99% pure Australia

10^th July, 11.30am

(or it was, when I first wrote this. It is now 11^th July 6.30am, and I’m off to Rotorua. However, I should let you know that my limited internet access these past couple of days has put me in mind of many an XKCD comic pertaining to internet addiction .... ARGHHHH!!)

New Zealand is basically Australia, except that it has more sheep, more grass, that terrific @Calbo accent and probably, a prime minister who doesn’t say ‘negociate’. Oh, and fantastic ice-cream, judging from that tiny tub of berry-flavoured taste explosion that they gave us on the plane. This country’s got pretty nice planes, too, come to think of it. They ran out of the salad before they got to us so I had to have a toasted cheese sandwich (I poked the ‘ham &’ a couple of times but didn’t get round to actually ingesting it), but their Your-exits-are-here-and-here Lady was awfully nice about getting me an ‘I want to eat more grass and fewer sheep from now on please’ form (they called it the ‘vegetarian’ option, pfft, what’s with that?), and kindly repeated herself many a time when she came up to me and I was a little too engrossed in watching The Runaways.

(My verdict, on that film is, by the way, a fairly solid thumbs up! I was predicting Angsty Teen Drama, but it had slightly more of a Skins angsty teen drama feel than a Dawson’s Creek one. I’m still fairly sure Kristen Stewart’s theatrical range doesn’t extend any further than her cute button nose, but it works out quite well in this case, because her role as the grungy rockstar chic Joan Jett didn’t really require anything more than looking good in her underwear, looking good snogging Dakota Fanning (an all-grown up Dakota Fanning, might I add. Remember the days when she played the wee young’n in movies, like in I am Sam? Wow, really, you do? Gosh, I certainly don’t, you must be like, really old) and most importantly, looking kick-ass with a 70s hairdo and a rockin’ electric guitar. I must say, middle-aged people definitely have a little more street cred than I’ve previously thought; they were actually once cool enough to be the punk youth of this age.)

I know you’re not meant to reference things in brackets (because those curvy lines are like little bubbles, and if you poke them they burst and all the words tumble out and make everything else that little bit less cohesive) but I thought I should just pause to consider the fact that my inability to stay on topic has resulted not only in an entire bracketed paragraph, but one which has a set of brackets within it. You should call me Bracket Girl, or something. Actually, no. Don’t do that.

But I digress, a fact with which I’m sure you will all concur with much enthusiasm.

After The Runaways, my finger couldn’t help scrolling past that show about the three nerdy flatmates who crush on the girl next door, past that awesome movie with the boy and the Vikings and David Tennant and some dragons (the only good movie Dreamworks has ever made other than the first two Shrek films), past Tina Fey and Steve Carrell – past all that – to that show with the red-headed Scottish chic and the man in the bow tie.

Anyway, you probably don’t want me to go into an in-depth of analysis of that Doctor Who episode (It was ‘The Eleventh Hour’, Eleven’s first one. I really do adore that kitchen scene, where Amelia cooks the Doctor up a bit of just about everything, trying to figure out what he’s craving, and he takes it all a little too personally when things aren’t to his taste – “And STAY out!”, while frisbeeing a particularly insulting plate of bread and butter out the front door. And the scene where he picks out his new outfit from the clothes hanging up in a men’s locker room. And Rory. I adore Rory – “It’s the Doctor! But how can the Doctor be here? The Doctor was never real! [To Amy] You used to make me dress up as him!”) so I, er, won’t, er, do that. I’m off to explore Auckland instead, and bring you back some more, you know, actual on-site information.

Until next time!

Auckland, New Zealand