A couple of differences in NZ life from American life

1. In classes, I've had a number of problems with the language that lecturers use, and maybe it's because at Oxy, there's a huge emphasis on the power of language and the power that goes along with who gets to do the naming, but still--here, lecturers don't use person-first language (in which you would say "Shaun, who has autism" instead of saying "Shaun's the autistic kid"), and I find myself getting extremely frustrated hearing it. Nor do they have an understanding of the difference between gender and sex, which gets confusing because at Oxy, gender is a social construct and sex is biology, end of story. Here, they use them interchangeably, and in a class where we're discussing gender as a lens through which to examine power structures it gets confusing. I suppose it's just a difference in the use of language, but it throws me off every time.

2. Gender stereotypes are much bigger here: there's a huge ad campaign for a brand of milk called Meadow Fresh, and their ad campaign is built upon the phrase "Milk for Blokes." The ads claim to show all the way men have it better than women, but instead they perpetrate extremely outdated stereotypes about gender roles that would never be displayed in the States because people would be too worried about them being offensive. There's also another set of ads that are everywhere here for a brand of beer called Tui. The ads are all in the same format: on the left, there's text, and on the right, it says "yeah right" every time. They range from typical college style ("I'm not drinking till after exams...yeah right") to political ("War will bring peace...yeah right") to extremely gender based ("I have to wash my hair tonight...yeah right"). Both of these ad campaigns are successful because they are extremely recognizable, but I was talking about them with a bunch of Americans the other day, and we were talking about how the States would never let them stay up and how they really date New Zealand in terms of social progression.




3. In the States, there's primarily girls in my education classes, and the same goes here. Also, the only time I've ever seen somebody color code their notes by topic has been in ed classes at Oxy, and here about five girls in my ed class bring pencil bags to class with different colored pens and sticky notes! Apparently some things are the same across continents.

4. My kiwi hosts, when referring to the States, always say "America" while I always say "the States" or "the US." It's really weird for me to hear "in America, is Robbie Williams popular?" because 'America' sounds idealistic to me, probably because I think of it in terms of the American dream, or the American way of life, or vague ideas like that instead of a physical country where people live. It just always catches me off guard.

5. Kiwis are much more laid back in general, and seem to value family more. Most cafes and stores close at 5 so that workers can get home to their families. At first, I thought it was annoying to have to get everything done before 5, but now I kind of like the values that it stands for, and I've gotten used to it. They also seem to have much more pride in their country. They love talking about NZ politics, they love talking about how "clean and green" NZ is, every time Sir Edmond Hillary comes up, their eyes practically swell with tears instantaneously...while it's certainly a stretch for me to say that all NZers are proud of their country, it feels like much more of them are proud to say where they are from and almost get defensive when something comes up negatively about NZ.

In other news, I finally feel like I'm officially in school...I had to write my first paper, and it was actually a difficult one! Not because of the subject matter, but because the prof wanted us to cram tons of information into an extremely tiny amount of space. Instead of feeling like I was writing concisely, I felt like I was just being incomplete which is a terrible feeling, since I know I could have proven my point much better with more space. Oh well, it actually felt good to finally write a paper and be academic again. I also had to do a crash course in NZ spelling and change all of my "behavior"s to "behaviour" and my "organization"s to "organisation."

This weekend, I'm going back to Queenstown, this time with everybody from my initial program. We're going on the shotover jetboats, tramping through Mt. Aspiring on the Routeburn track, and taking the gondola up the mountain to ride the luge. People are also bungee jumping, but I think I'm going to keep my bank account from crying and take a rain check on that. It'll be fun to be with the whole group again, and I really liked Queenstown so I'm jazzed to go back.

Hope everybody's enjoying plenty of spring-ish weather for me, because it's feeling like winter already for me...the weather is cold, it's raining a lot, and it's only 2:15 and I'm on my third cup of tea for the day.

Loves!