Not Your Mama’s Christmas Eve

I’m currently sitting on my balcony in Queenstown with a view of the Skyline Gondola and about 10 Christmas morning hang gliders trying to figure out where to even begin. Probably due to my hangover. Let me focus. Ok. In the morning we went to Puzzling World, which is basically a grown up version of the McDonalds play place. So Puzzleword has a bunch of rooms with crazy optical illusions and puzzles. In one room you feel like the room is slanted at a crazy incline and can barely walk across it, but when you roll a ball, up is down and down is up.

It’s hard to explain and that probably didn’t quite do it. There is also a giant outdoor human maze. We decided to tackle the Maze with our bus husbands. We figured between two doctors, a lawyer and an accountant (low man on the totem pole) how long could it possibly take? A long fucking time. I can’t believe they put mice through that shit.

I thought Stina was going to break down a wall to get us out. I tried to cheat like 12 times.

Then we were off to Queenstown! The adventure capital of the world. AKA, Rory’s paradise. We passed some beautiful lakes and crystal blue rivers on the way. Fairly standard for South Island. We also passed the 45th parallel, if that is cool to anyone. Doubtful. And then we arrived at AJ Hackett on the outskirts of the city for someone on our bus to jump off a bridge. We were at the famous “K Bridge”, which is the site of the world’s first commercial bungy (AJ Hackett and Co spells it this way, I do actually know how to spell bungee, just not much else).

We didn’t jump, as we were doing the canyon swing in about an hour, but suffice to say we signed up for a jump as soon as we got to our hostel. So pics in a few days! Then we were off to our Canyon Swing! A canyon swing is basically a bungee jump on crack. You are driven up into a canyon and then thrown off a ledge suspended in the canyon and swing through said canyon. Stina and I did a backwards tandem jump together first, to warm up. Then we each did a second swing where you hang upside down and the jumpmaster drops you…when you least expect it. Fucking amazing. Apparently if you jump topless its free. I told the guy 29 year olds can’t do shit like that, and frankly, no one wants to see 29 year old boobies flopping around in a canyon anyway. He asked if I was married. I said no. And he said “oh, then you are fucked. It’s ok for a guy to be old and unmarried, but not a girl”. I told him I was aware and why did he think I was throwing myself off a cliff? Ass hole. Later that night I became 25 again, so no worries.

After our canyon swings we picked up our bags and had to find our hostel. We stopped on the street and asked a girl working in a fish and chips stall where Church Street was. She said she didn’t know and would google it for us. It was the next street over. Literally, the cross street of her place of fucking employment. Stina could not handle the stupidity. I thought she was going to perform an impromptu sterilization right there at the stall. So I must repeat my question from the other day’s post: how the hell do these morons get themselves to work? I wanted to give her a card for my “how to not be loser” seminar, but I haven’t gotten around to printing them up. Bad for business, I know. I’ve been a little busy. We arrive at our hostel to find a lovely private room that basically looks like a hotel room. A little Christmas present I booked for Stina a few months ago. She looked like she was going to wet herself. We then bought a shit load of booze, as they don’t sell any on Christmas day here, and everyone knows that provisioning is always the key to a good holiday. $20 says half our bus will have no booze and be crying about it on Christmas day. The half that are losers.

And then it was FERGBERGER time. If you have not heard of a Fergberger, google it. It’s basically Queenstown’s In-n-out. Their claim to burger fame. The end-all, be-all of food in this fair little city. So we met up with some of our bus mates, queued for about 20 minutes, and settle into burger bliss by the lake. We fully expected to be disappointed, especially after the sad excuse for Mexican food we had the other night. Oh, that reminds me, we have two Mexican girls on the bus, and everyone just calls them “the Mexicans”. When they are late, our bus driver goes “Where are those damn Mexicans?”. She is totally serious. I laugh my ass off every time. There are two other girls who are not Mexican but are really tan and no one can tell the four apart, so we just refer to all of them them as “The Mexicans”. But I digress. Fergberger was the shit. They are literally as big as your head. They do breakfast burgers as well, so naturally that is now on the itinerary. Later at the bar I was so full I had to have one of our bus husbands rub my belly.

It sounds weird…but I’ve had him do it before, after all-you-can-eat pizza night. To a 29 year old overeater, a belly rub is better than foreplay. I can’t possibly be alone is this, can I?

And then it was bar crawl time. Also known as “7pm” here in NZ. And you people wonder why I pass out at midnight every night. 5 hours of drinking is like a marathon for this old bitch. We started at Loco’s where we did our secret santa gift exchange. Thank god one of the A-team people got me, and I was rewarded with rings that you can blow bubbles from ($5 max on the gift – I’m not sure how you can do better than bubble rings for $5, honestly. She outdid herself). These would come in handy later in the night…I’ll get there. Stina got this one girl, Sofie (who we like) a mini nerf gun that you can shoot people with. Basically, the best present ever. Sofie did not agree and was very disappointed. When we were shopping we must have forgotten that Sofie is a real girl and hates all things fun. More for show than go, if you know what I mean. So I gave her one my bubble rings in exchange for the gun and proceeded to put the gun to people’s heads and threaten to shoot them for about an hour. Doesn’t sound funny now. But vodka makes a lot of weird shit funny.

Oh, and someone got stick-on mustaches. Stina and I spent about an hour just fucking around with all the lame presents laughing our asses off. People were confused.

We then moved on to another bar which played non-stop Christmas music and we all danced our asses off for about 2 hours until normal, non-backpacker bus folk started to accumulate. We had a limbo competition using a string of tinsle as the pole. The DJ put up a $50 bar tab to the winner, so you know it was on. Stina, myself, and horse face (not sure I’ve mentioned her before, but her face looks like a horse and her voice is super manly – yes, more manly than mine!) came in second and some no-fun nancy skinny bitch took first. Games like that need to be scored on a sliding scale that take into account your weight-to-height-to-age-to-awesomeness ratio. The bar tab was wasted on this bitch. Later that night there was a competition for who could look the most Christmasy. As the only Jew in the room, I was naturally the obvious choice for our group of friends to thrown their support behind. It was clear that the boring bitch (who already won a game!!) was going to win, as the B-team decorated her, and they are FAR more numerous in number than the A-team and therefore had more Christmas shit at their disposal. So Stina literally stole the Christmas tree from behind the bar and I danced around holding it on my head. It was for sure a winner. But I was basically disqualified for theft.

The one time Kiwis actually give a fuck is when you put a tree on your head?! Come the fuck on! I demanded a recount. My plea fell of the deaf ears of the grinch working the bar. Bastards.

But our luck was about to turn. Because upon returning from the ladies room (where I pissed on a Santa Hat that someone had put in the toilet – zero fucks!!) Stina informed me she had found the hottest guys in the bar. So I did what any 25 year old gal would do…I went up behind them and blew bubbles at their (very tall) heads. As that did not illicit the response I was looking for (which was eternal love) I pushed my way to the bar next to them…the classic whoo girl move, been doing it for years ladies. Works just about every time until you turn 25, and then the effectiveness drops exponentially, much the like viability of your eggs. But it was my lucky night, because it worked. Stina got the hotter one, but I got the younger one. If we are being honest, the younger one got stuck with me. But 29 year olds who pretend to be 25 at bars take whatever scraps they can get. So bring on the 26 year old Sweedish wing-men! Did I mention these hot men were both about 6’8 and BROTHERS. It was a Christmas miracle. The bar closed so we spilled onto the streets and loitered about for a while. The extremely tall and good looking Sweedish men wondered how we knew everyone in town. We mumbled something about a bus but kept the explanation short, as we preferred them to think we were kind of a big deal.

Then, as you all well know, after the party is the after-party. We went back to our luxurious flashpacker suite to pop bottles. Yes, I actually said “lets go pop some bottles”, and yes, the Sweeds thought it was hilarious. So we spend the next few hours drinking Rose Sparking wine, dancing to the Jammy pack, and introducing the Sweeds to the baby dino. No, that is not secret lingo for some weird sexual move. It is literally where I just talk in a high pitched voice as a baby dinosaur. A Pterodactyl, to be exact. At one point my boo decided he also wanted to be a baby dino, so I made him get in the fetal position and then declared him re-born a Velociraptor Dino and instructed him to make whatever noise he thinks a baby raptor would make. It’s about as weird as it sounds. Keep in mind it was 2am and I had already drank every vodka tonic in town. After sufficiently scaring these boys, we sent them home to their parents. Yes, they were on Holiday with their parents. We also invited ourselves to (1) Christmas dinner with their parents, and (2) Their NYE party in Sydney. They don’t want us at either one. Shocker.