New Zealand

It’s amazing how easy it is to forget I am on a boat…until the ship starts rocking.  We are currently on our second pass through the Tasman Sea.  It starts out very fun because I love jumping when the ship is on its way down a wave and I can hang suspended in the air for much longer than I should be able to.  This entertains me for about ten minutes before I have to take a sea-sick pill and go to sleep. 

We’ve left New Zealand, but will be coming back.  New Zealand was very lush and green and beautiful and backpacking seems to be highly encouraged.  Every port seemed to have a backpacker welcome sign and every hotel and restaurant caters to them with discounts.  It’s very different from America, where if you see a backpacker you usually assume they are homeless and everyone looks askance at them in stores and restaurants.  Why does no one backpack through America?

I have been trying to collect an item from every region that we visit and I finally settled on an ugly statue of a Kiwi bird with native shells inside of it.  The actual picture of a Kiwi Bird is much more flattering to it than this particular statue, but the statue is so ugly that it’s cute and I couldn’t pass it up. 

I got off of the boat only a few times in New Zealand.  Mostly I made my way out in search of food.  I scored big in Auckland which had a Thai restaurant on every corner.  We had to search a little harder in Dunedin where all of the restaurants seemed to be closed on a Tuesday afternoon.  We found an old hotel on the waterfront that had been converted into a seafood restaurant and luckily had one vegan item on the menu.  Being that it was red curry, I was more than happy to stick around for lunch.  It was delicious.

Other than the distraction of good food, we’ve been reformatting some of our shows to better suit the guests tastes as most of them are more familiar with music from the Mesozoic Period.  I asked Jason how I should finish that sentence and that’s what he came up with.  I love him because he is both hilarious and accurate.  

The passengers on this cruise seem to be enjoying our shows immensely so we know we are heading in the right direction.  Of course, they are mostly American, so our Motown show was met with nostalgia instead of eye-rolling which was great since it’s the first one we put up for all of the cruises.  I do play piano for our old-school Broadway show which has been changed around to incorporate guest suggestions.  I admit that the show is fun and for this cruise it was finally met with the crowd response that it wasn’t long enough and they would like to hear us sing more.  Joy! 

That’s pretty much it.  I have to remind myself to walk outside occasionally and see the world especially on sea days when it’s easy to exist in the bowels of the ship.  Also, yoga on a ship is wonderful.  The waves make you stretch deeper into all stretches and they also offer respite on the way down.  Now if I could only balance…