Of 'Bugpickers', Campers and Steamed Feet...

Those Kiwis...they have a word for everything. (With apologies to Steve Martin.) New Zealandian (Zealandese?) is like "Scottish Lite". Shopping carts are trundlers. They have "trundler parks" at the mall. Sandals are jandles. No jandles parks at the beach, at least none I've seen so far.

They say"fish " like "fush". Fush un Chups.

(Above - "Nice camper, Sir." Seen near Punakaiki on the west coast of the south island).

The Kiwis also love their camping and travelling and they have a cool tradition of building wacky home-made campers. (See one above).

Back a few years ago, Monica was travelling in New Zealand with a girlfriend and they were doing a bus tour from town to town and staying a youth hostels. So they are on the bus at the end of the day and the driver is yelling out a stop: "Bugpicker's Central - next stop Bugpicker's Central." Monica is like: "well we're sure as Hell not staying there".

They they realize he's saying BACK-packer's Central. "Ohhhh - BACKPACKER'S Central...well that sounds musch better...kind of central and...bug-FREE."

If it WERE "Bugpicker's Central", Now I'm just not sure, hypothetically speaking here, if it would be "Bugpicker's (singular possessive), or Bugpickers', plural possessive.

As everyone is quick to point out - Canadians and Kiwis have certain thematic similarities: e.g. they hate Aussies like we hate Yanks). Another hilarious Kiwi trait I have noticed that makes them resemble Canadians (Canadians resemble Kiwis?) is the tendency to complain about airlines. We complain about Air Canada...they complain about long-distance flights (and well they should).

The New Zealand columnist Grant Smithies wrote an article titled The Unfriendly Skies (Some people think Hell is all about fire down below. Others...think it's more like an overly air-conditioned aircraft...) that Monica noticed in the Your Weekend magazine published in New Zealand on Nov. 28-09.

We just about killed ourselves reading it. A few choice extracts:

- "Short periods of fitful sleep are broken by howling children, or by stewardesses waking you up to eat food that tastes like steamed feet."

- "Starved of stimulation, the long-haul flyer's mind turns in on itself, twitching like a toad. The eyes shrivel in the endlessly recycled air, each of them rattling around in its gritty socket like a golf ball in a sandy pocket."

- "The tongue feels furry, thick, and pulsates like a hammered thumb."
STEAMED FEET...HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH! Grant Smithies, you are sooo right.

Smithies should win a Pulitzer for his "telling accumulation of detail." Or failing that, at least a Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, shorely.