Amongst the Kiwis: An American PhD Student in New Zealand: dryer

After the two-week trip in the North Island, the time has come for some of the not-so-pleasant aspects of New Zealand. The speeding ticket from the first day of the roadtrip waiting in the mail did not help...

Healthcare

My first experience with the New Zealand healthcare system was not enjoyable. The law only allows pharmacies to dispense 3 months' worth of prescription drugs at a time. You have to go back in for a doctor's appointment every 3 months to get a refill (contraception is the exception - it is every 6 months). For people on a medication for years that does not require close monitoring, this is ridiculous. The international student insurance of course doesn't cover the appointment or the prescriptions, so this could quickly become a signficant cost. Some other students have said that it is sometimes possible to get a cheaper nurse's appointment for refills, but I have not tried this yet. (Also, even over-the-counter drugs from a pharmacist can only be given out in 1-month supply.)

Living

We have found that toilets here don't flush well, regardless of whether or not they are in rich people's houses or nice business establishments. It is nice that most of them have the dual-flush option to save water, but they don't get enough power to actually get the water clean. I finally looked up the difference and found an Australian company trying to show that their way is superior to the North American way:

"North American toilets most commonly utilize siphon jet technology. Most of the water in the tank is used to create a vacuum or siphon effect in the trapway of the toilet bowl, which then pulls the waste out after the water. [...] Washdown toilets do not use this flushing mechanism. When flushed, the water is released very quickly from the tank and into the bowl through an open rim bowl design" (http://www.caromausa.com/resources/faq.php#a2).

Sorry, but the washdown toilets just don't do the job. It's not saving water if you have to flush several times.

Power outlets are not installed in most bathrooms, at least not in older places. If they are, they are in inconvenient locations and not usable for things that need to rest, like electric toothbrush charging stations. I'm not sure where people who use electric appliances (hairdryer, hair curler, etc.) get ready in the mornings. There is also a general lack of power outlets in hallways or rooms; often there is only one or two for a whole room. Power strips are the norm here.

I think I've already mentioned the absurdity of the sub-standard housing and lack of central heating, but now that colder weather is here again (52 degrees F in the house this morning), it is very frustrating. Just using the heat pump for a little bit in the morning and evening and heating blankets has shot the electricity bill up a lot. It will easily be over $300 a month for electricity this winter. Also, I downloaded the manual for the heat pump which is technically an air conditioner to try to figure out how the timer works so the kitchen won't be an ice box in the morning. I had to laugh out loud:

"Heating Performance: The air conditioner operates on the heat-pump principle, absorbing heat from outdoor air and transferring that heat indoors. As a result, the operating performance is reduced as outdoor air temperature drops. If you feel that insufficient heating performance is being produced, we recommend you use this air conditioner in conjunction with another kind of heating appliance."

So...the main source of heating in most New Zealand houses is not really designed to work well when it's cold outside. Great... Guess it's good I have three space heaters, three heating blankets...

Part of the reason we study at school is because most of the buildings are heated (who knows how much that costs). But it is unclear who is in charge of the heating. Sometimes if the weather outside warms up, it actually becoems too hot in the room and students start opening windows to get a breeze. Having heaters on and windows open is so wasteful.

We started using our clothes dryer and discovered that because it doesn't have a vent on the back, all of the moisture in the clothes shoots out through the front vent and soaks the laundry room floor in front of it. I'm not sure who designed it this way or why there isn't at least a warning that you will have a puddle to contend with when you use the appliance.

"Morning tea" is basically snack-time at 11:00am, and last week I went to one as part of a staff meeting. As in the past, there were napkins but no paper plates or utensils for eating some of the food. All of the food is not finger food, and yet they still do not provide a non-messy way of eating them. This has happened with fruit before, but this time there were full sponge cake and carrot cake pieces. I picked up a piece of the chocolate and raspberry sponge cake with my bare hand and it oozed raspberry jam and whipped cream all over. I put it in a napkin to hold it, but this still involved sacrificing one hand to become entirely messy. I cannot understand how anyone thinks this kind of food can be eaten without a plate and fork.

Education

I know a lot of U.S. college teachers still take attendance in their classes and count it as part of your grade. Here, taking attendance is not the norm (although I've heard some teachers do it). Sometimes lecture halls are full; other times they are visibly missing most of the students. My tutorial attendance has been steadily dropping and I know I have neither carrot nor stick to hold over them. Fewer students are actually completing the weekly reading as well, making it difficult to have discussions when no one has read. The whole system seems to be based on the ideal notion that students are there to learn, rather than complete the assignments, pass the classes, and earn a degree that can then help them get a job. There are some good students, of course, but you have to wonder what the rest of them are doing with their time since most classes don't have homework and just have a couple essays or tests for the entire grade.

I also just finished grading their first round of essays and encountered an astonishingly high number of grammar and punctuation errors. From asking around the staff and other postgrads, I have learned that the New Zealand education system is not very good and if you don't go to a good school or have a good English teacher, you probably won't learn grammar or how to write an essay.

Another interesting thing is that the school allows time clashes, so a student can be enrolled in two classes that have lectures at the same time and not go to one of them but complete the assignments and get credit for it. Some of my students are unable to attend my tutorials because of time clashes. There are also three-week-long study breaks with exams at the end. We never had that long to study for our exams; plus, we had homework throughout the semester! I believe these breaks are a legacy of the British system.

General

D learned in one of his law classes that there has been boilerplate language regarding acts of God (like earthquakes) in mortgage agreements for decades, and people signed them without any consideration that their homes could be repossessed and demolished by the bank if it deemed earthquake damage irreparable. So technically, if a homeowner didn't have earthquake insurance, they wouldn't be entitled to receive any compensation in the event of an earthquake. Yet because the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes caused so much damage to the city as a whole, public pressure ended up turning against the enforcement of these clauses. The situation raises interesting questions about whether it's fair to the people who prepared and bought earthquake insurance that people who didn't pay for it ended up getting bailed out because of the disaster. Four years later, people are still waiting for insurance claims to be settled and a couple houses in our neighborhood are in the process of being demolished.

Also, earthquakes are getting to be a pretty common occurence for me here, though I am still scared when they happen. We experienced our first one while at school on April 24th. Since we were several floors up, the shaking was gentle. It lasted for about 20 seconds.

A lot of roads are poorly marked. In the U.S. there are Botts' Dots and reflective markers so you can clearly see the lanes. In the dark, it is hard to tell where lanes are, and it is dangerous when it's raining and you can't see where you're supposed to be driving. In construction areas especially, you sometimes have to guess where the lane dividers are.

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I think that is the bulk of it for now. It will be interesting to compare Australia in a few months with New Zealand and the U.S. It should hopefully be a bit warmer there!

We're moved into our new house which is a relief after almost two months of living with strangers (although the second place was okay just cramped). It's more room than we need, but with almost everything here being single-family homes, that's what you get.

There is a garden area plus a long row of soil along the fence for more garden or flowers. Any tips for starting a garden from almost scratch are welcome (it's coming into spring here so a lot of things can start to be planted now). D is going to attempt to grow jalapeno peppers -- if we can find the seeds -- since they are so expensive in the stores.

Although most homes don't have central heating, this one does have the next best things which are an HRV system and two heatpumps (the white things on the wall). The HRV system is supposed to pump warmer air from the attic into the house through vents in the ceilings of the rooms and create a kind of pressurized bubble which also prevents heat loss through the single-pane windows. It's been cold the past few days, but today it is nice again so the house is warm at 26 degrees Celsius (78 Fahrenheit). Power isn't cheap, so we're hoping the HRV keeps us from having to use the heatpumps a lot. Another plus - a dishwasher! Haven't had one of those in a long time.

There is a separate laundry room which is nice because usually they cram a washing machine in the bathroom, presumably because this is where the water supply is. It is not common for appliances to be included, so this room just has a washing basin. There is room for both a washer and a dryer, however. And a dryer is another luxury - most people hang their washing outside on the line to dry, which is fine except when the weather is unpredictable, it frequently rains or is very windy, and you don't want to wait several days for everything to completely dry. Or don't want all your neighbors to see your laundry. We decided early on that a dryer was a necessity (and since no one wants them, they're very cheap second-hand).

In another news, I've just finished two sessions of training to become a learning advisor next year, essentially what the U.S. calls a tutor (one-to-one help to other students). It's amazing to discover how poor students' writing and critical thinking skills are when they haven't been asked to write an essay until they come to university. Universities here don't have a general education requirement, so students don't have to take a first-year English class or know how to go out and research and write a 5-paragraph essay by themselves. And there are a lot of English-as-a-second-language students who can get in with relatively low levels of ability in English (part of the turning of higher-education institutions into profit-makers), so they also struggle on the level of having to communicate in a language that may not even have any of the same rules as English. They are handed an assignment to write an essay in response to a question like "To what extent did religious issues account for the conflict between Ireland and Northern Ireland?" and have no idea what to do. Or they just discuss everything they know about the topic and hope they've answered the question by the end. The training made me appreciate my high school teachers and the opportunity to take advanced-level classes that drilled into me how to write a good essay with a thesis and support for the arguments. I've never had to explain these concepts to an ESL student, however, so it will be interesting to say the least.