liquor? but I hardly even know 'er.

I'm revising the beginning of this entry. I was looking for a good way up the nearest mountain without getting caught hopping a fence, and on the way up the road I saw this. Store. I didn't know what to say. I guess this is one of those "cultural differences" moments.

Staying at a hostel in Queenstown, adventure capital of the world. You can do anything here. You can bungy jump from any height, including 143 metres. You can take a jetboat up a river and feel like you're going to hit a cliff, you can take a water sledge off a waterfall, a boogie board down a class IV rapid, hangglide, parasail, cave, climb, heli bike, even fly a rocket on the end of a rope, with you on it. No shit.

Well I'm not doing any of these things (yet) because I am looking for work here, figure I should stay awhile so that if I get an answer I'm still on this side of the country.

Staying at a hostel run by a nice Welsh guy named Taf, or Taff. Taf loves to tell stories, and he's really good at it. Taf knows all the ins and outs of getting a job in Queenstown and has been pretty helpful with his strategies so far. He's worked at the hostel awhile, and it's no accident. See in NZ, just like everywhere else in this godforsaken queen-plagued commonwealth, the company has to prove that no locals can do the job before you, the foreigner, are allowed to do it. Funny thing is, Taf is the company. So it's up to him to put the ads in the paper advertising his job for others. His Welsh delivery was priceless. If you don't know what a Welsh accent sounds like, it's basically british, but really easy to understand. In so being it loses nothing of the wit, timing, and dry delivery of classic British comedy. "Every month or so we'd get these CVs in for people wanting the job and it would just be like 'fuck off'" But it was the best 'fuck off' ever. Taf screwed his face up quizzically, and as he made the motion of frisbeeing the CV into the rubbish bin he formed the words "fuck off" as a question, his voice going up at the end. He had me and another British guy in stitches.

"Pretty soon the ads got so specific that if you weren't a five foot four Welsh guy with blue eyes and curly hair there was no fuckin way you were coming in for an interview. We started running the ads on thursdays cause no one reads the paper on thursdays, and it's cheaper then. The lady at the paper was like

'Thursday, you sure? No one reads the paper on a Thursday.'

'Yeah, I know.'

'Right - so do you want a border around that?'

'Fuck no!'"

He also explained that you can't get away with anything in Queenstown, because everybody talks, and the cops are strict. There is a process called a diversion, whereby you can get out of jail free, if it's your first time. If it's your second infraction of any kind, then you are screwed, buster. Taf has a British buddy that is a bit of a lout. "He's done a bit of boxin' in the past and, well, he's the nicest bloke you ever met and fun to go out and have a pint with as long as the night goes perfectly. If anything goes wrong though. . ." Taf just shakes his head. Well The guy had gotten in trouble for fighting or something at some point and has used his diversion. . .

So one day he was in the grocery store, and he disobeyed the "No Grazing" sign, which Taf thought was "the rudest fuckin sign ever since it compares people to cattle." The guy ate 3 grapes. He ate 3 grapes and got busted for it. The police and store managers estimated that he'd eaten half a kilo of grapes. They never said how they arrived at this estimate, but they stuck by it. Even though the guy was like "Are you kidding? Why would I eat half a kilo of grapes? You can look at the stem and count how many are missing, I ate 3!" They wouldn't have it. He went to jail. jail. Jail for eating three grapes.

Don't fuck up in Queenstown.