Baby Blue Penguin

Two afternoons ago on my walk into work at the Swiss Café, I came across a penguin. Or at least, I only had to go slightly out of my way to come across it. I was heading around the bluff that roughly divides Waitangi, the Maori neighborhoods where our new flat lies, and Paihia, the gaudier touristy side, and I saw a small group of people clustered at the ocean’s edge below. A few were crouched low, one holding a camera. I peered carefully at them, but the crowd was obscuring whatever they were looking at, so I trotted off the sidewalk, down the slight grassy hill, and across the beach to check it out.

And there was the penguin, a small blue one with wet feathers and flopping flippers. He was really impossibly small – smaller than a cat or a chicken – but very distinctively a penguin. I’d never seen one outside of a zoo before. This one was hurt, we all seemed to know. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, no gaping wounds or misplaced feathers, but the way he leaned back and forth on his belly on the rocks, where no smart penguin should be, seemed a clear sign.

There were about eight of us standing there; a couple from Germany, a girl with an unmistakably English accent, some local Maoris, a Japanese woman, and myself; a proper international greeting squad for the penguin. We peeled off one by one though; each person, myself included, mumbling something incoherent and vaguely apologetic as we left. It felt like leaving the scene of an accident; there was a sense of guilt about leaving the rumpled, adorable bird behind.

I have to say that it’s pretty rare to run into penguins while walking to work in Michigan. You know, now that I think about it, I don’t think it’s happened once; let alone run into a penguin in the company of people from at least four different countries. This is just one of the fantastic things about living in New Zealand that I’m coming to accept as some kind of normal.

For example, last night I trapped, in my bedroom, a giant insect. I mean, this was an enormous bug. It had a bulbous, intricately patterned green body and four enormous buzzing wings. I’d never seen anything like it. Shortly after trapping it and setting it outside, I found my second two-inch uber-slug of the night inching its way down the wall. Slugs on the walls, monster bugs in the closet, penguins on the way to work, and Germans mingling with Brits mingling with Chinese mingling with South Africans on the footpaths.

This is New Zealand. And for all of its lack of Christmas cookies or wireless internet, I love that I’m here.