second wednesday
It made up for the Thursday 17th April I missed crossing the international dateline westward. New Zealand really is full of sheep, and a lot of the white natives look like ugly British people. On the other hand, penguins close enough to touch! Two kinds of penguins! And a kiwi, and albatross chicks, and two kinds of cormorants, and the enormous, beautiful New Zealand pigeon, and what the hell I got all excited about birds.
The country is, outside of its wool & dairy production (they make “vegetarian cheese,” i.e., cheese without rennet, which I thought admirable, though being generally opposed to dairy industries I did not eat any of it), heavily dependent on tourism; as one of our bus drivers informed us, lakeside towns with three-digit populations can swell into the mid-thousands during the summer months. Franz Josef Glacier, where we spent two days, officially counts around 100 people as residents, though there were certainly double that at least when we were there, during the off-season (read: fall).
I’m finding it extremely disorienting to return from 6pm sunsets to dusk at 7:30. Also, the “competitive pool of applicants” was too big for me and I won’t be attending library school in the fall. Now I really have to find a job, what the hell.