6 posts from this month
We left Wellington, the capital, and took a ferry to reach the South Island. Way more rugged, more dramatic, even less crowded. Saw something wild: cattle in a truck, on a boat. The Marlborough Sounds were our first stop — fjords stretching through green hills. The light hit differently here. Everything felt bigger, emptier, untouched.
People go to New Zealand for the space and the landscapes — supposedly some of the best on Earth. What hits you first is how empty it is. 4.5 million people spread across land half the size of France. More sheep than humans by far. Auckland felt almost too urban after that. The North Island gave us volcanic weirdness, thermal pools, and green rolling hills that stretched forever.
Or: how to transform a complete disaster of a day into something luminous. Stood at Lake Matheson in New Zealand, and this quote hit different: "We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence. We should find perfection in imperfection." Sometimes the gray days teach you more than the sunny ones.
The Wabash Institute is where serious intellectuals study how kids learn language. Very serious people surrounded by toddlers who mostly just babble nonsense. Then someone dies. Suddenly it's a murder mystery wrapped in linguistic analysis. Carkeet manages to be funny and sharp at the same time — not an easy trick. I was hooked from page one.
"The world lagging behind people's expectations — it couldn't go on like that." Imre lives in a shack cobbled together from junk, right in the middle of the Budapest train tracks. Communist-era Hungary. Gray skies, grim prospects. Life's not exactly cheerful between the depot and the broken promises of the system. Zeniter writes bleak beautifully — which sounds contradictory but somehow isn't.
Before heading to New Zealand, I debated bringing an e-reader. Ultimately said no. Then Cuné convinced me otherwise and lent me hers, fully loaded with books. Turns out traveling with digital books instead of lugging around paperbacks? Game changer. Still not totally sold on e-readers for everyday life, but for long trips? Yeah, I get it now.