Weekly Blog #9

As soon as I landed in the Auckland airport, I received a text message from a woman I have babysat for since I was fifteen. She told me about a family who had stayed at her Airbnb over the summer, who had just moved to Auckland. She said they were looking for a sitter for a bit while they lived in a rental home in Mount Eden, a small suburb of Auckland not far from the city center.

The mother of the four children, Vanessa, contacted me about a week after I landed in Auckland, and she set up a day for me to come hangout with them and then watch the kids for a few hours in the evening.

They picked me up and we walked up Mount Eden and played for awhile on the playground, and on the walk back home Vanessa asked if I liked fish and chips, one of the stables in New Zealand.

She ordered a bunch of filets and "chips" or french fries for the four kids, her and her husband, her friend visiting from Wellington, and I. It came in a huge cardboard box, all wrapped in paper. Vanessa explained to me that when she was a kid growing up in New Zealand, they used to spread newspaper on the floor and eat fish and chips all sitting around it. She wanted us to do the same thing, especially because there were so many of us and the dining table was small in the rental home.

The living room was small, fireplace in the center wall and a small couch and a few armchairs sat placed around it. The floors were wooden and covered in a few old Persian rugs. Vanessa pushed the couch and chairs out of the way to create enough room for the eight of us to sit criss-cross on the floor.

She laid out all the pieces of golden-brown fish and then dumped the huge pile on chips into the middle. She followed with making piles of ketchup, or "tomato sauce" as they refer to it in New Zealand, at each corner of the newspaper.

The fish was perfectly fried, a light golden brown, crispy outer that gave way to a soft, delicious interior. The entire room was filled with the heavenly smell of fried food, the french fries making the air a little salty.

The kids smushed their faces into the fried food at an alarming rate, dunking their big potato fries in the mountain of tomato sauce. The littlest boy snuck the cat small pieces of fish behind his mother's back.

The fish itself was incredible, the flavor filling your mouth the second it touched your lips. It was fried well, coated in a beer-batter buttery outer. The fries were crispy on the outside, but soft and warm on the inside.  They melted in your mouth, the salt leaving you craving more.