Tea cozies

My New Zealand bleg drew some interesting responses. Reader/photographer Danielle King, who moved from Toronto to Auckland half a year ago, makes a bunch of recommendations, including:

Mt Eden. It's possibly the best view in the city. (And, yes, I've been up the Sky Tower). Great place to just relax and take in the views on a nice day. Weekdays are better since it can get busy with tourists on nice weekends.

The French Cafe. The best food I've ever eaten in my entire life. It's a little pricey but worth the splurge. Though I didn't try it, the degustation menu has been raved about by just about everyone I know.

You must have a flat white while you're here. If you don't like coffee, have a hot chocolate. They take their hot beverages seriously here and it shows. Everything's yummy.

Tyler Cowen himself says:

Eat fusion cuisine in Auckland and Wellington, Malaysian and Burmese food, fish and chips (of course), lamb, forget the beef and chicken 100 percent. Don't order them once.

I very much like Napier. Do "quaint" things, like shopping for tea cozies. Try to rent a cabin for a day or two away from a city. Drink their wacky fruit juices. Go for walks. Don't expect too much culture or good art to look at. The Pacific materials in the Auckland museum are superb, however.

Never am I un-down for fusion food. I hereby swear to avoid the beef and chicken. (One does not — does not — ignore this man's culinary recommendations.) I always plan to walk plenty, wherever I am, but I'll do even more in NZ, especially since I'll need to do quite a lot of it to get mobile field recordings. Despite the fact that I'm not sure what they are and will now have to visit Wikipedia to find out, I'll keep my eyes open for the country's finer, cheaper tea cozies.

From Ben Casnocha comes an argument that, considering how much more he's traveled than I have, merits consideration:

I've never gotten the "I don't want to see what tourists go to" thing. "Must-see" attractions are must-see for a reason. They are usually extraordinary. I also think that it's very hard to "experience life as a local would" when you are only passing by. Popular tourist destinations tend to be popular because they combine some element of localness with added elements of accessibility and entertainment. Most San Franciscans don't cross the Golden Gate Bridge very often. Most live at home and go to work in SF and then return to their home. This doesn't mean you shouldn't go to the GG Bridge.

Indeed, it's worth thinking about why, exactly, popular tourist destinations become popular tourist destinations in the first place. But at the same time, none of the popular tourist destinations I've visited thus far have done anything at all for me. The Golden Gate Bridge is, alas, a particularly unfortunate example: despite having seen it a bunch of times, I'm still not quite sure why it fires up everyone else's blood. This may all be a simple case of varying mileage, though. I wouldn't recommend that anyone else avoid tourist attractions, but they don't amount to much more than a daylight drain for me. (And I should add that I don't exactly want to "experience life as a local would"; I just want to exist in places where locals are experiencing their lives. If I wanted to live just like the locals, after all, I'd have to get a... job. Shudder.)

I recall an old post from forcemajeure — a fellow who has traveled not merely much more than I have but helluva much more than I have — which echoes astutely my own ideas about how to approach travel:

I love the experience of going someplace foreign and just experiencing daily life there. Some people go to see the sights, to visit the things you Simply Must See, but that's not me. I prefer integrating myself into the daily life of a place as much as I can, just absorbing the pace of life, the details. Crowding around some monument with a bunch of tourists so you can be photographed in front of it, proving you were there, holds no appeal for me. As a matter of principle, I almost always refuse to carry a camera when visiting a place. If you want to know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, buy a damn book. It looks just like that; take my word for it.

The travel memories I really treasure are those of ordinary moments. Girls in a pizza joint in Jerusalem trying out their English on me. Sitting in a café in Milan, watching pedestrians cheat death in an uncontrolled intersection. Helping an old lady I'd never met before carry her groceries into her fourth floor walkup in Prague. Strangers inviting my family to dinner in Buenos Aires. There's the occasional crisis, like when I was pickpocketed in Budapest, but those, too, become part of the experience you're looking for, if you let them.

And it also looks as if I must've subconsciously swiped a Comedically Proper-Nouned Phrase of his. Neat.

I'd be lying if I neglected to add that said I'm also somewhat influenced by the people I occasionally meet who return from what should be life-changing trips with little more to show for it than 700 JPEGs of themselves standing in front of various icons. (Rarely do I befriend these people.) It's the same reason I pare down my personal library: fear of artifact-collection drawing bandwidth from experience-absorption.