New Zealand. Those two words evoke different pictures in everybody’s minds. According to some people, it’s a beautiful landscape, full of waterfalls, hills, amazing beaches and crystalline waters.
According to some others, it’s the All-Blacks’ land, and all the children can play rugby, and the boys have strange tattoos on their faces, and they spend the night dancing the Haka. Other people see the Maori culture deeply connected with the Pakeha (not Maori) one.
Yes, New Zealand is all that, but it is also much more.
It is winter in July and Christmas on the beach in a swimming suit. It is seeing people using flip flops and shorts in winter (and you are wishing for a coat), it is leaving school and see lots of people without shoes, so that they can feel the ground under their feet. It is going to school and finding a lot of little buildings for classes, and a Maori temple. It is finding out that the concept of homework doesn’t exist, people here just learn during the lessons. But they learn. It is having only six subjects, and being able to choose five of them. And finding out that people choose the difficult subjects, the “useless” subjects like physics or biology, instead of the easy and (really) useless.
New Zealand is starting school at 8.40 and having only five periods per day. It is having dinner between six and seven p.m. and going to sleep by ten. It is ordering pizza at “pizza hut” and finding weird sauces on it. It is finding out that here half of the food is “original Italian food”, but actually there’s nothing Italian in it.
It is watching television and about every ten minutes there are commercials, that last at least five minutes. It is having lunch at school on a huge green field, watching boys playing baseball or football. It is challenging to die while crossing the street, because you are watching the wrong direction. It is buying an umbrella to move from a class to class when it rains. It is arriving in a class soaked wet due to the rain, because you don’t have an umbrella, as half an hour earlier it was sunny. It is seeing a whole rainbow every day.
It is learning that Aotearoa is the Maori name for New Zealand and it means “the land of the long white cloud”. It is discovering that Kiwi is not just a fruit, a funny bird or a nickname for New Zealanders, but a life style.
So, welcome New Zealand.
Anna Aglietta