In the swim

Today we discovered the wonders of the Porirua Aquatics Centre which is located (perhaps not so surprisingly) in Porirua, a suburban enclave of Wellington about 20 minutes away from Paekakariki.
We began our trip to Porirua in a quest for Michael’s new glasses. His broke somehow as he was picking up Perry on Monday, and he’s been squinting ever since (not his best look). So after French toast, we headed to Porirua, which we had been wanting to explore. First stop, we found ourselves in a real live shopping mall. This one could happily have been in Tampa F:, tropical plants inside, huge food court, the Body Shop advertising a massive sale on body butter, jewelry stores with “layby now for Valentine’s Day” signs in the window. There were two glasses stores.
What were the differences between buying glasses in the Porirua mall and Pentagon City? Pentagon city has three glasses stores, and each of the stores has maybe 20% more glasses than the stores here (but all of the stores have enough selection to make me dizzy). And the other difference is that I’d never have let Naomi go on her own to the store next to us which was having a sale on children’s clothing. Never.
The food court, like all the food courts I’ve seen so far here, had a couple of meat-pie-and-muffin kinds of places and a whole lot of Eastern-facing restaurants—many kinds of Asian and Indian. We ordered a dhal dish that was so good it made me moan in ways that embarrassed the children—this from the food court in a MALL. I’ll trade the extra glasses store for that any day.
Then to buy a couple of more things on the endless list of new household items. Whenever we contact the international moving company currently in charge of our stuff, we get depressed and have to buy something to brighten up the house and let us know that actually we live here even though virtually nothing we lay eyes on is ours. Last time it was a bookshelf we bought when we heard our things wouldn’t be coming until something like February 20. This time we bought new covers for the bed (a duvet cover for Naomi and a blanket for us) because the stuff won’t arrive until the first or second week in MARCH. You can’t imagine how tired I am of the clothes I brought (less than half of which are suitable for the summer season as it’s understood in the NZ context).
But the treat of the day was the Porirua Aquatics Centre. We had been introduced to this magical place on Wednesday, when Marianne took us there. But the magic was a little thin Wednesday, as the huge waterslide was closed and then someone threw up in the pool and they closed it for several hours. Today, we thought we’d try it without the vomit.
It’s a big indoor pool complex, with a big lap pool, a huge pool to delight children—with things that squirt water, a river that snakes around with real current, and the occasional bout of big waves in the wavemaker. The water in the main pool never gets over Naomi’s head, and is rarely over Aidan’s, and it’s warm and designed to be a child’s paradise. Then there are three hot tubs (of varying heat and with varying age differentials—from “all welcome” to “adults only”). The true joy of it is a huge waterslide (“hydroslide”) which weaves in an enclosed tube outside the building, falling from the roof, winding down the outside of the building, and hurling you back inside into a shallow pool. It’s long and twisty and oodles of fun for kids and adults. We must have gone down it—in different combinations—50 times today. And then, when we were finally tired and cold and our skin and eyes were smarting from the chlorine, Michael and I sent the kids to do the waterslide on their own (totally safe, and with lifeguards every 10 feet or so) and we slipped into the sauna.
At the pool, the differences from the US were startling. Each of the water effects was familiar to us, and the place reminded each of us of someplace we’d been. But those someplaces were often enclaves of the very rich (the Alaska cruise, the posh hotel where I once attended a conference in Phoenix, the expensive water parks outside DC). This posh and well-designed place is for the masses. It cost us $15 to swim for the day with our family. The place was filled with all kinds of people—giggling, bikini-clad girls climbing up the water slide, trying to look cool with the little kids rushing around them; huge Māori men wearing swim belts and water jogging in the lap pool, the distinctive blue-black tattoos circling massive forearms; families with three generations eating crisps and lollies in the café area; teenage mothers holding young children in the not-so-hot, toddler friendly hot tub. The majority of folks in the pool looked Pacific-island, but there were also folks of Asian, European, Indian descent. And all of us, stripped down to nearly nothing, hurling down the hydroslide or bubbling in the hot tub.
Somehow it all came home to me in the sauna at the end. We had been feeling particularly cheerful because Gabriel, Marianne’s son, came and said hello to us, which made us feel like we weren’t so all alone in a far away place. And we had had a conversation with Gabriel’s father, Jorge, who greeted us enthusiastically (nothing personal—he’s enthusiastic with everyone—but it still felt fantastic). And then Michael and I sat in the sauna, enveloped by the fantastic wooden smell, the heat that hurts your nose, and surrounded by huge Pacific men and small, wrinkled, old Pacific women (and one white hippy with long grey dreadlocks). We have smelled that lovely hot sauna smell before, but it’s always been in places of relative wealth, and I’ve always felt just a little guilty for the privilege I have in the face of so much poverty throughout the world. Here, I had the sense of the sauna as not the domain of the rich Anglo, but as an ancient practice that stretches around the world. There was something more shared and egalitarian about this lovely sauna than about others I’ve used before.
And that was true of the whole place, ultimately. It was wonderfully mixed, with the dramatic differences in body type. (In the US, we have large color differences as we span from quite light beige to quite dark brown, but here there is less color variation and far more ethnic variation in body size and type.) It was filled with families being playful and tender together. It spanned from tiny new babies in swimdiapers to ancient women whose skin hung loosely from their frames. It was a lovely chance to do a fun thing that felt utterly non-touristy, to feel like we really lived in this place, played in this space, shared this space with others. And for a little while, it felt like we might come to belong here; after all, we’re all relatively-recent transplants to New Zealand, and everyone loves the hydroslide.