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Meeting new people in a foreign country can sometimes be a difficult task. Often times there are language or cultural barriers to such an introduction or simply not knowing the best places to go to do so. In Queenstown, however, this is only an issue if you want it to be. The first friends that one usually makes upon their arrival to this little oasis here are people that are staying at their same hostel. The hostel provides for a great way to meet other like minded people because you are all essentially doing the same thing, looking for a cheaper place to stay. Some stay in hostels long term because the rooms are relatively cheap and although there is absolutely no privacy in a hostel, there is also no lack of someone to talk to. More importantly for most longtermers, the hostel requires no bond, aka deposit, to move in. Shorttermers stay for more varied reasons, from the casual backpacker just passing through town to the soon to be local staying until a house becomes available. Just walking into the common area of the hostel is usually enough to find you someone to do something with for at least the day if not a long tern traveling buddy. Almost all of my friends here in Queenstown I met either at Deco, the hostel that I stayed at back in the spring (or fall depending on your hemisphere), or through someone that I met at Deco.
Even outside of the hostel, meeting people in Queenstown is a non-issue. I went out for breakfast this morning with a Deco friend and two others met through a Deco friend. We sat there enjoying our eggs and bacon and bemoaning the fact that it was Australia Day and that the shouting and horn honking were likely going to continue unabashedly though out the day. Several of the local shops and restaurants had even gone so far as to hang up yellow and green (did you know that those were Australia’s colors? Weird, huh? I thought that the flag was red, white and blue.) balloons and make a special Australian menu. My mistake was to be wearing a yellow t-shirt, which meant that every time an Aussie passed me there was either shouting or horn honking. This is why it is so important to invest in Advil (aka ibuprofen). After about my fourth cup of coffee some girl came and sat down at the patio table next to ours and that is all it took. She was having breakfast on her own so we bought her a drink and she joined us for the rest of the afternoon.
The decision was made to go lugeing after breakfast. Now in order to go lugeing you have to take a 10 minute gondola ride up one of the hills, put on a glorified bike helmet and ride another chair lift even farther up the hill. Once you have arrived at well over 700 meters above Queenstown, you are instructed to sit down on what looks like a sled with wheels and a handle bar. If you let go of the handle bar, it slams on the brakes and catapults you off the luge and onto the concrete track where you will immediately be run over by a seven year old in his own luge. Pulling back on the handlebars slows the luge down enough that you can go around the excessively sharp curves without dieing. Once you get the hang of it, you can lean your body all the way to one side and take the curves at full speed on only two of the four wheels. At that point, however, you have luged one too many times and should really find another way to spend your time in Queenstown. Its actually really fun but not having planned to go lugeing this morning, I woke up and put on a cute little summery knee length skirt, fabulous for walking around and sitting by the beach not quite so fabulous for speeding down a hill on a glorified trashcan lid. Needless to say at one point there was a serious wardrobe malfunction that would have made even Janet Jackson embarrassed. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t a touristy area, which means that there are cameras all along the course that take souvenir photos of your lugeing adventure. But don’t fret, after slamming on the brakes and almost causing a five luge pile up on the advanced track, I got the skirt back under control before rounding the next curve to where the grandparents wait to watch the kids come down the track. I wonder how the Duggars would have handled something like this?