Jim

On the road from Te Anau to Wanaka, I stopped in a tiny village to see the atelier of a local potter, a lovely old man named Jim. The shed that housed the workspace looked innocuous enough, but once we got chatting, a world of new information opened up for me. We started innocently, talking about pottery, but once we had established I was not American or anything else equally terrible (his words and views, not mine!), we got deeper into Jim’s world and life.

Jim cannot read or write well, but he has recently gotten into finding out more and more about “the Lord Jesus” and what happened back then. I think it is Jesus that tells him directly, but he was not 100% succinct in his explanations, so I can’t be sure. Jim has started painting the stories from the bible as he now knows they have happened. He says it is amazing how for so long you are left in the dark with all these people telling you what supposedly was going on back then, until you get to know the truth and it is all clear. It was Mary Magdalene who wrote it all, just in case you wondered. The female perspective is unfortunately a bit frayed by the fact that men have taken the writings and transformed them into what you know as the Holy Bible. I liked how in Jim’s version of the events, the women were the clever ones, constantly outsmarting the men who wanted fame and power and whatnot.

In any case, we soon moved on to more astonishing events (at least for me), namely the fact that Jim often sees the sprits of deceased people walk by, with a face if he had known them, without a face if they were strangers. I am always fascinated by tales like this and by the people who tell them. It is so easy to dismiss this as crazy talk and to make fun of them, but in the end, I actually have no way to disprove anything, and I am not even sure I would want to. My approach to life is to keep an open mind, and I have met many amazing people who have a worldview that couldn’t be more different to mine. I often find these conversations very enlightening, sometimes mind blowing.

But wait, Jim had one more amazing yarn that was the climax to our conversation.

When he was a kid, Jim saw THE SPACESHIP OF GOD. Yes. And the way he brought this up, totally off-handedly, was just so wonderful. I can’t quote him verbatim, but he said something like “Well, and then there was this thing in the sky. Not one of the normal UFOs, that you see, like the small round ones or the large ones, that are 1000km in diameter, but totally different”. For Jim, seeing UFOs was like seeing dogs play in the park. I started wondering what I would do if I ever saw a UFO – would I tell people as openly as Jim, taking the Mulder approach, let’s say, or would I try to forget the event so I can go back to being what is considered a “normal person”? Anyways, should you be interested, God’s own spaceship is about the size of a containership, and it is all motor. This massive motor can generate a strong electromagnetic field of sorts, which was the reason for all the strange events you find back in the bible, think seven years droughts and flooding the planet. Every time mankind needed a reminder of God’s existence, he showed up in his large spaceship, doing something pretty impressive like parting an ocean, and people became believers again.

With the world behaving the way it does at the moment, I a actually sort of expect him to rock up any day now…

Internet in NZ

Seeing how I am working whenever from whenever, I have become that person I used to hate – the one who asks for the wifi code the minute she walks into a café. Finding wifi, it turns out, is actually more of a struggle here than it was in Malaysia.

In Europe, you often find cafes that will say “no wifi – pretend it’s 1985 and actually talk to each other”which is a cute way of reminding you that there is a world outside your phone. For the digital nomad, this is of course the death sentence for a café. Here, literally every place has wifi, but cafes and restaurants often are not allowed/willing to give out the code, and I am writing this in a café where I was granted a 20 minute connection code. 20 minutes!

And this morning, I looked up how much data is sent during a skype call, as I have a feedback session tonight and a 500MB limit on my connection at the hostel. (Turns out I’ll be fine, as long as no one is feeling too chatty.) It’s funny, when planning this trip, I made sure that I’m in New Zealand during the time where my skype schedule normally becomes busier, as I assumed there would be broadband internet at every corner. Who knew I’d have to fight for every MB…

I have yet to find out where this, let’s say “frugal” attitude originates, most people just take it as a given.

The people at the Milford Sound café however, they are really taking the cookie: Milford Sound is a very remote place, it’s a 2 hour drive to the next town, so I guess they felt ambitious to really bring the internet restrictions to a whole new level: They are selling 100MB for 12 Dollars. It’s like being in the middle ages. And still, I am sure they are doing a roaring trade with their stingy connection: Hikers who have not had access to civilisation for several days will alight from the woods in Milford and apart from the customary Soy Latte, what they really need is a connection to the outer world. Like the internet junkies that we have all become, they will happily sell their grandmother to the devil for a fix of whatsapp and to be able to upload their pictures to Instagram and Facebook (as, as we know, that is the only way to ensure it all has actually happened).

Tattoos

Another thing that strikes me about New Zealand is the frequency of large scale tattoos: I have the feeling any primary school teaching staff Monday morning meeting would make a tattoo convention proud. It seems that people like you and me need to have at least a certain percentage of their bodies covered in depictions of skulls, seemingly random words and symbols. 

The Maoris traditionally have had a strong tattoo culture and this seems to have reached all inhabitants of this country at this stage. In the Maori culture, as in many other cultures, tattooes have a meaning and a magical power. I feel quite colourless and non-descript here at times, when talking to people who have large scale images of whatever seemed to have floated their skin-colouring boats a while ago. But as this whole trip is all about opening my horizon, I am trying to come to terms with having innocent chats with innocent people who, in my culture, look like drug dealers with a triple murder conviction (this sounds terrible, but seriously, people with face tattoos?!)