Matt Rhine
Horn Player, Student
Traveler (I wish)
1
Hello all! I've started writing up an account of my trip, I will admit, it's got everything, meaning everything, so I preface my installments with a reminder that I aim to entertain rather than shock and offend, if happen to do the latter, I apologize the most I can in advance and just let me know, otherwise enjoy! I promise you will be getting more of these, and I just let you know, that day one of the trip hasn't been fully covered, and there is yet 9 more days to go, and ironically, this is 9 pages double spaced so far, so you will have plenty to read, I promise.
Matt
I've decided I'd finally get around to this...
Sooo... Australia, it was pretty incredible, as was New Zealand.
From June 29th to July 10th CYWS had a performance tour in the down under. I ponied up my $3,500 to go.
It was worth it.
From here is my account of the trip, you may be surprised, I have included what had happened on the trip as well as personal feelings. I'm writing out of sleep deprivation, which I have found is my best time to write anyways. Anywho, enjoy! It is a very long read (with more parenthetical references than you can shake a stick at.)
The first day of the trip was spent flying, my first time flying. Ever. It was fun, well, the first flight was, it was from Cleveland to Cincinnati. I realized how fast you actually go up there, at least on short distance flights. Jon was my plane mate (for every flight, as it happened to work out that way) and as I turned to ask him if we were about to pass Columbus, the flight attendant announced that we would be landing soon. From there we had about a three-hour layover, it was here that we basically established our "group." We were the ones who hung out during the trip, got angry at each other, liked each other, had feelings indifference towards each other, but somehow got along with each other. A blessed thing if I may say so myself.
Before I went on the trip, I knew I was going to know (Last names withheld, for purposes of privacy, but in the interest of keeping duplicate names straight, I'll use initials) Kate O, Mikaela and of course, Jon. There were a good deal more people that I knew, these were just the people in our flight group. I met Lee and Lauren as well. We shopped, (A new concept to me, all I ever knew was Hopkins Int'l Airport) we looked around, and we ended up playing Egyptian Rat Screw for until boarding time. For the record, Lee "totally owns" at that game even though he doesn't think so.
From there we went on to Los Angeles which was a totally crazy thing to me, at least the airplanes were (I was quite naïve at the time about airplanes.) From Cleveland to Cincinnati, we had a two seats, then aisle, then two more seats airplane. The plane from Cincinnati to Los Angeles was three seats, an aisle and three more seats. I sat by Jon, but I had to sit next to a person I didn't know. It was startling at first, but it became a norm to me later. I was lucky that she wasn't a mean person. I basically spent the flight playing a game or two with Kate O. (It was more like eight games, across the plane with my DS) and looking out the window and wondering when we were going to get out of Ohio. It turns out that when I thought we were still in Ohio, we were in Colorado, I guess America has more farmland than I thought. We saw the Grand Canyon and I played a butt-load of Mario Kart DS. We landed in LA an hour after we left, which is a neat concept to me, seeing how it was a four-hour flight.
Now the LA Layover was interesting, and long. I stress "long." An eight-hour layover is a very long time.
I'm going to back-up a little bit and explain a few things, I had already known Kate O. from Senior project, I was an intern for Mrs. Lichtler, so I was in a fashion, her teacher, which turned out to not be awkward at all, thank goodness. Her and Lauren sat next each other on the plane from Cleveland to Cincinnati, and were victimized by my excitement as a first time flyer, i.e.: my summoning the attention of everybody to look at a cloud, or a housing development, etc. This, however, served as a decent icebreaker, so I don't worry too much. Jon I know as my best friend for quite some time. We were pretty discontented with each other before the trip, and this trip served as a chance to bridge that gap (and I happily report that it did.)
Back to LA. We got off the plane, and the first cool thing to happen was the sighting of palm trees. That is cool to people in Ohio. Enough said there. After that it became Long lines with everybody checking your passport or your shoes (that was the TSA, or "Thousands Standing Around," as Tim said, which rings far truer than Transportation Security Administration. You'll meet Tim later.) We met up with Becca, Kate A., and Jenny in LA after we went through security (interestingly enough, I went through that stupid security check four times.) We all kinda' piled our luggage in place at our gate, and I stayed and people watched with Kate O. and charged my two DSs.
I liked Kate (not like that, besides she has a Boyfriend) so we hung out during the layover. Everybody went and explored, Kate and I hung out and talked. After everybody else had filled their fancies and lust for exploration, Kate and I went and got food. She got Sushi and I got this crappy fruit salad from McDonald's, we found a table after fifteen minutes and then at some point Kate lost her wallet, we discovered this after we went through security my third time. For Kate, her debit card not working at the currency exchange was already bad, this made it worse. I wanted to help her as best I could. We braved the outside world of security-checked gates and Kate, myself and newly added to the team, Becca went out to explore the airport in an effort to find her wallet. Unsuccessfully may I add, but it is to my belief that it did not detract from the trip. A CYWS staff member came out and met us to help us, at this point Becca realized that she was seriously behind on her meds (the three hour time change is understandably easy to forget about) So I learned this neat trick with security. It goes as such. You go to the line, summon a worker, tell them your dire situation, and you get through security immediately. I think everybody there but me hated me at that moment (Becca didn't want to make a scene), but at least I felt good about myself.
From here, Becca and I hung out while Kate was trying to find her wallet with Dan (the CYWS staff member) We listened to music before we boarded, and all was good, Kate hadn't found her wallet, but she didn't lose that much, everything was bright and looking to make for an amazing trip. (Don't worry it was.) We boarded, and our group was pretty tightly clustered, except Becca, she asked the lady sitting next to us if she would switch, rather than just saying, "No, sorry." She responded saying, "No, I don't switch on airplanes." She was a mean lady, but nice, I have mixed feelings about her, however, this writing is about Australia, not about the Lady that sat next to me on Qantas flight 026. I gave Becca my second DS, which became a vital communication tool.
I may as well throw it out there now, that I liked her at the time. I thought she liked me too, but we'll not go there and just know that we're friends now and that everything ended well. But I digress, Qantas is an amazing airliner, they sponsor a rugby team, the give two fully cooked meal, they supply a blanket (which I am wrapping myself in at the time of this writing) and a pillow, they cook meals that didn't make me sick, they flew a Boeing 747 (which is the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life), and everybody that worked on the plane had an Australian accent! The flight itself was about 12 hours long, and I slept about half of it. The other half was talking to Jon and Lauren (Jon was directly to my left and Lauren was across the aisle to our left, we were in right set of window seats) and Becca on my DS.
We landed at some point and got into Australia- err… New Zealand at 5:00 in the frickin' morning. Somehow it went from Thursday to Saturday in one day, but that's the dateline for you, I just accepted that I had lost a Friday and would be having two Mondays on the way back. We went though customs, got our luggage and got up into the bus, Bus 1, the best bus of three, because our "group" was on the bus, so there. My first observation when I got outside was that it was dark, my immediate second observation was that it was cold. It was indeed winter where we were, but that turned out for the better as we went along on the trip.
We went from the airport to around town, we just kinda drove around (on the left side of the road, that was weird), it was called an orientation tour, the first place we stopped was Mt. Eden, and holy crap it was gorgeous. I realized how pretty it was in New Zealand, that and how narrow it is. From the peak of where we were, you could see both coasts, almost at the same time. It was also very cold. It was definitely winter in New Zealand. After I took a ton of pictures, and held up my group taking landscapes, we boarded the bus and was off to see more places. We stopped at the Domain (I don't think we actually did though, it's just what the itinerary says) and Mission Bay (which was really neat, volcanic sand is fun), from there we went to Holy Trinity Cathedral. That was the second place we played at on our performance tour, we didn't play then, we just visited. And everybody bought goofy hats, excluding most people, but including Jon. From there got on the bus again (we did that as well at Mission Bay, just in case you were wondering) and we saw some amazing houses. The neat thing about houses in New Zealand is that they all look different, and they all look like they have no concept of city planning, as in they are kinda clustered and not next to streets all of the time, etc.
From there we went on the bus again. We also went to a mall, it had some American shops and some non-American shops. Of course, that is quite obvious, but I digress. We went as our bus group to the discount store on the third floor and kinda split up from there. I looked at the prices at this discount store. I at first had forgotten the exchange rate, and was absolutely floored by the prices. It was $100 for video games there! That's expensive, and then you take into account the exchange rate, and it still is! But not as bad. From here we split up and Becca and I got juice at a coffee shop, it was pretty good, I got pear and apple, wow, that was some strong pear, as in, they actually used pear, and you could smell it, because they used real pears. It was fascinating, and probably boring to all of you, so I shall move on.
Becca and I visited the shops. I shall back up and say that the bus driver said while we were touring that Asians made up about 20% of the population, but as Lee noticed when we went through the mall, "He lied, there are a lot more than that." At least it seemed like it, the Asian people by and large were shop keeping folk to the best of my observation, and it infused culture into the land of New Zealand, and it also made it harder for us traveling folk to communicate with our localized slang and accents.
Becca and I went to a bakery and got an apricot pastry thing. We got silverware to eat it with and we did, and it was good. After we ate, we tried to return the silverware, which took five minutes longer than it should have, it was frustrating, but even funnier. They didn't understand us when we were saying we had dirty silverware. To their credit [the shopkeeper's] I always had to ask twice what people meant when they asked me "how're ya' going?" which "means how are you doing?" It was interesting.
We got on the bus yet again. We passed pretty farmland, and stopped at Mercer, think rest stop, and that's where we went. I got this Hamburger from Stockholm, Kate O. got an exotic Baked potato minus the exotic part. We all got numbers and sat down, the servers then came out and tried to find you, mine eventually did, and came with my Hamburger, it came with Chips and a drink, and because they liked me, my hamburger had a New Zealand flag in it. Interestingly, the chips (French Fries) actually tasted like potatoes. Jon and Lee got McDonalds, and I laughed at them for it, because they were eating American food.
After we ate, we went to gift shop, which had your typical grandma run gift shop items, sweaters, scarves, ties, and so forth, until you got to the back, they had possum fur willy warmers and willy wash, it is what you think it is. We found that slightly amusing, scratch that. We found it downright hilarious and embarrassing if I may add.
After we left there, we headed to Hamilton, New Zealand (from Auckland) we arrived into this beautiful college campus, oh wait. Never mind, it was a high school. The High Schools there are like our private high schools and colleges, the groups of classrooms are not all attached and the place was beautiful and well kept, as in they had plenty of flora in that place.
We conducted a rehearsal. And Dr. Ciepluch (our group director to those of you out of the know.) kinda showed off, we did our warm-up and then he had us do the Concert Bb scales up and down real fast, by section. I didn't mind, but you could tell we were showboating, well at least us in CYWS could, no matter. We rehearsed, and all was good, well, it was interesting anyways, we had our luggage on one side of the gym with chairs for people to sit and watch (presumably our host parents) and then us on the other side. Mind you we were rehearsing in a gym, so it was loud. Which coincidentally was our host parent's first comment about our group, or was that good? No matter, it made Jon and myself smile. For it made us feel loud and proud (pun intended.) After our rehearsal (what more can I say, a rehearsal is a rehearsal) we added the Waikato Youth Symphonic Band to our Cleveland Youth Wind Symphony and had a combined rehearsal practicing the songs we were to play together. The idea was, that the Waikato Youth Symphonic Band Members would sit between each member of CYWS, however, there was one member of the WYSB in the horn section, and there were twelve horn players in CYWS, so I didn't sit next to anybody that was from New Zealand during rehearsal. But I'm sure it would have been very cool.
The rehearsal was yet another rehearsal, but this time with Kiwi (New Zealanders) that I was not sitting next to. Rehearsal ended and then came the scary part. We were to meet our host family. We knew their last name was Jordan, we (as in Jon and I) knew they wrote to us via e-mail, and knew Jon told them he didn't like seafood, and we knew that they were school administrators from our e-mail conversations. But did we know where they were scary serial killers? Or super cool host family people?
Stay tuned for the next installment after Matt goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, goes to work late, has Shaker community band practice and stays up all night to write more on his trip to find out.
