Our New Zealand Holiday!

Well, we're now back in HK after an eventful flight where the hideous Mainland Chinese girl (you could tell she was a Mainlander by her Louis Vuitton carry-on luggage; no serious HKer still has LV carry-ons!) next to me coughed, maskless and without even an attempt at covering her mouth, for the entire 13 hours and it only took half an hour before I was longing to punch her right in the nose and four hours before I was coughing too, and seven hours before I was out-coughing her in the most spectacular fashion that undoubtedly made her long to punch me in the nose.

And it hasn't gone away. Yup, after days of resisting all the household bugs and obnoxiously bragging about it, I've now got a cold.

Bugs!  That's the main story of our latest Kiwi adventure!  As you know, Keith came down with his usual end-of-school-year vicious flu 10 days before we left and kept saying "I don't want to get dad sick.  If this doesn't go away, we'll have to cancel our visit."  but then woke up on the morning of our flight feeling fabulous ...

... but only three hours into the flight he began coughing again and it just got worse and worse, deeper and deeper in his chest, the longer we were in the air, and by the time we reached Auckland it sounded to me like a death's door rattle. 

And that's how he met his dad.  Lots of big hearty hugs, instigated by John who, when Keith tried to hold him off, said "Don't worry. I've got a great immune system. I haven't been sick in years."

Famous last words!

A really lovely first day, up and about and doing stuff, and a lovely second day when Janice arrived from Sydney and the festivities really started.  Third day, Christmas, with two wonderful meals (thank you Lois and Helen.) and really lovely times ...

... but then came the fourth day! John woke with a tickle in his throat, which developed, along with a fierce headache, into brutal bouts of prolonged coughing and within only hours he's staggering and throwing up and sick as sick as sick!

Poor Keith was mortified.  "I didn't want this to happen.  This is a nightmare." he kept whispering to me.  And when the deep rumbling coughing began he took his dad to the local emergency centre - the only medical place open - and it turned out his dad just had a bad cold while Keith had a full-blown case of bronchitis.  "See, I said I was sick!" he told me gleefully.

And that night!  What a nightmare! The Death's Door Symphony from THREE rooms - yes, Janice started coughing as well - echoing for hours through the hallway.  It was so bad, I ended up sleeping on the sofa in the lounge room!

Fifth day and it's a very sick household.  No one gets out of bed. 

And then it's two whole days of me resisting the urge to play Florence Nightingale as everyone sleeps away our holiday! I'm not usually that mean, but my philosophy is that the less sympathy one gets when one's sick, the less often one gets sick!  It's a growing-up-in-a-medical-household thing!

But this isn't a medical household so everyone is well stocked with antibiotics and serious cough mixtures and lozenges and panadol. But not me!  I buy myself a big jar of marinated garlic and munch my way through it, feeling as right as rain and endlessly and obnoxiously telling everyone at every opportunity that taking drugs isn't the right way to go about these things.  "You just make yourself worse in the long-run."  I tell them!

How on earth did they resist punching me right in the nose?

So I sat there for those endless days, reading my way through "The Giant Detective Story Omnibus" and Tim Severin's "In Search of Robinson Crusoe" and then an old stash of 1980s gossip magazines - and being surprised at how right they were about everything! - munching garlic and dark chocolate - the world's best cure-all - and every now and then, when the muscles felt like they were atrophying, I'd set off on a quest to find the family home used in the wonderfully wicked Kiwi TV series "Outrageous Fortune", Keith's favourite show on HK TV, which I knew was somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood.

And did I find it?  That's the story for another post I think! 

However, I should tell you that those Sick Household Days weren't too bad - just hovering around the "Grrrr!" level of annoying - because the weather was dark and cruel, but when the eighth day of our holiday started out being all balmy, blue and beautiful, my mood moved up the scale to "Kill!  Kill! Kill!" and I was determined to do something.

So I decided to leave the household to their misery and make it my mission to go into Downtown Auckland on the off-chance of hearing Jay Lim, the guitar virtuoso better known as Funtwo, busking somewhere in Queens Street, so checked out the bus timetable and ... can you believe it? ... it actually said the bus would arrive anytime between quarter-to and half-past each hour.

So I trudged up the hill with seven minutes to spare just in time to see the bus pull out of the stop.  Yup, it arrived slap in the middle of the only 15 minutes of each day that you weren't meant to expect it!  Wasn't prepared to wait for up to two hours for the next one, so I stomped home again, furiously raging that New Zealand's largest city had such a ridiculously incompetent mass transport system, and wondering just how incompetent various successive governments had to be to turn, in just 15 years, the world's 7th richest economy with a first rate infrastructure into some sad little Third World banana republic backwater!

So, by the time I got back, I was so angry I didn't trust myself to say anything so I grabbed Keith by the front of his pajamas and said "Read my mind!!!"

"Oh oh!" said Keith, obviously knowing exactly what I was thinking and being afraid ... very afraid ... so he kindly trundled off to have a shower so we could finally do something interesting with the only-three-days we had left of this holiday!

However, those are all stories for other posts!

And this story? Let's just say it's yet again, just like last year, another Kiwi adventure that consists entirely of me just sitting around the house and smarting at being in such a lovely country ... and just sitting around the house!