GW Hatchet Blogs - blogs.gwhatchet.com

While walking through the business district on my way to class recently, I passed a café/bar that was standing room only at nine in the morning, with the crowd spilling out over the patio and onto the sidewalk. From the other side of the street, I could see everyone gathered around a TV, but I had no idea what was drawing the crowd. I knew there was a game on; I could see the green field, but I couldn’t identity a team or a sport. As I hurried to campus, the crowd let out a collective low cheer, one that I wasn’t sure signified good or bad. Then everyone dispersed within seconds and the next time I looked across the street, everyone was focusing again on their coffee and commute. I, meanwhile, had no idea what occurred, but it wasn’t a bad introduction to New Zealand’s love affair with sports.

Newspaper pages here devote plenty of space to netball and cricket and racing, but the one sport to rule them all is undoubtedly rugby. Rugby is everywhere. It’s not hard to stumble across a children’s team practice or an impromptu game in a park. The most famous players, those on a first-name basis with the public, populate PSAsand commercials. There’s rugby league and rugby union and Super 14 and Sevens, but rugby wouldn’t be rugby without the All Blacks, the national team of the national sport. The All Blacks dominate rugby internationally, and the team’s success overseas means they’re ubiquitous at home. Their silver fern logo is often shorthand for New Zealand itself, and though it might be an exaggeration to say I see more fern flags that official national flags, it’d be a small one. The All Blacks are so integral to the culture here that I don’t find the name unusual anymore, even though it raises the eyebrows of Americans who don’t know that team’s uniforms are all black. It would be wrong to spend a much time in New Zealand without attending one of their games, so I bought a ticket for the first game of the season here in Wellington.

After a completely All-Blacks-less semester, the build-up to the game against Irelandwas interesting in its own right. A few articles in the paper focused on ex-pats who couldn’t quite decide who to cheer on. Bar signs challenged their patrons to drink Speights (a beer brewed in the South Island) instead of Guinness. And when the day of the game finally arrived, everyone in the city seemed to be talking about the game, clad in All Blacks gear and streaming toward the stadium. With a silver fern painted on my cheek and plenty of layers on, I was ready to go.

If you are more interested in the atmosphere of the game rather than the rules of the sport (like me, for instance), the haka that kicks off the game is not to be missed. The team performs a Maori dance before play begins, but “dance” certainly gives the wrong impression. The haka, called Ka Mate, is meant to reflect New Zealand’s cultural heritage while intimidating opponents, as the team slaps their thighs, sticks out their tongues and chants in te reo Maori. I know what you’re thinking. Sticking out their tongues? You might think that someone sticking out his tongue wouldn’t be especially intimidating, but when that person is an All Black, it’s a fierce display of athleticism.

The haka drew an enthusiastic response, but I was surprised to find that was it for the chanting for the rest of the game. All Blacks fans are devoted, almost filling the stadium on a winter night in the pouring rain, but they weren’t as boisterous as I expected. Last fall, I attended a D.C. United game. Say what you will about soccer in the United States, but those are some obsessive fans, constantly singing and cheering and waving flags. When they weren’t setting off stink bombs and throwing beer in the air each time a goal was scored, I found their boisterousness endearing, and I expected something similar from All Blacks fans. There wasn’t that same spectacle; instead, everyone actually watched the game. Even when New Zealand beat Ireland in the end, there wasn’t a big scene. There was hardly a person on the streets of Wellington that night who hadn’t been in Westpac Stadium, and everyone seemed happy for their team. Instead of provoking crazed individual reactions from their fans, the All Blacks and rugby are part of the cultural fabric, something that unites the country around them.

It reminded me of the morning crowd taking a break from work to watch the game on TV (though I’m still not sure which game). Everyone came together gripped by the game, but no one made a big fuss about it; it was just part of the morning. Rugby is a national obsession, something that is indelibly Kiwi, but fortunately it’s one that doesn’t require me to wash beer out of my hair.

It’s easy to claim a place as your own once you’ve left it, and I first found myself identifying with New Zealand when I spent mid-semester break in Australia. During my week in Sydney and the Queensland coast, I wasn’t noting the differences between home and abroad. My friends and I were marveling about how different it was from New Zealand:

“We don’t have Target in New Zealand!”
“I can’t believe that Australians say ‘thongs’ and not ‘jandals’!”

And so on. But that was among American friends. I’m finding that this identification has become a bit more pervasive, even when I’m among New Zealanders.

Today was my last tutorial for my news analysis class. I am the sole foreigner out of ten students, something that left me terrified on the first day after my tutor grilled me about my political beliefs and presented a hypothetical scenario in which I was shot. I think it may have been to demonstrate newsworthiness, but I can’t say for sure; my mind was preoccupied and racing to think of any class I could add in its place. But I decided that my tutor was quirky and not actually out to get me, and since then, I’ve settled in just fine. Maybe it’s that we do see eye-to-eye politically, or that I have embraced New Zealand English by diligently using find and replace on all of my assignments to make sure I’m analysing and not analyzing, or that I can participate in discussions about Kiwi TV shows.

My other classes never really presented this problem. No one in my Renaissance literature tutorial is a 17th-century Londoner, so we all muddle through together. My Pacific studies class is more conspicuously divided between Islanders and palagi (a Samoan word referring to white non-Pacific Islanders). My being American doesn’t matter much there, but in a class that presumes prior knowledge of New Zealand-specific media and politics, I struggle a bit more. After that first day, I’ve tried not to make it an issue and blend in as best as I can.

Before today’s tutorial, my classmates and I were chatting about our essays that we’d finished the week before. Mine was about Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to indigeous Australians delivered this past February, which lent itself to a discussion on Australian vs. New Zealand race relations and national character. I joined in, talking about “our responses” to events in Australia. Talking to a room full of Kiwis, I said “we,” referring to New Zealanders, but no one said a thing about it and the us vs. them discussion continued.

Successfully going incognito as a Kiwi didn’t last for long. Later in the hour, my tutor mentioned Shrek the sheep, which was met with knowing laughs from my classmates and a confused look from me. I was gently mocked for being “the foreign chick” once more, but who knew?

I saw an Irish comedian perform recently as part of New Zealand’s International Comedy Festival, and he made an excellent observation about Kiwi speech: New Zealanders are the only people who actually talk the way they’re stereotyped. The Irish tend not to sound like the Lucky Charms mascot and Australians are not constantly chatting about shrimp on the bahhh-bie. Kiwis, however, talk pretty much as expected. It’s funny to me now, but until a few months ago, I couldn’t have told you what a New Zealander was supposed to say. Something about sheep, possibly? I now know that Kiwis like talking about how great things are in a number of unusual ways.

The comedian, David O’Doherty, mentioned getting his passport stamped when arriving in New Zealand, prompting the customs agent deem everything “awesome.” But it’s not just the extreme enthusiasm for something that is usually less awesome and more routine and necessary. It’s the multitude of ways through which that awesomeness can be expressed. I’ve become accustomed to using choice and keen, but the most iconic Kiwi phrase is undoubtedly “sweet as.” You could exclaim that something is sweet or cool or mean (a good thing, of course), but adding “as” somehow makes everything sweeter and cooler and meaner. To what is all this sweetness being compared? Nobody’s entirely sure, but that’s no problem.

I’ve come a long way from the first night of orientation when we were told to go grab our togs and jandals, and everyone just stared until it was clarified that we might want to change into bathing suits and flip-flops. Since then, I’ve learned where the wop wops are and what a dairy is. I know how to pronounce Paraparaumu and whakapapa. I order my food for takeaway instead of to go and say cheers instead of thanks. I’ve been mistaken for an Australian and I’ve been told that I don’t really have too much of an accent. Despite all this, I can’t quite bring myself to say sweet as. Before I leave New Zealand, I hope to happen upon a situation that is maybe sort of nice but still declare with confidence that it is, in fact, sweet as.

“For a capital city, Wellington is really small. Maybe it’s the smallest in the world, besides, like, some place in the Faroe Islands.”

My news analysis lecturer was talking about media markets at the time, but my mind wandered to just how small Wellington really feels. Not as tiny as Torshavn (Thanks CIA World Factbook!), but there is one thing that makes it feel that way. Fewer than 200,000 people call Wellington city home, but because it’s the cultural capital of the country, there are always hundreds of things going on, making it impossible to be bored. No, what makes it feel like the smallest of small towns is my inability to go anywhere without running into someone I know. This often works out in interestingly coincidental ways. After trying to make plans with a friend, we agreed to meet up another day but several hours later ran into one another getting takeaway from the same restaurant. The day before my mid-semester break trip began, I stopped by the public library downtown to pick out a few books for the journey, and my travel buddies snuck up behind me in the stacks. Even when I’m not bumping into friends, I am tripping over the impromptu reunions of strangers on the sidewalks downtown.

Occasionally I spot a person with a particularly egregious hairstyle and then notice the same person on the other side of town several hours later, but sometimes sightings like this lead to confusion. I’m still unsure whether the tough-looking guy in a skirt I saw two days in a row was one person or two of many people in touch with the city’s artsier side. Possibly twins with similar dress sense? Several friends have conclusively determined this is the case with the identical violin-playing boys spotted busking all around town after a few too many double-takes.

Even outside the city center running into people I know is about as easy as spotting sheep, but comparing travel stories with friends shows I’m not the only one. One girl from my program was encountered all around the South Island: walking the Abel Tasman Track, taking the ferry back to Wellington, traveling the east coast. It seems implausible that among four million people and 40 million sheep we’d continue seeing the few people we know, but it keeps happening.

It brings to mind the generally ridiculous question that’s inevitably asked when finding out about hometowns: Do you know (some person who happens to live in the same city/state/country, regardless of how many other people live there too)?

Well, do you know someone in New Zealand? Give me a few days and I just might know them too.

I’m not sure what I expected of Sydney, but it was more overwhelming than I had anticipated. Not in any uncomfortable way, but how you might imagine any city of 4.5 million people to be. Normally, I am a fairly confident urban navigator and the person my friends throw the map at when they’ve lost hope, but a week around the mostly rural South Island of New Zealand must have softened me. New Zealand cities are great big small towns, but Sydney is a real city, more Americanized than New Zealand. It has a real skyline, an immense immigrant population and a tangled public transport system that travels through diverse suburbs.

After several frustrating bus rides and some time exploring the central business district (bustling and interesting, but more upscale and thus less welcoming to backpackers than NZ), I found I liked it better from a distance, looking at it from the Botanical Gardens jutting out into the harbor, especially because my wanderings provided an excellent opportunity to view Sydney’s most iconic building. Yep, the Sydney Opera House. It is completely riveting. I could not stop staring at it, whether across Sydney Cove on a park bench, walking across the Harbour Bridge or right on the Opera House steps. I told myself that I really should step away from the city’s most obvious landmark and dig a little deeper in my travels, but I liked watching the clouds shift and light change over the roof.

Though gravitating toward green space is very Kiwi of me, my devotion to the touristy reminds me more of D.C. You may be jaded, but I still find myself peeking at the Lincoln Memorial whenever I cross 23rd Street on my way to Safeway, and I feel lucky to be able to do so. In Sydney, I was close to 10,000 miles away from the District, but I liked being able to trade dodging important people on the pavement for tramping on the grass and admiring an extremely famous gleaming white building or two. I did end up tearing myself away from the first thing in the guidebook to get a feel for Sydney’s neighborhoods, but some things are iconic for a reason.

Though final exams are on the horizon at GW, those of us at the bottom of the world are only halfway through semester, thanks to the late start of the fall term in February. Don’t feel too bad for me; my mid-semester break has just started and I’m currently packing my suitcase for a two-week trip.

I haven’t even left for the airport yet, but I’m already finding that traveling the South Pacific is a big departure from, say, spring break in Europe. While a train pass and a long weekend might be all you need to gather a few more passport stamps in Europe, I am currently surrounded on all sides by a very large ocean. All of those countries that look fairly close on a map really aren’t. It takes three or four hours to fly to Australia, five hours to Fiji and 10+ to Southeast Asia, so most study abroad students stick to bus trips around New Zealand, since there’s no shortage of sights to see within the country. Yet with two weeks of break ahead of me, I’ve decided to spend half my time looping around the South Island of New Zealand and half in Australia. After traveling for the better part of a day to get to New Zealand, what’s a few more?

I’m interested to see how my time so far in New Zealand has changed my perception of Australia. Until a few months ago, Australia and New Zealand were basically interchangeable to me. One was a bit greener, one was a bit sandier, but everything else was almost the same, right? A few days ago while booking a a tour, I called an Australian company and was surprised how different the accent on the other end of the phone sounded compared to the clipped Kiwi accents I hear every day.

Now I am firmly on the NZ side of the Aussie-Kiwi rivalry (generally friendly, unless the other is winning at rugby), but I’m sure that when I check in next week from across the ditch, I’ll be having a great time.

“Elijah Wood peed in that fountain. It was covered in our student magazine.”

This was one of the many things I learned during my first few days in Wellington, as I walked down Cuba Street with several veteran Vic students imparting their knowledge to a group of still-jetlagged Americans. I rarely admit that I have never seen the Lord of the Rings series (just in case someone catches me with 25 spare hours and forces me to watch the entire thing) and thus am not especially interested in the actors’ shenanigans during the filming of the movies here in New Zealand. I am, however, interested in student publications, and my interest in Salient, Victoria University’s student magazine, was piqued further when I read this description in the student diary:

“In 2005 the Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University obtained a court injunction to prevent an issue of Salient from being distributed; in 2006 Salient described the Chinese as a species we should be wary of, and in 2007 Salient made national headlines with the feature “How to rip off Winz” which listed the legal ways to maximize the dole.”

Ever since then, I’ve picked up the new issue each Monday. I’m sure that my newcomer status to Vic means that I don’t get much of the insider humor, but I still can’t quite decide what to think. It’s a satirical magazine, yes, but it’s also a student advocate, a community news source and a compendium of filthy jokes. Sarcastic headlines are followed by hard news pieces, usually all written by the same reporter. Dozens of impassioned and incoherent letters to the editor are published each week in all their unedited glory. National, local and university politics (dealing, interestingly, with many of the same issues that GW faces: Islamofascism, anyone?), entertainment reviews and the dragon drawing of the week all exist side by side. Part of me wants to take a pen to it and do some serious copy editing, and part of me enjoys that it’s so jumbled and unpolished. Yet since I’m not really sure what it is they’re aiming to do, it’s hard to say they’re doing it wrong.

After a month here in New Zealand, I feel that I can safely stereotype and say that most Kiwis are pleasant and polite. Everyone seems to be excellent at queuing and all too happy to offer a friendly “cheers,” but I’ve found an exception in drivers, who seem to whip around corners so quickly that I’m not sure whether they’re actively trying to mow me down or just being unobservant. Still, if a collision were to take place, I’m sure that the exchange between the driver and their moving target would be perfectly friendly, which is exactly what happened when I got hit by a bike.

I was headed downtown with a few friends during orientation week, when I was still getting my bearings around Wellington and reminding myself that New Zealanders drive on the left. I now look both ways about six times before I cross the street, but that night I crossed after instinctively looking left, then right. The street looks perfectly clear when you’re watching for cars in the wrong direction, so I stepped in front of a cyclist who had just come speeding around the corner. After hitting the ground, I distinctly remember thinking that the bicyclist who had just collapsed next to me had a right to be pretty angry, since I was completely at fault. Yet the big surprise of the evening (besides being hit by a moving vehicle) was the polite and characteristically Kiwi response.

Not only was the cyclist completely calm and reassuring even with an injured arm, but a group of first-years stopped and stayed with us until they were sure we were all right. They helped the cyclist call his wife to pick him up, and when she arrived, she could not have been nicer to me. She insisted that I should go with her to the hospital, but after I convinced her that I was only scraped and bruised, she took down my contact information and promised to check up on me in the morning. And she did!

After giving up on downtown and heading home, my friends and I marveled at the very un-American responses. We all had anticipated that the situation would involve much more shouting and end with my getting in trouble for being unable to properly cross a street. However, accident compensation is universal and personal injury lawsuits are illegal in New Zealand, which allows for situations like bike collisions to be much less contentious, more easygoing and more focused on everyone’s well-being. After my eventful evening, I was mostly happy to still have all my teeth, but I was especially grateful to get a bit of Kiwi kindness in an unusual situation.

Ever since I made the decision to study abroad in New Zealand, sharing my plans with others has been met with a variety of responses. Most frequent was intensely jealous well-wishing, but a number of times people would scoff a bit and say, “That’s not studying abroad. That’s a vacation!” It’s a response I partly understand, especially since meeting a good number of American students who fully intend to spend the semester tramping through the bush and bungee jumping. New Zealand is a pretty ideal place for a vacation (I confess that I’m dying to go skiing and surfing on the same day), but usually I would justify my decision by mumbling something about my English major and postcolonial literature.

Fortunately, plenty of people were actually interested in my reasons for heading off to New Zealand and supportive of studying abroad in general. Flying home from winter break, I was seated across from a guy who took interest in my plans without making me feel like a slacker for choosing a location without old cathedrals or medieval universities. Studying abroad, he said, was a valuable experience regardless of destination. Any time you step away from your American bubble to experience how others see the world is worthwhile, especially if you return with a new perspective on your home. He wasn’t just railing against the current state of the U.S. Actually, he may have been, since he mentioned repeatedly how he was learning to live in the woods in case his Capitol Hill neighborhood bit the dust in the impending nuclear apocalypse, but that’s beside the point. Airplane Guy just agreed with me that everyone should have the opportunity to experience a different culture, and that’s something even the most insane bungee jumping enthusiasts I’ve talked to are eager to do.

Regardless of how similar it seems to home or paradise on the surface, New Zealand is neither. After a week in Wellington, I’ve enjoyed noticing the little differences like unusual foods (I’m still trying to figure out what hokey pokey is) and Kiwi-speak (the post title means “hello from New Zealand” in Maori, roughly). On the other hand, I’ve also learned what happens when you don’t heed Andrew Alberg’s advice about looking right then left when crossing the street. Hint: You get hit by a bike, but that’s a story for my next post.