It seems the best way to get a post out of me is to ask questions. Here are five from AJ. More than five, really, but only if you count them. He thought he’d got away with this by not putting question marks on some of them, but I fooled him by putting them back.
Birthday! (happy birthday, btw… apologies for lateness) How did you mark the day?
Eating, mostly. I had dinner with C at a very nice restaurant called Molten, where I had a lovely piece of John Dory, dinner with C and T at their place watching People Like Us on DVD, and lunch at Sunshine, Auckland’s top rated yum cha eatinghouse with flatmates Lisa and Angelo and Ewart and LiveJournal friends annettle and jsr.
Not all on the same day, of course. The celebration had a nice sort of quantum indeterminacy.
What’s the best comic you’ve ever read? Why was it so good for you?
Hmmm… best comic ever. It would be gratifying to pick something obscure, but I’d have to say Sandman.
Auckland’s given you a bit of time to settle in. What’s good / bad about the City of Sails for you? Anything weirdly overseas-ish about the city of the north that we might find outlandish?
The most weirdly Aucklandish thing I’ve seen so far was the venue for the Straitjacket Fits gig. It was in most respects your standard no-frills struggling-to-make-ends-meet alternative music venue. Except that it had a corporate box.
The overwhelming and obvious bad thing about Auckland is its transport infrastructure. It’s just not convenient to get most places, and the city doesn’t cohere – it really does feel like a bunch of Timarus joined loosely at the edges. There are positive moves afoot with the trains, but at the rate local and national governments are moving I suspect it’ll be decades before there’s any noticeable improvement. And even then they probably won’t have figured out that you have to actually own a bus service to make it work to an adequate standard.
Cycling in Auckland isn’t nearly as unpleasant as people make out. There are no cycle lanes, and drivers aren’t as familiar with cyclists, but on the other hand they’re used to driving on the motorway and therefore familiar with the concept of letting someone into a gap. They also stop at pedestrian crossings, which I still haven’t got used to. The hills are quite manageable, once you figure out the best routes.
I’ve decided that the true mark of being an Aucklander is whether you like the Sky Tower. By that measure, I have a long way to go. I’ll grudgingly admit that it’s very pleasant to look out of while you’re having dinner, but I’d still rather not have to look at it from the outside.
What I do like to look at is Rangitoto Island. I’ve felt since I was very young that it has an extraordinary presence – a primeval forested mountain standing over the city but never a part of it. It does weird things with your sense of time. It’s young for a mountain and it looks so new it might not have been there yesterday, yet it’s old enough to silently mock the impermanence of the city. Even when it’s pelting with rain and I’m soaked through, it still seems like a privileged to see it from the bottom of the Museum steps as I ride through the Domain on my way to work.
I like all the volcanoes, but Rangitoto is the most powerful.
What is, for you, the most difficult aspect of being a Baha’i in New Zealand?
Probably the sense that it’s not all that difficult to be a Bahá’í here, and therefore easy to get too relaxed. I’ve always felt that I’d be a Baha´’í regardless of whether anybody else was, and I find it easy to go for months without making the effort to see other Bah&actue;’ís.
Generally in the Baha´’í community here I think there’s an older generation that has grown up with the idea that it’s a sort of social movement first, and struggles with the idea that it’s genuinely a religion. We’re doing a lot to be more systematic in the way we run our communities and to be clear with ourselves and others about what we believe, which has caused some difficulties with people who I think were originally attracted to the Faith because it didn’t seem like an “organised religion”. It always has been an organised religion, it’s just organised differently from what people might be used to.
We had fun cycling from Greymouth to Christchurch – any other cycle trips in the world catch your eye?
We did indeed have fun, and I remember it fondly. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing some more long-distance cycling, but so far it’s been fairly low on my priority list. I’d like to travel around the North Island a bit at some point, and I’m particularly aware that I’ve never really been down the East Coast. The Coromandel would also be nice. But I haven’t come up with anything as splendid in its simplicity as crossing the South Island via Arthur’s Pass.
