Environmental Volunteering Gothic

Environmental Volunteering Gothic(Inspired by the “regional gothic”-meme on tumblr)

It’s the last day of planting season. You plant. All day. The pile of plants you need to put into the ground does not seem to get any smaller. How many plants have you already planted? You count them, but your vision get’s blurry when you try to look back. Back to the place you started planting. Where was that? You can’t seem to see the top of the hill. You don’t know how long you were at this hillside, you only know that your back aches and you are slightly out of breath.

It’s the last day of planting season. You look forward to doing something else than digging holes, like you did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that day. You try to remember a day before planting. You can’t. Was there a time before planting season? And will there be a time afterwards? Now that you think of it, you the last day of planting season was yesterday. Or even before that? You keep on digging. And planting. Finally, the last day of planting season is over and you can go to sleep. You wake up. It’s the last day of planting season.

“Planting season” is a myth. We have heard that planting season is over since my first day, and according to the others, planting season was over way before that, but we still plant. Mainly because the nursery in Atiu creek has too many trees that they don’t want to throw away, and because it was very rainy the last few weeks. And as long as the little, newly planted trees won’t get too dry, it doesn’t really matter when you put them into the ground. To be fair, we did some other stuff this week as well, and I like planting best anyway. We planted and loaded trees on a trailer on Monday, fixed a fence on Tuesday, and planted the previously loaded plants on Wednesday. Since we finished work quire early, Bruce took us for a drive and showed us Journey’s End, the town at the end of the penisula we are on.

On Thursday, we potted little plants; they will get planted next winter. This Friday, we did not work a lot, we just washed some of the bags that the plants are in before they are planted and cleaned the Atiu Creek cottage we stayed in. The house was nice, but appearently, the volunteers before us did not really take cleaning seriousy. Spiderwebs and ants, everywhere. The cuterly drawers were really dirty, I cleaned those. Unfortunately, the power went out before we finisherd vaccuming. Wich also ment that we could not make lunch properly, and we were out of bread I could eat, so I ate cold tortilla wraps with hummus, yumm. Then we left the remote citrus tree-rich cottage drove back to the Auckland-office, waited there for some time and drove to the house we are staying in for the weekend.

Bye orange trees, see you in a week!

Seven people, one bathroom

At least it’s not ten, like last week. And we’re only here for the weekend. And even though the house does not have Wifi, or a phone, or a working dryer, or enough cupboards, or matresses you can sleep on without your hips aching, or a tv, or anywhere to put your stuff, or lemon trees, it has a gorgeous view.

For dinner, we found an awesome pizza place called “Hells”. My inner Goth rejoyces. Their pizzas have charming names like “Mordor”, “Lust”, “Envy”, “Pride”, "Limbo", "Mayhem" and “Wrath". And they have vegan cheese! This was the best pizza I had in a long time.

I ate the Damned, a pizza with mushrooms, spinach, cashews, pineapple (yes I like pineapple on pizza, live a bit!), jalapenos, and vegan mozzarella. It was delicious!

The house is in Auckland, but to actually get into town, you have to ride the bus and the train and it takes over an hour. That’s what we did on Saturday. A bit of shopping and browsing, we found many curious things. I also found some nice vegan cake in the Little Bird Unbakery. Maybe overpriced, but pretty good.

I did not think I would ever find actual bottled air in a store

What better way to start your day than a bit of sheep placenta?

I actually had Starbucks again, for the first time in forever. And I was shocked when I saw the prices. I know that food in New Zealand is ridiculously expensive, and that Starbucks is massively overpriced. But Starbucks in New Zealand? Not more expensive than most other coffees – and way cheeper than beer! My sugary pumpkin spice latte immediately sent me back to my early teen years, when going to Vienna and having a Starbucks Coffee after a bit of Shopping on the MaHü with my best friend was the most awesome thing to do. Ah, nostalgia...

Pumpkin spice latte!! #basicbitchwhitegirl

On Sunday, Xandra and I went for a walk to the beaches. While it had been warm and sunny on Saturday, Sunday morning was grey, cloudy, and rainy. If it had been as nice as the day before, I would have brought my swimsuit, but I don’t want to catch a cold and be sick for the rest of the week, especially since we will visit some hot pools!

Xandra is basically Ariel

The trees here fall over all the time, but just grow new roots and continue on with their life as if nothing happened. Very inspirational. That's the attitude we all need in our life - fall over, just make the best of it!