There always seems to be an awkward silence whenever Chris Hamblin mentions he sleeps with his piano.
Most people do not bother to hang around long enough to find out why, he says.
The 22-year-old American jazz pianist is paying for his tour around New Zealand by busking on his beat-up old Yamaha piano, which he keeps in his cheap van next to the mattress where he sleeps each night.
"Yes, I sleep with my piano - there's people out there with far worse fetishes.''
Then with his best Godfather impression, he says: "It's definitely better than sleeping with the fishes.''
The Bostonian has been travelling around New Zealand since November, playing his own jazz compositions in every town in which he stops.
"The best I've ever done was at the Hokitika supermarket. I made about $300 in three hours.
"But it really just depends where you are. Other days, I might only make about $10.''
Mr Hamblin said he was a mathematics and philosophy major at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, and upon graduation, decided he was far from ready for the desk job his education had led him to.
"A lot of my friends are maths majors and went into finance or market analysis. I just wasn't ready to do that, so I came to New Zealand for my big OE.
"This is fun.''
To get the piano in and out of his van, he has built a ramp from an old bed frame, and also built a trolley out of two old scooters so he could move it about the streets freely.
The only problem was, pianos "don't take kindly'' to being moved around a lot, and were sensitive to changes in temperature, which affected the tuning, he said.
"I actually had to learn how to tune pianos so I could do this. It goes out of tune all the time.''
Mr Hamblin planned to keep busking around New Zealand until May, when he hoped to get a job on a boat as a crew member to Australia or Fiji.
As for when he planned to leave Dunedin, he said it depended on how long it took to save the money needed to move to the next destination.
"Every day I just decide.
"I stay in a place long enough to accumulate a little bit of savings, and then I get up one day and I say it's time to move on.''
