Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

convenience fees

by

As we enter our third week of Kiwi life the thing I’ve begun to appreciate about America now that I am outside of it is how everything there is convenient.

The first thing I noticed were credit card fees. I’m not generally one to use my card for casual, daily expenses, but it was a necessity here before we got our bank cards set up. I quickly discovered that it’s common for many places to tack on a convenience fee of at least 2% to a credit purchase – and, for small purchases it might be an automatic 30-40 cents. These fees are almost universally absorbed by the store in the US.

You might be thinking, “2% – what’s the big deal!” Except, are you the sort of person who puts big purchases on your credit card purely for the points or miles, only to immediately pay it off?

Suddenly you’re paying a $20 premium for every $1,000 you pass through your card that way. $20 isn’t nothing, and if you’ve got to buy a whole new set of appliances because rental properties don’t come with them, it’s several multiples of $20.

Yes, you heard me right: rental homes don’t come with the major appliances here. No washer, dryer, or refrigerator – which are collectively known as “whiteware.”

I still haven’t heard the full history of why this is the case. It seems utterly mad to me, because as a renter you are suddenly responsible for a few thousand dollars of appliances over their lifespan of a decade or more, and if you switch homes a few times there is no guarantee they’ll fit into each subsequent house!

That’s specifically the case with dryers, which just aren’t very common in New Zealand. We’ve seen tons of places that don’t even have a spot for one, and even if they do there’s no ductwork for venting. If you want a dryer in those houses, you have to buy a super-special, super-expensive “condenser” style dryers that suck the water out of your clothes just like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s farm.

The majority of people here line dry their clothes. We went on a walk to the zoo yesterday while the weather was nice and nearly every house we passed on the way had clothes hanging out on a line or a rack! [Read more…] about convenience fees

does it taste the same?

by

We’re on Nomadic Day 23 here in Wellington.

I don’t know about you, but that’s way longer than any other vacation or break from the regular schedule of life that I’ve had since … um, let’s go with ever. It’s long enough that it’s starting to become difficult to differentiate between the days of the week, despite trying to hang on to some semblance daily norms like EV6’s bedtime routine.

That’s why I was so excited to visit a farmers’ market this morning. Saturday morning farmer’s markets were a regular fixture of our Philadelphia life for much of the year, no matter which configuration of the three of us decided to attend. Even if this one paled by comparison, it would at least let me know it was Saturday.

As it turns out, the Newtown Fruit and Vegetable Market in Wellington dwarfed our little Landsdowne Farmer’s Market. Or, maybe it just seemed big because there were so many vendors squeezed into such a small space all selling similar things. It created an effect similar to a hall of mirrors, such that you saw endless rows of peppers, pumpkins, and kumara no matter which way you turned.

Not only were there (perhaps literal) tons of fresh food, but it was much cheaper than in the many supermarkets we’ve visited like Goldilocks sampling bear housewares. A bag of veggies almost too heavy for me to carry was only $35! Plus, I snagged a beautiful brocade-covered canvas bag for just five dollars from a delightful woman who said she appears at the market fortnightly, and I honestly would have probably paid just to hear her use that word casually in a sentence.

The market helped introduce a little bit of gravity into my week, but it was a trip to the local Mediterranean Food Warehouse, that made me feel more at home here. It’s a high-end Italian-influenced grocery store and eatery chain whose local outpost commands one corner of a large intersection nearby. [Read more…] about does it taste the same?

happy birthday to this

by

EV6 rides through our old neighborhood on her trusty balance bike.

Every so often a relatively-common cultural quirk of one country becomes the fad of another.

Sometimes it’s pop stars. Other times it’s food or some random bit of technology. Suddenly we’re all singing the “Macarena” and checking our Tamagotchis while fitting a drizzle of aioli and pickled something-or-another into our Swedish diets.

A few years ago a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing was the quirk that rose to hegemonic popularity. Western audiences marveled at how some people find it remarkably easy to cull their belongings so they can live in small (to us) spaces.

At the top of a ferris wheel at a local carnival with EV6 and my mother.

I don’t understand how the concept managed to fill out a whole book. The basic tenet (spoilers!) is that you should keep only that which brings you joy, because those possessions are the things you love.

This particular magic is lost on me. I am immune to the Japanese art of decluttering because I am swimming in the joy of my possessions. It’s very rare that I give or throw something away – it’s only if the thing has completely outgrown its use. I still have my first pair of jeans and my first comic book. I don’t have my first guitar, which lacked utility, but I still have my second – which plays nicely.

Seeing Katie Barbato open for Mutlu at Boot and Saddle with Lindsay and Jeremy.

This makes it hard for me to pack for trips, even harder to pack to move houses, and nearly impossible to both. I just want to be near all of my possessions. I want that joy.

I’m the same way on the internet. There are at least four or five times I really ought to have given up on the older bits of Crushing Krisis it and started it anew. Once when my career got underway in earnest, again when I switched to WordPress, perhaps another time when I started focusing more on my band and local music, yet again while I started blogging about comics, and possibly a fifth time as I began to write about parenting.

I should probably restart it right now, as I begin life in a new city and country!

On the Philadelphia Zoo balloon with EV.

I don’t know why I haven’t. Keeping all these words around every time I add a new topic has done intolerable things to my SEO.

What can I say? I just find joy in having these more than two million words around, which is how I’ve arrived at today – the seventeenth anniversary of Crushing Krisis. [Read more…] about happy birthday to this

Toyota down under

by

Today we let a four-year-old choose our new car.

Sort of.

EV6 definitely picked our car out of a line-up of dozens as soon as we hit the lot. She is obsessed with the color blue, and this car is an unmissable electric blue that you could spot from a kilometer away, which she nearly did.

“Let’s get that one!” she insisted as soon as we entered the parking lot full of models certified to have been never before driven in New Zealand.

“Oh really? How much would you pay for it?”

“Three dollars,” she replied. This is how much EV6 thinks every single thing costs.

As for whether it’s our car… well… I wouldn’t say that we own the car as of this writing. It’s more that we put down a refundable deposit on a car with a US credit card for an outrageous fee because the car dealership will not accept our American money.

I knew car shopping would be hard, but I didn’t anticipate that the hard part would be forking over a giant pile of existing money earmarked for car buying!

This little wrinkle has thrown quite a wrench into the “What to do when we hit the ground!” section of my “Moving To New Zealand” Gantt chart (which is a real thing that exists).  I thought the crushingly obvious order of events would be bank, cell phones, car, house. That makes sense, right? Money, communication, transportation, permanent habitation.

In reality, the bank won’t even make an appointment with you until you are in the country and then it takes several days to wait for it, during which time you’ll probably want a phone and a vehicle, except purchasing the vehicle requires you to have a New Zealand bank account, but even if you visit the bank to try to rush things you’ll learn that the bank account requires you to have a permanent address with some form of bill associated with it, but you are probably still living in a hotel because renting a house requires you to wire a bank deposit, which is virtually impossible to do from a US bank (as we discovered), so you’ll need a bank account to rent the house where you can be sent a bill in order to get your bank account in order to buy your car.

At least the cell phones were easy. [Read more…] about Toyota down under

left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)

by

In writing about last evening’s grocery apocalypse solely from my own perspective, one detail that got lost in the mix is E doing all of the left-side driving in a ridiculously large sports utility vehicle.

It’s terrifying. And that’s just from my perspective.

Of course, E is doing all of the hard work and shouldering the even-greater terror of actually piloting the vehicle – the mental gymnastics of staying left, doing shallow left turns and wide right turns, and figuring out how the fuck you “Give Way” in a roundabout.

Even before we could get into the terror of conducting our American-driven death-tank around the unsuspecting roads of Wellington, there was the misadventure of actually acquiring said vehicle at the airport.

We were forewarned by D, E’s Aussie friend on the ground in NZ, that our chosen car rental agency was a little … odd. Perhaps our first hint should have been their complete absence from the considerable line-up of rental desks in the international arrivals terminal.

An exhausted E posed this to me as a feature rather than a bug as I swung a delirious EV6 back and forth by her ankles in an effort to keep her from attempting to surf on the baggage carousel. Our car agency would pick us up and deliver us straight to our vehicle, she advised me as she rang them up to let them know we had arrived and would require a large luggage cart.

It was a concierge service. Perhaps they might arrive wearing a jaunty hat and carrying a little white-board with our names written on it.

I entertained that possibility for the first ten, or maybe twenty minutes of us hovering around our impressive island of nine bags for two-and-a-half people, being the most obvious weirdo, materialistic, “super-size me!” Americans we could possibly be. After that, my hopes began to falter.

(“We’re moving here FOR GOOD!,” I wanted to shout at every Kiwi passing by, “And our household belongings won’t be here for FIVE MORE WEEKS!” As if our suitcases didn’t contain more clothing than most of them had in their entire houses.)

Finally, our man arrived. Sans luggage cart and jaunty cap, but with a large mini-van! Was this our vehicle? He made no comment on that, but started loading our luggage into the rear of the dingy, disheveled old van whose particular scent I might kindly describe as being evocative of a cat brothel.

Hopefully this was not our vehicle. E snapped EV6’s child seat into place and we confirmed that all of our bags were intact. Then, we set out for a short drive through the airport to the rental agency lot.

“Perhaps,” the driver mused, “you might just like to keep the van to drive home? All of your things (he said this very pointedly) fit into it so well. I could drop by your flat with your car tomorrow.”

To which we of course replied, “Um, well, we respect the rights of feline sex workers as long as they are doing the work by their own free will, but perhaps you should hold on to their mobile home and we could possibly have the actual car we rented? If for no reason other than needing to figure out how to snap EV6’s seat into it.

“And also on account of the smell.”
[Read more…] about left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)