After my little adventures to the West Coast and up the East Coast, the next stop was a work conference in Queenstown at the start of February. This was ideally timed, because Queenstown is packed full of boozy, loud (and mostly English) people in December and January, then it largely clears out until ski season kicks off in early July. In February, however, the weather is still incredibly sunny and warm – which makes for a perfect vacation spot.
The conference was held on a Thursday & Friday, which is more than enough audit updates for the year. Back when I worked at the other place, training was usually one week per year plus another three days for audit and accounting updates. It’s notable that the accounting standards in New Zealand haven’t changed for five years, and the assurance standards changed in 2010 for the first time in about that long.
The conference was at the Millenium Hotel, and was overall quite nice. However, their building inspector failed the accessibility test on two accounts. First, the accessible guest rooms were on the 5th floor of the hotel – and thus only accessible by elevator. Which is great, unless of course there’s a fire. The second fail was for the restaurant bathroom, which has wide hallways and push-button doors, but forgot about the three steps to get up to the hallway. Maybe there’s a back way through the kitchen, like Café Nova. As a side note, I now freelance as an occupational therapist in my spare time.
Anyway, the conference was Thursday-Friday, so the Group (big G since I now work for a publicly traded entity rather than a Firm) put on an Amazing Race hunt which led us to the dinner restaurant. The Amazing Race thing was pretty cute: you had to direct a blindfolded team member to put together a puzzle, identify five flavours of chocolate, set a formal dinner table based on a provided model (with fancy napkin folding and fork-angling) and count the number of lampposts in the Mall.
The most annoying “task” was to go to Wine Tastes, which is an actual store in downtown Queenstown. The idea is tourists go in, give them $15 and sample six wines or something, then buy some of the wine at a 200% markup (they will ship overseas). This is a country where you routinely find decent, drinkable wine for $9.00 NZD ($7.50 Canadian) including tax at the grocery store. Wheeee.
So anyway, the challenge is to go to Wine Tastes, then taste and identify two wines, one white and one red. The problem, though is you need to identify the following:
• Type (pinot, merlot, etc.)
• Year (2003, 2006, 2008, 2009)
• Grape
• Flavours (oak & rose, pear & grass, etc.)
So, the first and last bits are relatively easy since the type of wine and flavours can be smelled and tasted to your senses. But when you’re trying to match up one of four years with one of six grape varieties, there’s 24 more or less indistinguishable combinations to choose from. And we unfortunately got stuck with an attendant who was less than encouraging. Long story short, I wanted a beer after about five minutes of this.
And luckily . . . the Group had arranged for us to have beer & pizza at a bar which sports the largest retractable roof in Queenstown. So when the weather’s nice, they just open it up and it becomes an open-air pizza patio. This was a really clutch decision, because pizza meant that dinner wasn’t going to be marred too much by manners, and it took away the trouble of ordering – they basically just kept bringing out pizza (and beer) until we couldn’t do any more.
Ice Hockey Win
This was Thursday night, and the Group got us nice and liquored up with a bar tab throughout dinner. The service was pretty good overall, it’s always pleasantly refreshing to get good service in a country where they’re not working for tips. Although, to be fair, I think Queenstown gets a lot of tourists who tip out of habit. Anyway, as soon as dinner was over I was 100% into the excited-drunk-wandering mode that most of you know so well. I saw a pool table, and fully intended to use it. And by pool table, I mean I spotted a hottie sitting across the bar from me, which was conveniently next to the pool table, so I came up with an excuse to get a better look. There’s something really fun about a hottie in a plain, tight grey t-shirt drinking beer by himself.
I dragged the rest of the Dunedin office over to play a few games of pool, which quickly got other conferenceers involved, and it basically turned into a mini-tournament. My favourite quirk about pool is how people react; there’s basically a split between people who are fanatically competitive and people who are really drunk. Anyway, pool happened for a while, and a bottle of wine was finished along the way, and eventually the grey t-shirt hottie had two friends show up. Because I’m me, and I was really slogged, the following conversation happened with my seat-mate at work.
“Go talk to them – they’re really cute!”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“Because they might hit me, but they can’t hit a girl.”
[side note: my strategy had not been updated since Snooki got KO’d by that dude in Miami]
Fortunately, my dare was accepted and about 15 minutes later we were playing pool against the too friends. Who turned out to be ice hockey players. For Team New Zealand. And possibly 20. And were totally cute.
Cowboy
Queenstown being only a few hours from Dunedin, a co-worker had arranged to meet friends who lived there at one of the many, many pubs in town. At this point, I was probably 5-6 beer and a bottle of wine into the evening, so I wasn’t going to say no to very much. Promise a mechanical bull ride, however, and I couldn’t be dragged away. Yes, we went to Cowboys, and yes, I fell off almost immediately. Then I stumbled back to my oddly shaped hotel room (seriously – it was shaped like a cowbell) and slept it off.
Queenstown
So the conference ended after a day and a half, and I had part of Friday, all of Saturday, and part of Sunday to get back to Dunners. We were let go at 3pm on Friday so people could catch flights, so I stopped by an empty hair salon for a quick cut. Then I defaulted to the “spend less on accommodation than you do on food” strategy and found the Bungee Backpackers near the city centre for something like $22. On Friday night I kept things pretty quiet, and went hunting for fish & chips and hottie-spotting down on the lakeside. I think I ended up on my top bunk bed by about 10:00pm.
The Projectionist
On Saturday morning I was up and in the car by 8am, as I had a hot date with Wanaka. To set the scene for those of you who haven’t been to Kiwiland, Wanaka is kind of like Queenstown’s Niagara-on-the-Lake. If you aren’t really up to bungee jumping, river rafting, or drinking your face off with 19 year old English backpackers, you would enjoy Wanaka more than Queenstown. It’s a sleep little lakeside town whose primary industry seems to be vacation homes. It’s also at the gateway to several national parks and tramping routes, but I’m not particularly interested in that.
I had two reasons to go to Wanaka
• Buy a specific puzzle at puzzling world as a gift to me
• Watch the Social Network at a renowned movie theatre
So I drove into Wanaka early over the Crown Ranges, and took some pretty cool photos. This is a winding, sometimes unsealed road with many, many switchbacks leading up over the mountains. Stunning scenery, but a terrible road when it ices over in winter.
Wanaka, home of the "aspiring" pharmacy.
Leaving so early put me into town early, so I stopped and had a $10 breakfast and watched rugby highlights. Then I drove out to the Toys, Antiques and Collectible Car Museum, which was hugely fun. I’m not really into cars, but I got excited every time I came across a toy I used to have.
Apparently Mattel released a line of Barbie Star Trek Toys
This made me think of Arrested Development
Also, they have a tank.
Then I stopped by Puzzling World and took another run through the illusion rooms, and bought a really neat brain-teaser puzzle called the Octagon.
This puzzle has over 100,000 different solutions (fit them all into the square). The tricky bit is it usually takes almost an hour to find one. REALLY fun coffee table game.
At this point, it was time for the Social Network. I was going less for the movie itself, and more for the cinema – which is listed in every Lonely Planet, Eyewitness and other travel book about the South Island. The cinema was started by a young Scottish guy in the mid-late 80’s, who basically wanted to reinvent good cinema. So he rented a garage, acquired a bunch of chairs, couches, and other seating items through donations, and started screening movies. Eventually, he moved a convertible car into the garage (so you can sit in the car and watch) and three seats from an old airplane. Personally, I chose a squashy armchair that wouldn’t have been out of place in my grandma’s living room.
The movie itself was excellent. As you all know, I’m a huge fan of anything featuring Emmy award winner Justin Timberlake. And I found the script and pacing well done, which is code for I DIDN’T GET BORED.
If you have ADHD like me, a 2-hour movie is more or less the bane of your existence. That’s a REALLY long time to focus on anything. To combat boredom (and possibly sell more snacks), the owner guy he put back in the Intermission when the reel needs to be changed. If you’ve seen Rent: Live on Broadway, you’re more than aware of how awesome a full intermission is in the middle of a movie. Accordingly, when you buy your ticket you can order a warm cookie, coffee or other snack to be brought in on a little cart.
[side note: YES! I'm watching TV right now and Miss Kathy’s going to be on Graham Norton this weekend with Cameron Diaz, and a guy who sort of looks like a young Ed Burns]
Anyway, back to intermission . . . because the place runs on two staff, it’s usually the projectionist who goes out and serves the moviegoers at intermission. And our projectionist . . . might have been 17, and was wearing stubbies and a singlet. And looked good doing it. All I’m saying. Actually, he kind of looked like this guy from Home & Away
Mmmnnn . . . Romeo
And that was vacation the third, barring a rather boring drive back to Dunners through Central Otago.
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