Missy's New Zealand Trip Report - August 2000
"How I spent my summer...."
By Missy Good
Okay. So, here we have my trip report. . Please remember that I"m the person who dragged all and sundry to the LaBrea Tar Pits in LA so I could see the fossils, and considered that a fascinating afternoon (esp when Llachlan and I spotted an ancient microchip and assumed it to be a Dar and Kerry fossil, but I digress) In other words, I find the darndest stuff interesting.
Travelling to New Zealand was an amazing experience in itself. I chose to fly on United Airlines, which made even getting to Los Angeles for my overseas flight a dice roll. (g) I had my flights programmed to page me if there were changes, and I got paged on every flight including the one out to Auckland. My flight from Miami International left late (afternoon thunderstorms - they shut the taxiways down so no poor guy with a luggage cart gets zapped), then as it arrived at Chicago OHare, I got paged saying that flight outbound was also late.
Lucky me. (g) It did take my mind off the fact that I was about to fly halfway around the world, about to embark on a week of watching something I never in my wildest dreams believed I'd ever experience.
Kym Taborn, the sage of LA, was right though - after that 12 hour flight to Auckland, I'd be way too brain fogged to think about what I was doing. (g) International travel is itneresting, especially that long a flight. First off, when you board, after they shut the doors and all that, they give you...
Socks. (staring bemusedly at the pair I kept) Blue, United Airlines socks, in a little baggie. They also give you a menu, with all the meals listed on it. Since my flights usually involve either pretzels OR peanuts, this was a revelation. On a flight out to Auckland, you get dinner, a snack mid way, and then breakfast before you land in New Zealand. They also play lots of movies to keep you entertained. I have now seen "Where the Heart is" mimed four times. Fortunately, the flight out to Auckland wasn't that crowded, and I had a little space to move around and all that. I slept most of the way, at any rate.
Before you land, they come around and hand out the customs and immigration paperwork you need to fill out in order to enter New Zealand. This was all new to me, since I'd never been out of the country before, but since I wasn't smuggling drugs, and wasn't bringing in any farm animals, it was simple enough to complete. After you land, they direct you through customs and passport control, and both, for me - were very short, very simple affairs. I did get my baggage checked out by two customs dogs - a little cocker spaniel who sniffs for fruit, and a larger Golden Retriever who was looking, I guess, for drugs and contraband. I was carrying neither, but both dogs did detect that I was a fellow dog owner, so I had to spend a few minutes showing pictures of Gab the Lab.
Once I got out of the arrivals area, and found the folks who were picking me up, I got to see a little of Auckland. It was just sunrise, and it was a very pretty one. The sun seemed larger to me than what I was used to on sunrise, and I wondered if that had to do with the lattitude and longitude of where I was. New Zealand is very hilly - the gentleman who was driving me showed me several extinct volcano cones, one of which has had it's crater cleverly turned into a soccer stadium. People sit on the sloping walls and watch play on the floor of the crater. It was pretty cool. The driver also was careful to tell me that I could find Burger King and McDonalds in New Zealand, along with Wendy's, and Starbucks. (g)
Driving on the other side of the road. Wow. Glad I wasn't doing it. I've been driving the other way round since I was fourteen, and I'm really afraid my insticts would have gotten me into some really horrific trouble here. (G)
The hotel was interesting. I stayed in the Auckland Hyatt, and the first thing I noticed was the fact that they do an interesting form of power saving. You get a sort of keycard thing for your room, and when you go in, you put it into a slot - this turns the power on. When you leave your room, you take the key out, this turns all the power off. So you save electricity whenever you're not in your room. I didn't really have much time to study this phenomenon, though - I called home to let my mom know I made it, then decided to start my adventure into the world of Xena.
I got told by the LA office that the first thing I'd notice about the NZ office is that everyone is very, very nice.
That's very very true. Every single person I talked to, interacted with, watched, or was involved with during my stay impressed me as not only nice, but professional and conscientious. It's obvious that they're used to living and working in the world of tv production, but they put up with my general wide eyed cluelessness with grace and humor, and I was pretty overwhelmed by how they accepted this brief intrusion into their really busy world.
Having spent some years behind the scenes in theatre made me understand how much work it takes to put on an artistic production, but I didn't realize exactly what it takes to produce a television show, week after week, year after year.
Dear God, these people work hard. All of them do - from the production staff to the actors, it's long hours, and long days, under conditions that most of us sitting here at our computers busy critiquing their results woudn't put up with for a SECOND. Twelve hours a day or more - through heat and cold, through rain and mosquitos and mud, day in and day out.
It's not much glamour - just a lot of sometimes repetitive, often frustrating work which takes hours and hours to result in a few minutes of magic.
Then it takes weeks, sometimes months of even more people working just as hard to bring that magic to the reality that we see on our television screens. It's a amazing process, a process I'm incredibly glad I got a chance to understand better, and to be allowed to see a part of.
On a personal note - after getting past the amazement at all the technical intricacies, and absorbing the effort being put forth to bring the material on the page into reality - to then look up and realize that the image all these people were working so hard to create came from me - the only possible reaction I could have was :
Wow. I hope it's good enough. I hope it's worth all this.
It's a totally overpowering feeling.
One of the things I got to do while I was in New Zealand was to see an almost completed version of my first script, Legacy. I don't think I have words to describe what that felt like yet.
I spent five days watching the work, from exteriors to built sets, to some studio work on interiors, each type of filiming using different techniques, and different mechanics. I also got the privledge of getting a tour around the main PacRen offices and studios, and a trip to the props shop where I got to see how they make weapons and the chakram in it's many incarnations.
It was a great week.
Auckland was great too - it's small enough so that you can walk all around the downtown part of it - it's different enough so that you realize you're in a different country, with a different culture, but there are enough simliarities so that you don't feel lost there. The mixture of cultures is facinating - a good deal of Far East influence, along with the Maori - I spent time listening to Maori newscasts at night.
I got to see some very pretty areas around Auckland, and did take a peek at one of the famous black sand beaches. I discovered that the South Pacific reminded me more of the North Atlantic in it's power and fury against the land than did the friendlier, gentler South Atlantic and Carribean seas I'm more used to. The surf was continous, and I could see that anyone wanting to take a swim better know what the hell their doing.
The black sand is not all black - it has iron on it, but it's a bit tan as well, and it's very fine in texture. The rocks on the jetty at the beach had tiny black limpets living on them - but not any of the algae I"m used to seeing in warmer waters.
Yes, I saw sheep. They're wooly and cute looking, but I didn't get too close. (g) I got a picture of a huge field of them, and right across the road, a huge field of cows. I'll put them up later when I download my camera into the PC. I also got a shot of downtown Auckland.
Vegetarians - cover your eyes. The lamb here is AWESOME. For food differences, I noticed little things, like odd breakfasts. (odd to me, anyway) They were more UK oriented, and yes, there was vegemite on the table. What I found most astounding about the vegemite was not that it smelled and tasted a bit like anchovy paste, but that it was put out by Kraft.
They use more brown and unprocessed sugar here. That's very cool. The bacon is more boiled than deep fried - a little disconcerting if you like yours crisp. Eggs are creamier. The ice cream is killer. (g)
New Zealand television was hilarous. I got to watch stuff I'd only heard mentioned on the lists, like Bad Girls (liked it) Topps Twins (stared at it slack jawed), and Shortland Street (needs more viewing to figure out what's going on) I also liked watching the BBC news channel, and seeing things reported from a South Pacific point of view. I got a crash course in what an 'all black' was. (g) I'm used to sports and fans, since I live in South Florida and exist with the Marlins, the Dolphins, the Heat, and the Panthers, but a national sports focus like the rugby All Blacks are was new to me. They enter areas of life that sports in the US doesn't - and the players are used to illustrate goals and ideals in many different ways.
I got a stuffed Kiwi. Gab almost munched it before I got it out of the bag. I also got some sweaters for relatives, a sheepskin (i couldn't resist) a pullover for my mom, a couple hats, and some neat stuff for the house.
All in all - I really, really liked New Zealand, and I was glad I happened to pick that as my first trip outside the US. I'd definitely go back, this time to actually visit and sightsee, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who loves beautiful country, and very cool people.