Ciao Queenstown!

It's official - I'm no longer a bartender. After my final shift last night, I took a few moments. First, to give thanks for not running into any trouble with the cops (although one did hang out outside for a disturbing amount of time). And second, to think about how I've made a living over the past 5 months... I suppose that I'll miss some things, like meeting some interesting people ever day, but there are certainly things I won't miss, like meeting even more people who don't view you as a person, merely a hurdle to be surpassed in order to obtain more alcohol. I guess that before working behind a bar, I didn't fully understand how poorly people in the hospitality industry are treated. And when alcohol is involved, it can get ugly. But that's all I'll bother to say about that...

From here, I'm going to the North Island for 12 days. I was there for about 6 weeks when I first came to New Zealand but stayed in Auckland for the majority of the time. This time I'll be traveling around, visiting cities such as Raglan, Rotorua, Taupo and Wellington.

From there it's off to Australia! Yes, that right. New Zealand is actually DIFFERENT from Australia. It's not part of Australia, it's not owned by Australia...it's a wholly separate country. I thought that this was general knowledge, but apparently not... :-p Anyways, I'm starting in Sydney and will spend a few weeks making my way up the East coast to Cairns. In Cairns I'll take a PADI dive course and get my open water certification, diving the Great Barrier Reef. Figured that it would be a big shame to go there and NOT do it...so I really had no choice. Right? Right.

Leaving in 12 hours! Time to pack!

I know a Patrick, and he's no saint

St. Patrick's day is a bar owner's dream. People start drinking early in the day, and don't really stop...until they really can't drink anymore. It was a bigger night for us that New Year's. I wasn't scheduled to work, so was out with a few friends. I had tried to go to one of the two "Irish" pubs in town for an obligatory pint of Guinness but they were all packed so full that I couldn't even get up to the bar to order a drink. So I stopped by Bardeaux and found that it too was real busy... and there wasn't anybody on the door. I suppose that in retrospect this makes sense - since our new doorman is Irish - but it seems silly that we hadn't had the foresight to get a substitute for the night.

I had only had a few drinks and didn't want the bar to get itself into trouble so I threw on the security jacket and stood on the door for a couple hours. Yep, I've gotten pretty huge and intimidating since I left the States (not really... working security at Bardeaux is more about people skills than butt-kicking skills - although those help too). The biggest part of being a successful doorman is identifying problematic people, before they have a chance to cause trouble. So when walking around collecting glasses, I'd often talk to groups of people to gauge their levels of intoxication.

I was talking to a group of Australians who were friendly and having a good time. We had been talking for about 5 minutes when one of them asked "So are you from the North land or from the Republic itself?" The only time I've ever heard of a "North" region, as differentiated from a republic, is Ireland. Confused, I told them that I come from the US, not Ireland. But they insisted that I sounded Irish... maybe my thick kiwi accent, when combined with my old American accent, results in an Irish accent....?

I guess everybody really IS Irish on St. Patrick's day.

California Child

It's raining :( It was sunny for a whole few week stretch there, but yesterday it turned sour (I'm such a weather pansy). And while it often rains at night, it almost always clears up by the time I head home from work. But today's storm had better legs, and is still drenching the town. I was even considering using my day off tomorrow to go bungy jumping, but I guess that'll have to wait.

Rainy days at a bar are wierd. It's either real quiet because so few people go out when it's raining. Or it's real busy because nobody who enters the bar wants to leave and venture back out into the pouring rain. We had one of the busy nights.

We got some new wines in today for our cellar collection. The irony of our cellar collection is that I wouldn't ever recommend that anybody order anything from it. As I understand it, wines are supposed to be aged in the dark, at a moderate temperature, and stored on their side. Our "cellar" collection is about 6 feet from a roaring fire and all the bottles are stored standing up...pretty much violating all three general rules of storage. I can understand having the really expensive wines as a signaling mechanism to indicate the quality and type of bar, but wouldn't it just be easier to drink the wine and then display the empty bottle?

PS Threadless tees, one of my favorite t-shirt companies, is having a sale where most of their shirts are $10 until March 12th. Check it out here: http://www.threadless.com/

PPS Coming back to the states on May 10th... back in Marin on May 14th!