Day Off

When the weather at Mt. Ruapehu is bad enough to actually close the ski area, we get a day off. There’s not much to do in Ohakune on a stormy day, but Taupo is only an hour and a half away. I piled into the snowboard team’s van with a few colleagues for a much needed rest day…

On the road again

Travel magazines love to publish articles about road trips around New Zealand.  The reader can imagine themselves in a shiny new BMW, the top down,  speeding across the lush countryside or along the Tasman Sea…

After four months in New Zealand, I’ve come to understand that most roads are less “German car commercial” and more “dangerous muddy mess.”  Don’t let it stop you though… it’s a hell of a ride!

It’s Blue as, bro!

Mt. Ruapehu is famous for its crazy nasty weather and I got a taste of it last Friday. At the base of the ski area, it was raining but at the top of the first lift, it was snowing with visibility limited to about 50m. We’d already missed two days that week due to bad weather, so we had to take what we could get. At least it wasn’t windy.

Despite how ugly it was on Friday, the forecast for the weekend was ‘blue as’… this will make more sense if you watch this video on YouTube… Kiwis seriously talk like that…

Wild Weather

If I had written this email this morning, I would have said, “Hello from Sunny New Zealand….” But now it’s in the late afternoon, it’s no longer sunny, the wind they predicted is picking up, the rain is falling horizontal, and my fire is struggling to stay lit.

The school holidays are over, and I had a three day weekend thanks to a closed day last Saturday at Turoa due to limited visibility and wind. I spent much of Sunday chopping kindling and bringing in firewood to dry. Three weeks ago I was the worst fire starter in the world. These days, I’m practically a professional…

Kia Ora!

There are so many crazy and unexpected things about New Zealand that I simply could never have imagined!

Let me start with my flight, because it was perhaps the best flight I’ve ever been on. I left San Francisco on Air New Zealand at 9pm on Sunday night June 28th. The plane was in a word -beautiful. I had a window seat in a group of three, and the overweight woman on the isle had bought the middle seat for extra room so we were quite comfortable. Taking off from SFO at night is so cool… While we waited on the tarmac for a takeoff slot, and I just stared out the window at the continuous stream of planes landing. What would appear in the distance as a very bright star, eventually became yet another airplane, and they just kept coming. When we finally took off I could see all of San Francisco lit up like Christmas, and the Golden Gate Bridge too…

Užsienyje

The thing about living in a small country in north-eastern Europe, is that no matter how much you love being there, you’ll want to travel a lot.

It’s not as easy as it used to be though… what with FlyLAL going bankrupt, and Air Baltic routing all flights out of Vilnius through Riga. The bus takes forever, but fortunately the roads through Poland are slowly getting better. I dream of the day that there is a real four lane highway from the Lazdijai to Český Těšín…

Iki pasimatymo, Lietuva!

After more than five years of living, working and enjoying life in Vilnius, it is time for me to move on. By the time this magazine goes to press, I’ll already be in New Zealand, where I will spend the “summer” coaching a local ski club. I do intend to return next winter to Lithuania to coach the Kalnų Ereliai ski team and hopefully to resume writing this column, but for the moment, it’s time for this little lietuvaitė to pack her bags and learn to speak Kiwi…

Trys Milijonai

Since much of my winter is spent out of Lithuania, I spend spring getting in touch with friends and catching up on all the activities I’ve missed. As long as I can remember, on April 1st the weather is always warm and what better way to start the spring then by celebrating Užupio Independence Day…

Kalnų Ereliai 2009 Season

Avant-garde Easter Eggs

Easter was spent this year in Panevežys with my cousins.  When I arrived on Saturday afternoon, they had just finished decorating the eggs.  Far from the usual Lithuanian eggs decorated using either beeswax or a scratching technique (which my Grandmother is famous for), they used onion skins, colored string and various herbs and flowers to make what I called avant-garde Easter eggs.

Not only were they beautiful, each one unique, but they began conversations and inspired communication at the table.  There’s no better way to spend a holiday with family than around the table caught up in inspired converstaion!