A local delicacy.

Awhile ago I noticed an interesting new food product in my local grocery store. It's a twisted cheese preserved in brine. Now, generally when I find something like this, I don't hold back. I just pick it up and put it in my basket and take it home to give it a try. This time, though, I've been fairly intimidated by the size and appearance of this product, so even though I've noticed it on every single shopping trip (it is displayed quite predominately in the deli section) I hadn't actually purchased it.

This weekend, this cheese was just on my mind. I told my friend all about it. I devised a plan that included stopping by the grocery store with my rental car to pick it up. That didn't end up happening. I got some anyway, and lugged it home.


I tried to eat some. This cheese is perhaps the saltiest thing I have ever tasted. I woke up this morning feeling dehydrated and my tongue felt a little bit burnt. I just don't understand how people eat this, or what they eat it with. I'm going to do some more research and ask around about it. I think I might try to save mine by rinsing out the salt brine and making a new pickling liquid with spices and vinegar and much less salt.



Pickled cheese definitely has some potential. Especially when it is hand knotted like this little twist.



To me, the most interesting fact about this cheese is that it is manufactured locally. This region is not known for its local products. And I really want to like this. I just can't eat it as it is. Even though this hasn't been the greatest culinary experience of my life, I'm still on the look-out for the pickled sausages.

Appropriate and inappropriate uses for googly eyes.

Sometimes googly eyes can be used for good. For example, quickly and easily turning a little purple tea cozy into a little purple hedgehog tea cozy.


On the other hand, googly eyes can sometimes be used for evil. For example. on this poster advertising a breakfast deal in downtown Peterborough. Sunny-side-up eggs shouldn't be able to see you. Also, none of this egg's food friends have googly eyes, so how come it even has googly eyes, in the first place?


Of course, definitions of good and evil are up for interpretation.

Foodie gadgets.

Sugar dust stencils with knitting and countryside designs by Megan Herbert.



Handpainted lunch tiffins from Rose Grey.


Tableware from Fishs Eddy with Alice in Wonderland designs.


Cookie cutter puzzles! from Match and Munch.

Sandwich wraps and snack bags from Brantford, Ontario.

A reusable shopping bag system from Canadian company, Moukisac.

Alice in Wonderland cutlery made in England. From Hidden Art shop.

Things I like these days.

Sweet needlepoint belt buckles. The picture says it all. From Needleyou.



PlanetBox lunch boxes. All metal, little leakproof containers available too.



The WhiteEyes. Little stuffies from here.

Nelson.

I spent the last Saturday in Nelson at the Farmer's Market then hanging out with Chris and Mara. Chris found the last half of the last season of Battlestar Galactica at the second video store we visited. We watched two episodes. I love BSG so much that it deserves a mention here. Then we went for a bit of a drive up through a beautiful valley to the big water dam where the city stores the water for Nelson.

We came across the Manuka tree from which the Kiwi bees make delicious honey. The flowers and seed pods are quite beautiful and I realized I hadn't taken many flower pictures for awhile, so here they are.

That night Mara made us a big Swiss dinner. It was delicious. She made fresh cheese pasta, stuffed sparrows (which aren't actually birds! - they are schnitzel rolled and stuffed with crusty bread, onions, and bacon, then fried and cooked in gravy, and broccoli and peas from her garden. She also sent Chris and I downtown to buy a rigger (2L) of berry cider from one of the local brewery pubs called teh Spring and Fern. It was delicious as well. O, and we had strawberries from the market for dessert. Yum. Third strawberry season of my year. After dinner we watched a movie, which was good, I can't remember what it was called, but Gerard Butler was in it and he was Scottish. Then we watched another episode of BSG before bed.

Picton Village.

Picton was a nice little town on the north coast of the South Island. The entire place is pretty much under construction right now. I think it's the place to buy realestate and a lot of beautiful houses are being built on the surrounding hills. I stayed at a little hostel called the Villa and it was really nice. I had Canadian roommates both nights. Most people only come for one night after arriving on the ferry, but I wanted to stay and hike out to the point.

I went to visit the Edwin Fox Museum. It houses the world's 9th oldest wooden ship, the Edwin Fox. I'm not sure if that means the 9th ship ever built out of wood, or the 9th oldest existing. It is the only surviving ship that took convicts to Australia, the only ship that took troops to the Crimean War, and the oldest merchant ship still afloat. Though it is barely floatable. At the museum they are attempting to preserve the ship, not restore it. That would cost too much money and not be as effective and eerie.

It was neat because you could go down in the ship and walk around. The sunshine looked much more beautiful and creepy in reallife.


I took a lot of pictures of the crafty things, like knotwork, as is to be expected.





The next day I hiked out to the Snout, or the point of this part of the Marlborough Sound.


On the way back, I walked along the beach because the tide was low and took pictures of all sorts of interesting things.



O, and next door to the hostel there was a Fabulous Dutch Bakery. The slice on the right is a Ginger Crunch. It was candied ginger baked into shortbread with ginger cream icing. Seriously, I think it was one of the best things I have ever bought from a bakery. Seriously. And that's saying a lot.

Kia ora, Kaikoura.

In Maori, that means: Hello, good day, town of crayfish food.

Kiakoura is actually named after a Maori story. The entire name is Te ahi Kaikoura Tama ki te Raki. It means "the fire that cooked the crayfish of Tame ki te Raki". He was on a journey from the North Island around the South Island to find his three runaway wives and he stopped here for dinner. Kai means food and koura means crayfish. And this town fishes for crayfish (which are lobster sized and cost $50 here).

In Kaikoura, I spent a lot of time just sitting on the beach. The hostel was right on the beach. It was very nice and there were some really cool people there. I shared my room with a Swiss girl and an American guy who had met a few days prior to arriving in town. The guy had the same pack as me, only in the boy version. His was 5 L larger, but mine was (slightly) heavier. I don't know how I do it. We had a lot of fun, cooked dinner together in the amazing kitchen (some hostels don't have amazing kitchens, this one did). They actually invited me to come to Nelson with them, but I already have the rest of my trip pretty much planned out! I also met a German guy who had traveled through Canada, Australia, now NZ, and was heading to Thailand. He said Canada was his favourite country (I'm biased, but I can understand what he's saying :)

This was the gravel beach. O yeah, Kiakoura is at the base of a beautiful mountain range. There is snow at the top of the mountains all year round. When I saw the snow, I felt SO happy, like happy homesickness. I'm sure I'll take that back next March.


My NZ wool on the NZ beach. Fits right in.


On my second day in Kaikoura, I walked down to the Saturday market. I bought some honey and I had a whitebait sandwich. Whitebait is a local delicacy, it's at the end of the season right now, and apparently it's worth a lot of money. I had no idea what it was, but I thought I'd try. It's tiny little fish fried in a pancake. Yep. Eyeballs and everything. O, and they serve it on a piece of Wonderbread with margarine. HOW is that a delicacy? It tasted pretty good, but I couldn't look at the little worm-fish while I was eating it. Here is a horrible picture of my mostly-eaten whitebait pattie.


And, there's a big thing in Kaikoura. A big crayfish, of course. Since this I've found two more big things in NZ, so watch out for them.


More perfect knitting on the beach, this is going with this and it looks lovely. It'll be nice and warm for the winter back home.


And then I hiked out around the lovely coastline. The seabreezes here were just so refreshing.


I walked out to the end of town to see Fyffe house, the only remaining house from the whaling days in Kaikoura. And this house belonged to the man who brought the whaling industry to this region. I don't know if it's always been pink, but now it's very, very pink. And it's built on whale bones as a foundation. They also used the bones as fences.


A cool cookie cutter in the kitchen cupboard :)


Whale vertebrate on the front porch.


I went down to a wool farm to see a sheep shearing show. That was interesting. This is a picture of Ramman, one of the rams at the farm. I fed him. I can't show any pictures of the sheep being sheared because it was too traumatizing. It took three minutes with electric clippers to shear one sheep, but the farmer can actually do it in 37.2 seconds. In the background you can sort of see the little sheepdog pup that's learning how to work on the farm. His name is Sam! There's also a little bit of a black sheep too. They're both eating the ram's food.


These are some of the lambs at the wool farm. I got shocked by the electric fence for this photo (and it's not even that good...I wanted more lily and spotted lamb face). I'm sure I'm not the first since people come here to see the lambs and I didn't notice any signs indicating the fence was electric. The farmer even told one guy he could go in with the lambs and didn't mention the fence. Anyway, it was just like a flick to the muscle of my left arm and I was totally fine.


On my last day in Kaikoura, I borrowed a bike from the hostel (for free, that was nice) and rode out to see one of the seal colonies and hike around the end of the peninsula.

Baby sealface! Can you see him?


Landseal, right beside the boardwalk. You're supposed to keep at least 10 m between you and the seals. Usually, that's no problem because they stay out on the rocks. This guy was right beside the boardwalk. I wasn't that close, but other people were.


The hike was really neat. There were all kinds of old Maori sites along the way. The ridges you can see in the first hill were actually a Maori fort, or Pa. The town of Kaikoura is around the other side of the point. It was so foggy I couldn't really see the mountains in the background.


I sat up over the ocean and knitted for awhile.

Lovely Kaikoura.

Hi,

I caught the bus south down the east shore of the South Island today. It dropped me off in a little fishing village called Kaikoura. This place is so beautiful. There is a turquoise ocean infront of me and snowcapped mountains behind me. It's not cold, their just very tall.

The bus driver stopped so we could take pictures of a seal colony.

When I got off the bus I had fish and chips for dinner. It was delicious.

Tomorrow I'm going to the market, seeing sheep shearing, and hiking around the peninsula.

I'll write more later! Love, Cass

Hotsprings and Mitai in Rotorua.

Rotorua is a really interesting town in the Bay of Plenty region. There's a lot of geothermal activity, so the entire town is full of open hotsprings. I saw signs that say the mud boils at 212 degrees celcius. This makes the entire town smell like sulphur. Luckily, you mostly get used to the smell. Even on the third day I was there I would walk past some places in town and still smell the sulphur very strongly. It was worth it though because there were so many cool things to see and do in the town. I really felt like I didn't have enough time there.

All of the hotsprings have fences built around them so that people can't fall in. The main park is literally fenced area after fenced area. My favourite springs and the ones with the boiling mud. There are also ones with boiling water and larger hot lake areas. This is a boiling mudpit.


This is one of the lakes right in the centre of town.


To keep the tourists out of the dangerous hotsprings, the city has built little footbaths throughout the park. I sat in one for a really long time. It was sort of cold out and my feet were freezing so it was really nice to just relax here.


In the evening, I went to a Maori show at the Mitai village. A van picked me up at the hostel and we drove out to Rainbow Springs where this tribe lives. I don't think they actually live out there though. I have a feeling they all have apartments in town and things because my bus was late after the show and I saw them all leaving in their cars and things. They tell you they live there though. Maybe the family or tribe owns the land still. First, you see the tribe actors come down the river in their canoe. The canoe was actually carved by people in the tribe. All of the actors are about 22. The chief was maybe 26. I don't know if he's actually a chief. They are all interested in learning about the culture and language though, so that's good.


Then they put on a show. It was really exciting. Kind of scary at times. There was a visiting tribe at the show and I had been chatting with some of the women before the show started. Then they wanted me to sit in the very front row with them. They all had to stand up and sing a special song. I didn't join in because I didn't know any of the words. I felt very tall and white.


The dinner was cooked in a traditional hangi, or ground oven. The only traditional food item was the kumera, or sweet potatoe. The rest was chicken, lamb (of course...I'm a little sick of it), scalloped potatoes, stuffing (weird), coleslaw, garden salad, rice salad, corn salad, potato salad, and, you guessed it, garlic bread. I also had a fine New Zealand Steinlager (German beer) to finish it off. I sat with a nice girl from America named Becca. O, and dessert was trifle, chocolate log cake, and fruit salad.


The next day I went to the historic Rotorua Bathhouse Museum. What an interesting place. Basically, the rich British people wanted to take advantage of the medical miracles the hotsprings could provide. They built this huge, expensive, tudor-style building. Every single pipe in the place had to be replaced in the first three months because the acidic water destryoed it. From then on in it had continuous problems and never was completed. It was abandoned, turned into a nightclub, abandoned, fixed up, abandoned, then taken over to become a really cool musuem. I liked it a lot and they've done a great job at explaining the history of the place.
They have this really neat exhibit that shows the history of the volcanic activity and you sit in these seats and the entire room shakes when the volcanoes explode on the screen. They don't even tell you that's going to happen. It was pretty funny.


And the entire town is full of beautiful tiki carvings. I took more pictures of them. Most of them are actually red, but I liked this white and black guy the best.