Quiet Day
Tuesday was another beautiful day at Pukehina Beach. After our experience on Friday, we were a little worried that the east coast might be a little wetter than your average cottager might like, but our fears seemed to be unfounded.
Debbie set herself up for a day of reading out front on the path to the beach. I settled into my little corner of the kitchen where the laptop was set up, back to the wall, front to the ocean. After a couple of hours of picking through pictures and waxing poetic for blog posts of days past, I packed the laptop up, kissed my bride farewell, and struck out for the wired metropolis that is Te Puke.
Te Puke was exactly as I remembered, except the internet cafe (not a cafe at all, more a 5 X 10 back room with no air circulation and 10 computer stations) was not populated by the three hyperactive children that had been my companions the last time I had been there. In blessed quiet I updated our online diary and checked e-mail. Once done, I did a little snack shopping at the grocery store across the street and then headed back to our little slice of heaven on Pukehina Beach.
We had originally planned a home cooked dinner of steak and vegetables, but when the time came to begin cooking, the Pukehina Local takeout seemed a more logical solution to our needs. We arrived just in time to catch the last deep fryer load of battered goodness. We retired back to our cottage and cruised through several episodes of Alias and several thousand calories of fatty foods.
As Tuesday was so uneventful, I'll add a few more musings on NZ life.
If you have any experience travelling in North America, you will have noticed a remarkable uniformity in the design of the bathroom fixtures in the various retail and restaurant bathrooms. This uniformity is completely absent here in NZ. I have yet to see two bathroom fixtures the same. There are a few interesting features that will interest the bathroom fixture aficionados among you (you know who you are)
I have only run into porcelain urinals once. The vast majority of men's bathrooms have stainless steel recessed wall section with a trough at the bottom. There is usually a small sloped bit of stainless at foot level to catch the drips, but a couple had metal grates upon which you would stand that would allow any stray liquids to drop through. Here's a picture of one, because it's so interesting.
Most of the toilets in restaurants have a tank attached to the wall mounted about 2 feet above the toilet proper. There are two buttons protruding from the top of the tank, with one of them 1/2 painted with a colour. The 1/2 painted button causes a short flush and the other causes a full flush. This is a great idea for water conservation and every house should have one.
In the apartment in Auckland, the cottage at Pukehina, and in several other locations, the toilet tank has been mounted between the joists of the wall behind the toilet. There is a large pivoting tab attached to the wall that activates the flushing mechanism (but without the full/half feature).
Gas is priced at NZ$1.41 per litre which converts to about C$1.23 per litre. This price has been completely uniform in all of the places that we have visited and hasen't changed since we arrived. What is wrong with the stupid price games the Canadian fuel retailers play?
Our car is a horrible gas guzzler. We opted for a "Full Size" vehicle and were handed a Mitsubishi 380. I kid you not, my preliminary gas gallonage calculations indicate this car is getting worse gas mileage than my big ol' Chevy pickup. The latest calculation is around 6 km/litre which is about what I get in the city in the truck. That said, I am driving this one a little harder than I drive in Ontario.
The roads here, as I have said, are very twisty and winding. With a 100 kph speed limit, people including me tend to accelerate out of the corners and brake into the next one. Although this is a lot of fun (for the driver - for Debbie, read "Alarming") it has got to negatively affect fuel economy. The other thing about this car is that it has quite a bit of Ooomph when you tromp on the accelerator. Uphill or down, after a little automatic transmission downshift delay, she just rockets past whatever car or truck was moseying along in front of us. This car is also quite excellent at hugging the curves, so ... for the record, although it's a gas hog, I would have to say we've been pretty happy with it.
On the topic of driving, when we first arrived and started driving around, I tended to drive with the left wheels on the shoulder of the road. Being accustomed to having the driving controls on the left side of the vehicle, I am naturally inclined to keep the left shoulder closer (it's weird, since, with driving on the left side, it should all add up, but it doesn't - think of yourself passing a car on a 2 lane road and driving in the left lane for a while). It didn't take long (and much flinching from the passenger) for me to get accustomed to (a.k.a. concentrating on) keeping my direct forward view two or three feet from the centre line. Driving along at 100 kph on these crazy twisting roads, with large (double long - most transports have two trailers) trucks oncoming in the adjacent lane, the survival instinct joins up with 25 years of right hand roads to force the car over to the left, away from the oncoming traffic.
At first I tried to overcome this, but then I noticed that most of the Kiwi drivers are very free with the shoulders. If you pay any attention, you notice that most two lane roads here have lines painted down the centre and also on the left and right sides. They might as well not bother with the edge lines, as the drivers here just plain ignore them. Once I noticed that, I didn't feel quite as foolish for not being able to stay between the lines. The shoulders are just part of keeping as far as possible away from the oncoming traffic. Very sensible.
The grocery stores have Weight Watcher's products on the shelves, but all of the statistics printed on the nutrition labels are in metric (kilojoules instead of kilocalories). If you are calorie centric as we are, the nutrition labels aren't much help to you.
That's all for Tuesday.
Don
Debbie set herself up for a day of reading out front on the path to the beach. I settled into my little corner of the kitchen where the laptop was set up, back to the wall, front to the ocean. After a couple of hours of picking through pictures and waxing poetic for blog posts of days past, I packed the laptop up, kissed my bride farewell, and struck out for the wired metropolis that is Te Puke.
Te Puke was exactly as I remembered, except the internet cafe (not a cafe at all, more a 5 X 10 back room with no air circulation and 10 computer stations) was not populated by the three hyperactive children that had been my companions the last time I had been there. In blessed quiet I updated our online diary and checked e-mail. Once done, I did a little snack shopping at the grocery store across the street and then headed back to our little slice of heaven on Pukehina Beach.
We had originally planned a home cooked dinner of steak and vegetables, but when the time came to begin cooking, the Pukehina Local takeout seemed a more logical solution to our needs. We arrived just in time to catch the last deep fryer load of battered goodness. We retired back to our cottage and cruised through several episodes of Alias and several thousand calories of fatty foods.
As Tuesday was so uneventful, I'll add a few more musings on NZ life.
If you have any experience travelling in North America, you will have noticed a remarkable uniformity in the design of the bathroom fixtures in the various retail and restaurant bathrooms. This uniformity is completely absent here in NZ. I have yet to see two bathroom fixtures the same. There are a few interesting features that will interest the bathroom fixture aficionados among you (you know who you are)
I have only run into porcelain urinals once. The vast majority of men's bathrooms have stainless steel recessed wall section with a trough at the bottom. There is usually a small sloped bit of stainless at foot level to catch the drips, but a couple had metal grates upon which you would stand that would allow any stray liquids to drop through. Here's a picture of one, because it's so interesting.
Most of the toilets in restaurants have a tank attached to the wall mounted about 2 feet above the toilet proper. There are two buttons protruding from the top of the tank, with one of them 1/2 painted with a colour. The 1/2 painted button causes a short flush and the other causes a full flush. This is a great idea for water conservation and every house should have one.
In the apartment in Auckland, the cottage at Pukehina, and in several other locations, the toilet tank has been mounted between the joists of the wall behind the toilet. There is a large pivoting tab attached to the wall that activates the flushing mechanism (but without the full/half feature).
Gas is priced at NZ$1.41 per litre which converts to about C$1.23 per litre. This price has been completely uniform in all of the places that we have visited and hasen't changed since we arrived. What is wrong with the stupid price games the Canadian fuel retailers play?
Our car is a horrible gas guzzler. We opted for a "Full Size" vehicle and were handed a Mitsubishi 380. I kid you not, my preliminary gas gallonage calculations indicate this car is getting worse gas mileage than my big ol' Chevy pickup. The latest calculation is around 6 km/litre which is about what I get in the city in the truck. That said, I am driving this one a little harder than I drive in Ontario.
The roads here, as I have said, are very twisty and winding. With a 100 kph speed limit, people including me tend to accelerate out of the corners and brake into the next one. Although this is a lot of fun (for the driver - for Debbie, read "Alarming") it has got to negatively affect fuel economy. The other thing about this car is that it has quite a bit of Ooomph when you tromp on the accelerator. Uphill or down, after a little automatic transmission downshift delay, she just rockets past whatever car or truck was moseying along in front of us. This car is also quite excellent at hugging the curves, so ... for the record, although it's a gas hog, I would have to say we've been pretty happy with it.
On the topic of driving, when we first arrived and started driving around, I tended to drive with the left wheels on the shoulder of the road. Being accustomed to having the driving controls on the left side of the vehicle, I am naturally inclined to keep the left shoulder closer (it's weird, since, with driving on the left side, it should all add up, but it doesn't - think of yourself passing a car on a 2 lane road and driving in the left lane for a while). It didn't take long (and much flinching from the passenger) for me to get accustomed to (a.k.a. concentrating on) keeping my direct forward view two or three feet from the centre line. Driving along at 100 kph on these crazy twisting roads, with large (double long - most transports have two trailers) trucks oncoming in the adjacent lane, the survival instinct joins up with 25 years of right hand roads to force the car over to the left, away from the oncoming traffic.
At first I tried to overcome this, but then I noticed that most of the Kiwi drivers are very free with the shoulders. If you pay any attention, you notice that most two lane roads here have lines painted down the centre and also on the left and right sides. They might as well not bother with the edge lines, as the drivers here just plain ignore them. Once I noticed that, I didn't feel quite as foolish for not being able to stay between the lines. The shoulders are just part of keeping as far as possible away from the oncoming traffic. Very sensible.
The grocery stores have Weight Watcher's products on the shelves, but all of the statistics printed on the nutrition labels are in metric (kilojoules instead of kilocalories). If you are calorie centric as we are, the nutrition labels aren't much help to you.
That's all for Tuesday.
Don
posted by Don at
6:20 pm
2 Comments:
Yeah, I'd wondered about that "bride" in there as well. Was it just a turn of phrase, or are we being casually informed that this is a honeymoon trip?
Also, the link to the urinal image seems broken. You can imagine how disappointed I was. Fortunately, I was able to get to it this way.
By
Anonymous, at 4:20 am
When I read that one I just knew there'd be a response. No fear - saving the free bar for the attendance of our loved ones.
By
Anonymous, at 4:50 am
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