You will see the blog has taken a less frantic turn since the American adventures, as life in NZ has taken a decidedly slower pace. This is probably just as well, as otherwise I might explode. However, despite the lack of daily full on adventurous excitement, I will endeavour to provide you with a flavour of the sights and sounds of being a 'local' in Queenstown for a few months. I was meant to be flying to Cairns, Australia, in November, but now I have decided to stick around in NZ until the beginning of Jan. I have just settled here, and with a free place to stay in exchange for cleaning (which is bearable in the short term, and comes with a good bunch of people to live with) and a job (with some new friends to boot) it seems a bit silly to move on just before Christmas, when it would be ideal to be settled somewhere with people who would be up for cooking a roast dinner and wearing silly paper hats. We might even throw a few things on the barbie - this will be the first Christmas I have spent in the Southern Hemisphere. It might even not rain. Maybe. This is NZ, after all.
So let me take you through an average day here. Let's start with the bathrooms at Bumbles. Oh, the deep, deep joy. Allow me to explain the process of cleaning a hostel to you this once, so that you may never have to hear it again.
When I turned up at Bumbles and esconsed myself safely into 'The Dungeon' aka Room Four, it turned out that I had arrived at a very convenient time indeed. Of six cleaners, two were impaired with a fractured wrist and a bad back respectively, one was leaving on Thursday and one did all the kitchen lockups and opening up in the morning, which meant they made their weekly hours quota in order to secure free accommodation without actually having to change a bed. Lucky sod. This meant they were left with two day cleaners present that could actually do all the required tasks without doing themselves further injury.
The cleaning rota itself is simple. You have to work 15 hours a week to score seven nights free accommodation. This usually means cleaning for three hours on five mornings a week and having two mornings off. Some prefer to do lockups, which means staying up until midnight, shooing everyone out of the kitchen and doing an hour's light clean so that when we open up at 7.30am, people having an early breakfast don't have to wade through pile of dirty dishes and overflowing bins so that they can put a slice of bread in the toaster. 3 hour long lockups = 1 day off a morning clean, which means that if, like Kati, you live and breathe snowsports, you can go up the mountain for an extra full day. Personally, after finishing at work in the hotel, I literally can't be arsed to do anything besides crawl into bed or have a glass of wine if I am feeling particularly active. The last thing I want to do is reclean the kitchen I cleaned 12 hours earlier. Fortunately for the team, this works out rather well, as it means we're not all fighting over the lockups.
The day cleans involve three people being put on a section each: Rooms (dusting, cleaning windows, removing rubbish and emptying ashtrays, hoovering rooms and bathrooms), Beds (checking everyone that has checked out has removed all required bedding, washing and drying all the bed linen and towels from the checkouts, making the beds to required folding specifications) and Bathrooms (cleaning all the bathrooms and mopping).
On my first morning's cleaning, I was set to work on the bathrooms, after being shown around the place by Fiona. There are nine rooms at Bumbles, with seven bathrooms in total, one of which requires a 'big clean' daily on a rotational basis, where we wash down the walls and ceilings as well as scrub all the crap out from the corners of the showers with a toothpick etc. When Fiona swung open the door to bathroom 3 and explained that it was today's big clean, I almost fainted. The high ceilings were definitely beyond my reach, even with a stepladder. How the hell had they cleaned up there before? Was one of the others an ex-basketball player? I happened to have my interview with Heritage at 2pm, and I was meant to finish cleaning at 1, but it was already 10.20 and I knew how slow I could be at cleaning (Daisy kindly tries to tell me I am 'thorough' but we all know the truth).
Every day at 11.00am, we all meet up in the kitchen and go through a lengthy and painful checklist together, culminating in the poor bugger that is on Rooms hoovering and mopping the large kitchen floor. I spent that morning miserably trying to keep up with the amount of work I had to do, and upon being presented with a list of things in the kitchen at 11.00am with about four bathrooms left to clean, inwardly groaned.
At 1.30, when I still hadn't done the mopping and was starting to get slightly antsy about having to leave on time, Fiona kindly offered to drive me up to the interview after a speedy shower and clothing change. I arrived there red-faced, sweaty and out of breath, but managed to pull it all together in some sort of organised semblance and went through the interview unconsciously thinking of what I was going to have for lunch, as I hadn't eaten since 8.00am. I don't often forget to eat, as you will all know, so this was some monumental hunger indeed.
My first shift at Heritage was a week or so later, on breakfast, but I have been lucky enough to avoid this again. It involved getting up at 5.15am to shower, dress, and have a quick something to eat, before presenting myself at 6.00am in order to stand around and wait for some guests to come in. The highlights of the shift included being yelled at by the breakfast chefs to get some room service trays ready, complained at by guests as there were no clean glasses left and having to hoover up some egg. If you have ever tried to hoover up egg from a carpet, don't. It's more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, it was a great success, in that I didn't get fired after the first shift, and that from that point onwards I have been rota-ed on dinner service, which is infinitely more preferable.
Every night is pretty much the same, busy-ness varies depending on who we have staying there. I was provided with a name badge that read 'Laur' that belonged to a previous Estonian employee, as there were no 'Laura' ones left in the HR office, which I wore up until two weeks ago. It made for an interesting conversation piece with guests who were wondering if we employed a badge maker who was utterly atrocious at spelling.
I have noticed that most of the guests there are actually quite good natured, having expected some horrendous attitudes from people staying at a 4.5 star hotel. I have, of course, had a few run ins with what we call 'professional whingers' who like to complain about anything and everything so they can get something for free, and people who come in with a face so long that even perfect attentiveness and a constant grin strapped to your mug won't shift the aura of glum surrounding their soup entree. But it's all part and parcel of the joys of working in hospitality.
The best bit has been getting to know the other members of staff. Most of them, like me, are on their Working Holiday Visa but there are a handful of Kiwis amongst the Brits, Chinese, French and Czech (to name but a few nationalities). Everyone has been friendly, chatty and welcoming and it has genuinely been a pleasure working with them (so far!). However, aside from meeting a whole load of different people, I think one of my favourite experiences of working at the Heritage was the 3.15am finish after a conference two weeks ago, at the end of which Celine and I had to prepare about 100 places for the delegates' breakfast. We had to use a particular size of tablecloth, which of course wasn't available. When we attempted to construct a giant tablecloth out of a multitude of smaller ones, we found they were mostly size-labelled incorrectly and ended up half arguing in a stage of tired hallucination. I was all for leaving the tables bare and leaving the cutlery out for people to help themselves to but in retrospect I can see how this wouldn't have been popular. I can't really remember how I got through the next day, but I think it involved the heavy abuse of caffeine. Another recent highlight in my career as a waitress so far involved calling on a man who had ordered room service and had thought it prudent to take a bath while he waited for it to arrive. So far, so stupid. When I knocked on the door I heard him scrabble around in a panic for a bit, then answer the door wearing a bath towel. In true comedy style, as he took the tray from me the towel fell off and he almost dropped the meal trying to cover his modesty. I did my best to maintain professionalism, not burst into peals of frenzied laughter and at the same time save the expensive burger he had ordered from falling onto the beige carpet. It all worked out rather well, and I managed to contain my mirth until I was at least two feet down the hall away from his door. A final pinnacle to mention was the day I had to move 42 large tables, two at a time, with the conference supervisor, Edward. Not only did I spectacularly fail at being strong enough to lift the tables without almost tripping over the legs, I managed to walk one into a door and managed to crush my pubic bone with great success. A small wince later and a tear forming in my eye, I didn't really want to explain I'd hit my fannybone to a bloke I had just met, so I carried on.
But anyway, enough about work. What about leisure time? This is meant to be a travel blog after all, and Queenstown is NZ's self-proclaimed 'adventure capital'. A small town with a population of about 13,000, It's best known for its bungy jumping, canyon swinging, skydiving, skiing, heliskiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, jetboating, canyoning... I could go on. Personally I am not the world's biggest adrenaline junkie - last year in Scotland I was terrified and almost in hysterics when asked to jump off of a tiny ledge into some water that was only about four feet below us, and I get vertigo walking up a stepladder. So far, I have only indulged in the snowsports side of things here, visiting the Cardrona ski resort twice, and The Remarkables, which is probably Queenstown's best known skifield.
My first foray into skiing was many moons ago at Wycombe Summit, which was in those days Britain's longest dry ski run. It closed down due to lack of interest (a common theme throughout businesses in the Wycombe area, it seems) and was mysteriously the victim of an arson attack a few years ago, which I suspect was some sort of insurance scam. Anyway, I remember the experience being difficult, unpleasant, and a worrrying precursor for my Year 6 school ski trip to the Alps.
Of course, once I got on the snow, everything was a lot easier and less painful and I have never looked back. I may not be the best skier there is, but I vastly enjoy throwing myself down the snowy side of a mountain, and my visit to Cardrona was no exception. I had decided to get myself a ski package to celebrate securing a job, at some considerable expense. The skifields here are really only value for money if you buy a few months' season pass for a few hundred dollars, otherwise you are looking at costs of around $70-$90 a day just to be allowed on the mountain.
I got up at 6am to shower and dress in the essential ridiculous bulky snowsports outfit, and excitedly wolfed down a bowl of cereal before waiting for the bus to show up. Eventually, after a bit of concern from myself and others that it had already gone, a battered old coach showed up, complete with driver, 'Stoney', who I hoped was only Stoney by name and not by nature. Stoney was actually rather well informed about NZ flora and fauna and proceeded to deliver an unprompted 90 minute lecture as he drove us the long way to the skifield, which is actually closer to 'neighbouring' resort Wanaka than Queenstown. However, at 7 in the morning, any lecture, no matter how well informed, is not entirely welcome, so I elected to get some shut-eye and try not to drool on the shoulder of my enormous neighbour, who was taking up considerably more than half of my seat as well as all of his own. After several vomit-inducing windy corners and what seemed like hours of going uphill, we were eventually there. Unfortunately the day was pretty overcast and although I have several pictures of the resort, it doesn't look particularly pretty when compared to those in Europe or Canada. I had an overpriced smoothie in the resort cafe while I waited for refresher lessons to start, and generally tried to stay out of the way of all the families with kids.
Eventually, we were gathered together at the Adult Ski Lessons zone and, feeling brave, I chose to go up to group 4 of 6, with a hazy recollection of being able to cope with parallel turns the last time I'd skied. Fortunately, I survived (God knows how) and left the lesson feeling like I had vaguely improved my style of throwing myself downhill on two bits of fibreglass. Unfortunately, one member of our lesson party got concussed when a snowboarder crashed into her and sent her flying. I've noticed here more than anywhere else I've skied before that skiers and snowboarders don't get on, as a rule. This is mostly to do with the image of snowboarding as something cool young people do and skiing as something a bit less edgy for the old farts (like moi), but it's also thanks to the fact that they simply can't share a run without there being some sort of altercation. Snowboarders tend to cut a path straight down the mountain and skiers generally weave from side to side, which means getting in each others' ways tends to happen a lot. There are signs everywhere asking everyone to show respect to other mountain users, people further downhill have priority etc, but some boarders are downright dangerous - they have a tendency to be male, a tendency to be young, and, in NZ in particular, a tendency to be stoned off their tits. Combine all these factors and you're left with a fairly terrifying prospect. I'm not saying all snowboarders are reckless, and there are plenty of crap, unsafe skiers too, but there does seem to be an alarming number of crashes caused by some idiot snowboarder not looking where he/she is going. The lady in question was fine, by the way, but obviously a bit shaken up.
I bought lunch at the cafe and squeezed onto a damp bench next to a family who were trying to persuade their youngest that she liked fruit. She was nonplussed by this offering, and probably would have preferred a nice bowl of chips and gravy after a few hours out in the freezing cold and wet. I'd arranged to meet up with a couple of the women who were in my lesson earlier, and once I had wolfed down my cheese sub roll (no fruit in sight) made my way over to the meeting area and we enjoyed the rest of the afternoon zipping down various other runs. I had a couple of faltering starts where I had apparently forgotten how to ski, but eventually got back into it and shot, probably a bit too recklessly, down the mountain with glee - of course heeding all safety signs and trying my best not to crash into anyone.
Stoney took us back down the mountain at around 4 and I happened to sit next to the same enormous bloke I had sat next to on the way up. He was with a Contiki tour on a bit of a break from the Army, where he was posted somewhere in Australia. My memory of this is a bit hazy, as I drifted in and out of consciousness, lulled back to sleep by Stoney's return journey lecture. Happily, we didn't end up face down in a crevasse, and I stumbled back home absolutely exhausted, but with a big grin on my face from a productive day on the mountain.
Recently, Kati kindly offered to teach me to snowboard, so we headed off for a day up Cardrona. This almost ended in disaster as I realised snowboarding is actually a whole lot harder than it looks, and after some grumpy attempts at standing up, managed to finish the day 'leafing' ie: moving the board from side to side in a zig-zag motion, facing down the mountain. I was too chicken to actually take the board on the slopes, and not wanting either of us to spend the entire day on the Magic Carpet (the kiddy slope) I decided to get hold of a pair of skis and join Kati down some runs. I'd managed to get hold of some slightly thinner, faster skis and was surprised at how hard they were to control - I'd only been using fatter beginner's skis up until this point. It was great being able to go faster, but I felt like a few more runs on those would probably have ended up with some sort of broken leg incident, so I haven't been back on them since.
Our last snowy foray was on The Remarkables a few weeks ago - we hitched up with a Canadian who joined us on the slopes for a bit, and I managed a couple of small jumps without falling over too much. There was a particularly frustrating off-piste moment where we walked up the mountain for what felt like ages in order to ski and board down the fresh snow. When I got to the top, I spent about twenty minutes trying to put my skis back on to no avail. The others came to help, but none of us could get the damn things on. It didn't help that we were on a particularly steep bit of mountain. When I got one on securely, the other one would inexplicably slide further down the mountain and no matter how much snow I scraped off of my boot, the bloody thing wouldn't catch onto the bindings. So I ended up sliding down on my bum, dragging the wretched skis and poles with me, cursing all the way. I don't think I am in any danger of becoming pro.
Besides skiing, I've been on a few walks during my free time in Queenstown, including the Tiki Trail up Bob's Peak, which ends in the Skyline Restaurant. I headed up there in my Salvation Army purchased $5 snowboots, and soon wished I hadn't, particularly as I have a perfectly decent pair of trail trainers with me. I managed to wheeze my way up, stopping along the way to write in my notebook about the experience (and catch a breath) and watch people zipline down through the trees to the bottom of the hill. Once I eventually got to the top, I grabbed a cup of tea in the restaurant and enjoyed the spectacular view down across Lake Wakatipu to Queenstown and Frankton. I wished I'd had a decent camera, and the skills to operate said camera so that I could get a good photo of the sunset on the lake, but such romantic thoughts were thwarted by my rudimentary photography skills and equipment, so I have a rather flat picture of it that only looks half decent because the subject was so lovely. It was beginning to get very cold by the time I had finished having a look at the top of the Peak, so I got the Gondola down for the princely sum of $14. I later found out that I probably could have just snuck on and got down for free but I felt that would have been a bit mean spirited as the walk up had been so good.
Queenstown Hill has been the other epic walk of choice and thinking it would be an easy stroll uphill for a bit of a nice view was a mistake. Daisy routemarched us up there with her usual flair, and I hung back to take pictures and tried not to wheeze too loudly. The view from the top of Queenstown Hill was far more spectacular than from Bob's Peak, and took in a great 360 degree view of the surrounding mountain ranges and towns. I took a series of pictures that I am sure I can bore you to tears with when I return home.
Of course, life in Queenstown isn't all high end activity and hearty exercise, and my favourite leisure activity, as always, is the eating of cake and the imbibing of coffee. The cafe and restaurant scene in NZ was, until recently, pretty substandard and generally involved a cheese sandwich between two slices of white foam and an instant coffee. However, things have taken off in the last few years, and as a result there is a huge range of cafes, restaurants and bars, particularly in Queenstown, where tourists outnumber locals. Our favourite haunt, Vudu, gets a visit at least once a week, as the cake selection is like something out of a Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. Ginger crunch slices jostle for space with double chocolate hazlenut brownies, cream cheese spinach muffins and date and oat cake, all potentially washed down with incredibly strong freshly ground coffee that keeps you buzzing through work and into the next day. The toasted banana bread actually silenced me on the first mouthful, it was that good. Obviously, quality comes at a price, and it's not the cheapest stuff around, but as I'm working most days I manage to justify a treat more often than not.
On this note, I am lucky enough to find myself surrounded more often than not by foodies. It's become a bit of a ritual that if we all have a rare night off together, we each 'bring a dish' and have dinner together. I'm constantly impressed by the fayre that comes to the table, especially considering we only have a rather crap portable oven in the kitchen. Apparently, this is common, and many private properties as well as hostels are oven-less. How do people bake? It's a source of consternation for me.
Besides eating, walking and the odd visit to the pub, our other favourite activity is going to 'Salvos'. Charity shops don't really exist in Queenstown, or so I thought until someone told me about the mythical Salvation Army warehouse at the top of the industrial estate. It's a fair walk out of town, but when you're getting a pair of trousers for $1 or, in my case, a barely used pair of Salopettes for $20, it's well worth it. My whole work uniform, aside from the shirt they supply us, cost $10, and none of it looks very used. It's even survived multiple abuse from tumble dryers and milk foam stains during my 'coffee training', in which I managed to forget which way Off was on the milk steamer. I even managed to get a leopard print pillow that doubles up as a speaker for $3. You can't argue with that value.
And no update would be complete without a mention of who I have been associating with over the last couple of months. Queenstown is beautiful, and the scenery surrounding us is breathtaking, but all that would mean diddley-squat if you didn't have anyone fun to enjoy it with. I have been incredibly lucky and have ended up meeting some great people through the hostel and work at the hotel.
The main partners in crime run thusly: Kati, my snowboarding and food fanatic Estonian friend, Alexia 'Sexia' Kristensen, our smouldering Swede, Sophie, who has the best red hair ever (which I am 'well jel' of) and some quite incredible customer service skills, and Daisy, who has to be one of the most unique and funny people I have ever met.
I think if it weren't for them, even with all the most breathtaking scenery and activities in the world, Queenstown would really not be for me. For one thing, I'd probably be eating a lot less cake and biscuits, and that is obviously unacceptable.
