Good Friday and Easter

It's Easter Monday, and it's been such an interesting weekend, different than what we expected in several ways. Good Friday and Easter are big public holidays here with almost everything closed. No shopping at all on Easter Day. Before Easter, there were lots of newspaper articles about people's frustration with no shopping on Easter (no one is complaining about Good Friday because they get off work!). Easter Monday is also a public holiday, but the shops were open today. Tomorrow is another public holiday, the anniversary of the founding of our province, Otago. It just happened to coincide with Easter weekend this year.

On Good Friday, lots of churches have mid-day things, because people are off work. The churches in our neighborhood band together and have a big procession down the main street of our neighborhood with a big cross, and end up at the Botanic Gardens for a play about Good Friday. The first photo shows the cross, and the second two show the play. Most of the people carrying the cross and acting in the play are from Pacific Island Presbyterian Church. Dunedin is a pretty white city compared with the North Island of New Zealand, but we do have several Pacific Island churches.

After we watched the play, we walked around the Botanic Gardens, which are still beautiful. So that's another surprise about Easter here, that it's not really in the fall but is in late summer, particularly this year when Easter was early. But people tell me that most years Easter doesn't feel like it's in the fall. This is not what I had expected. In fact, last Easter I got to preach in a church in Seattle, and I preached about what the Easter imagery in the Southern Hemisphere might be like. I said that in the fall with decay going on all around, the message of Easter might be a vivid contrast to what was going on in nature. However, as you can see from the next few photos, there isn't a lot of decay going on! So having Easter in full summer is definitely different and a bit odd.

On Saturday we were invited out to the holiday home of some friends. Their place is almost at the end of the Otago Peninsula. In the next photo, taken from their back yard looking east, you can just barely see the outlet of the harbor to the ocean.

They invited us in part because I love clams and the tide was out, making it easy to collect clams. I'm using the verb "collect" rather than "dig" because the clams lie on the surface of the sand or just barely below the surface right where the water comes up to the sand. So you just pick them up. I forgot my boots, so I didn't collect any, but Dave and our friends got about 150 clams in about 10 minutes. We steamed them, shelled them, and made clam fritters, with the clams chopped up, adding milk, egg, rice flour, cooked onions, potatoes, and a little Thai chili sauce. They were SO good.

On Easter Sunday, we got to church early because we remembered what Easter was like in Seattle. That was our next surprise. The church was half as full as normal, which they said is typical for Easter Sunday. With Easter being at least a four-day weekend, and this year five, everyone goes away. The town was also deserted.

After church we drove up to Mount Cargill, a 2100-foot-tall peak, just south of town. It has a huge radio tower on top, so there's a road up to the top. We had never been to the top, but we were inspired by the fact that the churches in our neighborhood have a sunrise service up there every Easter. We didn't go because the forecast was for a cloudy morning, which but we woke up to brilliant sunshine, without a cloud in the skies. On the way up, we stopped and snapped the first photo.

The next photo shows about two thirds of the Otago Harbour with the Otago peninsula behind it, and the open ocean behind the Peninsula. Dunedin is just to the right, outside the photo.

The next three photos zoom in on the view, beginning from the left, so you can see the mouth of the harbor. Yesterday we were digging clams on the Peninsula, almost to the end. The second photo shows Port Chalmers, the big container port of the harbor.

Who's that handsome guy dressed in his Easter finery posed in front of a view of Dunedin?

Here's the view of Dunedin without the handsome guy. We live in the neighborhood in the center of the photo, about ten blocks from the Botanic Garden, which is the belt of green between that neighborhood and the city. The Garden has a lot of woods in addition to the cultivated garden part I keep photographing. The big white buildings just past the Botanic Garden are the university, with the downtown just past the university and a few blocks to the right of it. The body of water that looks like a lake is the end of the harbor.

In the afternoon on Easter Day, Dave went back to the Botanic Garden to paint for a while. Here's the view he painted. The statue is of Peter Pan with Tinkerbell on his shoulder.

Another fishing trip

Last week Dave took off for three days of fishing on the Mataura River. With fall coming, fishing season is almost over. He saw lots of other people fishing on the Mataura, which is supposed to be one of the best fly fishing rivers in the world. Dave didn't catch anything. There was a mini heat wave going on while he was there, with temperatures around 80, which is pretty warm for here, and I wondered if the hot weather kept the fish half asleep. The Mataura runs through the town of Gore, which is two hours south of Dunedin (and which is close to the town of Clinton, with the "presidential highway" running between them). Dave fished both below and above Gore on the Mataura. The first three photos show the river in different places, and the last three photos show some of the scenery he saw while driving to different spots to fish.

The end of summer

The US has gone on Daylight Savings Time, and we're about to go off of it. The upside down seasons are still one of the strangest aspects of living in the Southern Hemisphere. It's mid-March, and the signs of the end of summer are everywhere here. The nights are cooler, the days are shorter, and some trees are just beginning to get tinges of yellow. I keep thinking the roses will stop blooming so profusely, but they are still beautiful. The first photo shows the roses in front of the Catholic church a couple blocks from our house, and the second photo shows some roses in front of the train station.

I took the next photo in a downtown mall, and the flowers look like the kinds of flowers I see in flower shops in Seattle during the fall.

Dave's been trekking around town taking photos of things he might want to paint. He really likes First Presbyterian Church, a big, old downtown church with a pretty amazing spire. Three Presbyterian congregations meet in the building, an aging mostly white congregation, a Cook Island congregation, and a Samoan congregation. That gives you a bit of the flavor of the cultural diversity here.

Dave also spent a day at the harbor (or harbour) taking pictures. He's got a fixation with boats in dry dock, as you'll see in the third and fourth photos. He keeps taking pictures of them, thinking he's going to paint them, and I keep wondering why.

One of the main museums in town has a butterfly exhibit going on right now. The last butterfly exhibit I walked through was at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle a few years ago. Somehow it was poignant to have a butterfly exhibit here, too. Perhaps it was because there are so many things in New Zealand that are different than life in Seattle, and this was one thing that was similar.