new zealand memo - vol. 3 - street booze and music

When you travel in a group of at least 10, plus extras, the only way to roll is in a giant blue van. That goes double when a number of your crew are also carrying musical instruments. Before coming to New Zealand, Jenine had joined a bike circus for the summer and fall, in which she had traveled through Mongolia, down China, and into Southeast Asia. In China, she picked up a bazoonie (some sort of large brass instrument), and she came to Auckland with this dented, metal monstrosity and a fiendish drive for street performance. She instilled this love of busking in several folks there, which was why we had bazoonies, guitars, harmonicas, tambourines and bucket drums booming, buzzing humming, clapping and strumming as we cruised downtown in Keiran's van. I decided driving around with a live band in your car is the only way to roll.

Our destination was the opening night of the Auckland Festival, in a downtown park, where we had heard there would be a pyrotechnics show. I had spent the previous days in the depths of an infatuation with readily available and comparably (to Korea at least) cheap New Zealand wines, so I came armed with a nice Pinot Noir and Merlot/Cab blend, which seem to be two staples of NZ wines. The event was a huge gathering in an amphitheater shaped grassy bowl, mostly a family event. The word from the stage was that there were 60,000 people there. As darkness was falling, there was terribly cheesy music coming from the main stage, our buskers went out to ease those 60,000 people of their burdensome pocket change, and we were doing our best to keep our doping unnoticed by the families surrounding us. I was pleasantly ripped when the fire show started. We had all expected the show to be a fireworks show, but it was basically just an extravaganza of leaping flames and fireballs. Unlike I anything I had ever seen. The whole demonstration was set to the same terrible live band, and my favorite part was when they chilled it down, and small flames were shooting up to a solo smooth jazz sax improv solo.

After the show, 60,000 people were let loose on the streets of Auckland, with the predictable consequence that the sidewalks were packed, and your only hope was to swim with the flow of bodies, as if you were caught in a human avalanche. Luckily, Jenine was tooting away on her bazoonie the whole time, so we could all hear and rally around her when we got separated or had to dip into the bushes to water them. At one point, the crowd bottlenecked onto a bridge, and the people took over the road, blocking both lanes of traffic. The crowds persisted for what seemed like unnecessary distances.

Somehow, we reached K Road, a popular bar/porn store area just on the edge of downtown. Our plan was to get a drink at the Wine Cellar, but pretty soon an impromptu busk had self-organized itself at the intersection of the sidewalk and a covered pedestrian shopping mall. Jenine put out her sign from the circus that reads "We come from different countries. We travel the world by bicycle. Any money or food you can give us would be greatly appreciated...". Most of this was only marginally true; luckily no one pushed us on how we had gotten to NZ on our bikes. Our "busk" was more like a get together of drunken Appalachian hillbilly children than any sort of organized performance, but people stopped to watch and seemed to enjoy it anyway. Looking back, I'm slightly surprised we didn't encounter any sort of legal problems, considering we were openly drinking, and somehow my 3/4 full bottle of pinot ended up smashed on the concrete, leaving what looked like a pool of blood. Jenine's bazoonie boomed low, Jake's guitar was missing both the A and B strings, and several of us had only our clapping hands and stomping feet as instruments. Nonetheless, we had a small crowd of fans, and our hat soon filled with roughly $35, a bottle of wine, several bags of salty snack foods, and a full cooked chicken. The act may have been saved by Jenine's magic tricks.

After a good run of it, after the guitar was totally banged out of tune, and the chicken had been picked to the bones (mostly by me), we slipped into the bar right next to where we had caused the scene in order to count our loot. After splitting up the pot, we moved slowly along K Road in the direction of home, stopping at the place with the "strongest coffee in Auckland" (their espresso machine looked like something out of a steel mill), a Cuban dance club, and a gay karaoke bar. On the walk home, our guitar was out of commission, so we had to settle for singing an a capella rendition of the entire Graceland album.