A trip to New Zealand ..... and back

All this time I had been back to New Zealand once after eleven years.
We couldn't afford the tickets  but the family in NZ very generously got together and paid for all the Greek family to spend Xmas together at my parents beach house at Pukehina in the Bay of Plenty (North Island of New Zealand)

For the first few days New Zealand was  totally foreign.  Green was the dominant colour. Endless fields, trees and grass. The houses were made of wood with real lawn around them. There were blue houses and yellow houses and brick houses, with jacaranda and hibiscus.  None of the fat round bushy basil the greeks planted in an empty olive oil can.  The cars were Japanese or Korean, no longer european and mostly automatic. 

There was a distinct smell of cooking oil covering my old home town.  Fish and chips in some sort of vegetable oil.  The bookshop smelled of unopened, pristine books, and they were all in English!  And there were english magazines.  The radio played music I knew with voices I could understand.  The newspaper was another wonder.  I stared in fascination at the ads  on TV, loving them all while the rest of the family just wanted to turn the sound off.

I was astonished at the variety in the supermarket.  Back then Greece had only just started selling milk in bottles (instead of cans).  European goods were slowly coming into the shops.   A greek mini market had canned tomatoes, milk, tuna and sardines and dried beans and lentils in huge open sacks.  In a NZ supermarket there were aisles of canned goods, freezers full of packaged food.  Shelves full of everything, except octopus, feta and salted fish.  Nowdays Greek supermarkets have freezers full of NZ lamb and NZ supermarkets have shelves of Greek yoghurt and even octopus.

My parent's house was just yards from a white sandy beach and across the road was an estuary where at low tide we could dig for cockles and oysters and my sister in law, Rainy, found us a huge net which we put out one night to catch flounder, with little success but lots of fun.

Ocean beach on one side, estuary on the other

Xmas day was cold ham and trifle and swims in the sea, but only between the flags where the lifeguards could see us.  There was a bad rip out there which often took unwary swimmers out far beyond the waves and into danger.  When the tide was out we dived in the gentler waves and dug for pipis and tuatuas.

The whole family got together, coming from further south in NZ and even from far away Perth in Australia.  My mother and father were thrilled but ensured their peace of mind by moving out into the little guest house off the garage!

The stars seemed so low in the sky, like a twinkling blanket above our heads. Haley's Comet was somewhere up there and we searched the night skies to catch this once in a lifetime appearance.

The little greek-girls could understand english. I had made damn sure of that.  They rebelled a bit against the sterner discipline of kiwi grandparents but generally I think enjoyed the experience, if not that longest of long haul flights from the northern to the southern hemisphere.  

If you've got to go cattle-class at least go Singapore Airlines.  One thing which I will always remember is the way they looked after my two little girls 4 and 5 years old.

Back in Greece I hated the sight of the dusty dirty streets of Athens.  Our flat in Piraeus seemed tiny and it was months before I settled down and got used to the routine of cooking greek food, shopping at the outdoor market and walking everywhere instead of driving.