Earthquake, Pollution, Voting

It’s been a busy time lately, and New Zealand was once again on the international news with the 7.8 earthquake that devastated Kaikoura and also parts of Wellington. It was different from all of the other earthquakes I've felt here so far: over a minute of a gentle rocking, like being on a houseboat rather than in a house. It wasn't scary, although apparently the tsunami risk goes way up if a quake lasts for that long, and the evacuation plan for the coast is, well, not quite formulated very well. People ended up stranded for hours on a narrow peninsula and would have been engulfed if an actual tsunami had gone. Needless to say, residents over there are ticked.

I went to my first hui, which is the Maori term for a meeting, and that was an interesting experience where the topic was a very contentious political issue regarding children. I also went to a talk on freshwater pollution in New Zealand, which was very illuminating. New Zealand bills itself as clean and green but the reality is quite different. 74% of NZ freshwater fish are threatened or in decline and in a few decades there won't be any left. Plus, there is no protection under NZ law for them. 43% of NZ lakes are polluted and have too many nutrients (causing algal blooms). 67% of NZ waterways are polluted and the Canterbury region (which is where Christchurch is) has some of the highest rates worldwide of gastrointestinal disease. They're sobering statistics for sure.

algal bloom from report on freshwater in NZ

In the academic realm, I have gone back and forth on my thoughts on its function in today’s society. In discussions with some professionals outside of academia, I discovered that people outside the ivory tower have a surprisingly low opinion of academics. Their view was that many academics are the people who never left school, have little understanding of the ‘real world’, and couldn’t necessarily be successful having to work with other people in another job. They saw academics as more likely to be dysfunctional, which then explains why things like aspects like discrimination and backward-thinking still proliferate without much consequence. I have to say I’m starting to agree with some of this viewpoint, because of the resistance to change and lack of dialogue about critical issues that I have found this past year. Also, when I was helping tutor a student, I realized that they weren’t relating the book at all to their own life and struggles, and it occurred to me that we’re failing as educators (or the lecture system is failing) if they aren’t connecting what they’re reading and learning to their own life.

As part of this system, I had the opportunity to do several teaching sessions this year and experienced first-hand the issues with the lecture-style of teaching, because it is such a one-way, non-engaging style. It is still quite persuasive though, and allows you to shape others’ opinions. I also have been able to do more public speaking in front of hundreds of people, which I certainly wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago. Practice definitely helps. I helped organize a conference and a different seminar and in the process found a great TED Talk on how technology distracts us. I keep coming back to it (especially his bit about how checking social media updates is like gambling) so I think it’s a good one.

Other things that have happened were good celebrations of Halloween and Thanksgiving with friends. Funnily, I put out candy on my office hour but the New Zealanders were largely too timid to take it while I was there, but then when I came back most of it was gone. In the U.S., that wouldn’t have lasted a week! At a weekend festival, I tried fried pumpkin for the first time and it was yummy. And finally, I voted via email for the first time and it was very easy, and I hope that in the future electronic voting can become more of a thing, because I think it would increase the percentage of people who actually partake in elections.

 

Doing Things Around Christchurch

As for things to do around Christchurch, we went to the Airforce Museum, Savemart thrift stores, Benson Chinese restaurant with our Chinese friends, Botanic Gardens, Canterbury Museum, ReStart Mall, and the ruined Christchurch Cathedral (what we call disaster tourism). There was a Hare Krishna group performing at the ReStart Mall, which was my first time hearing them. While we were at the Canterbury Museum, there was a 4.1 earthquake, but I was the only one in the group who felt it. I looked at a woman next to me and she confirmed it: 'earthquake.' I checked the Christchurch Quake Map website on my phone and sure enough, there had been one. It was the final days of a Da Vinci exhibit which was really cool -- the display on anatomy and bodies showed just how ahead of his time he was.

Not-so-pleasant Aspects

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!

Gisborne and Napier

Gisborne was just a stopping point on the journey from Tauranga to Napier. The weather cleared up as we were leaving, so we took some photos with the famous Cook statues on the waterfront and headed out.

This is Cook's crew boy who first spotted New Zealand land.

Gisborne waterfront on a nice day

Napier is known for being an art-deco city since it was rebuilt in the 1930s after an earthquake devastated it. It definitely felt like something out of The Great Gatsby with the fonts and styles. We first visited the National Aquarium which was small but allowed us to get our first real sighting of a kiwi!! They switch its day and night (since it's a noctural bird) so visitors can see it out and about. No flash allowed, so my best photo is more like a Loch Ness sighting! Everyone was crowding the glass trying to get a photo of it, so I decided to enjoy seeing it with my own eyes. I doubt anyone but professionals gets a good shot of them. But it was a very strange creature, like something out of the Alice in Wonderland movie, poking its long beak around in the dirt and sort of waddling around in a funny way. I can see why it has trouble surviving in a world of mammal predators.

We also saw the little blue penguins New Zealand is famous for. They were all rescues and very cute. The color is more of a greenish tint.

One thing Napier was definitely lacking was many places to eat for dinner. By the time we had left the aquarium in the late afternoon, there was nothing open downtown. We couldn't find anything good at Pak N Save, so we finally had to settle for Domino's pizza and eat it in a park.

Giving and Gaining Knowledge

I have really been soaking up the knowledge recently at several lectures on campus:

The Canterbury Historical Society had one on economic history in the 20th century (also known as, What happened in the 1980s?!). It might not have interested me a decade ago, but being a worker and investor now makes me quite interested in the economy and how/why things work like they do.

The university and local writers' festival live-streamed the How To Be A Feminist panel from the Sydney Opera House, which included top women from Australia, Canada, and the U.S., including Germaine Greer. Then afterward was a local panel from Christchurch. The lecture hall was packed and had a broad range of ages. It was enlightening to see what the current trends and issues are in contemporary feminist activism.

The public What If lecture series had its first one of 2015 as What If All Women Everywhere Were Treated the Same As Men? given by a professor of law who is French but also now a New Zealand citizen. She mentioned the disappointment in finding that most New Zealanders she encountered weren't very interested in pursuing gender equality, like doing something about the gender pay gap.
Most of the information I already knew, but she gave a lot of updated statistics. On average, women in NZ spend 4 hours and 20 minutes doing unpaid work, while men spend 2 hours and 32 minutes. Only 15% of professors (highest level of academic teacher in their system) are women, begging the question of where are all of the women completing MAs and PhDs going. Top law firms in Auckland (biggest city in NZ) have 19% female partners. It takes 24 years on average for a woman to become a CEO, while it takes 15 years for a man.

The Critical Animal Studies series featured a Russian academic who presented on the Artist as Dog in Russia. There's a famous Russian artist -- Oleg Kulik -- who puts on a collar and chain and pretends to be a dog in various cities around the world, highlighting the lack of freedom for artists in Russia. She also talked about how the dog is portrayed in literature and Pavlov's treatment of dogs in his experiments.

The Canterbury Women's Club postgraduate networking group that I have been pushing to get underway had its first meeting and was quite well-attended. I enjoyed hearing what other people are researching, and the main speaker is doing cutting-edge research on bloodstain analysis in relation to forensic science. Apparently, the models out there only look at blood dripping downward and not all of the splatter that travels in arcs. She uses 3-D cameras and physics and also does educational outreach to encourage kids to see the practical applications of studying math and science in school.

We went to a poetry reading on campus. It has been a long time since I went to one of those, and it felt very hippie but was quite enjoyable. Hearing people perform their poetry makes it come alive so much more than reading it on a page.

Meanwhile, by the third week of tutorials my nervousness is almost dissipated which is a relief. We discussed The Time Machine and Heart of Darkness and it surprised me how these turn-of-the-century novels have a lot of similar issues and themes that people are wrestling with today (benefits and downsides of science and progress, racism, class-ism, sexism, ills of capitalism). I guess that's why they're considered literature and still worth reading. In my other one-on-one tutoring job, I am remembering how much I enjoy it and seeing the lightbulbs go on as I explain concepts and how to tackle assignments. So far, the students have been very appreciative of assistance.

In other news, I got around to booking accommodation for our upcoming North Island trip with a mix of hostels and Airbnb. You get so much more for your money with these places because you have access to free wi-fi and a kitchen. I'm not looking forward to meal-planning for two weeks this time, but it's necessary. We had the earthquake insurance inspectors here again to check something that wasn't covered in their last visit. Apparently they are having to make the decision whether to try to repair the house or rebuild. Our landowners said not to worry and that it wouldn't affect us, but of course with all the trouble it took to find housing here, I don’t really believe that. Last week we went for a walk in the "red zone" near us where the houses are all gone and nature is quickly reclaiming everything. It is a bit eerie, especially how fast plants take over.

Earthquakes and Christmas

Earthquakes

Yikes! Christms Eve brought 2 earthquakes in the afternoon. The first one had a couple jolts and scared me. We got under a doorframe and our cat scampered on the hardwood to get behind the couch. Then there was another one a bit later which was shorter. Our cat spooked again and ran under the bed. I can imagine the chaos of pets getting lost after the earthquakes here, and a postgrad student in my department actually just published a book on this topic with heartbreaking stories of owners searching for lost pets. I discovered I really don't like having to move around while the earth is moving underneath me. We feel fairly secure in this house, seeing as how it withstood all of the rest of them, but the many cracks in the ceiling are a constant reminder of the stress it has taken. These were only the second quakes I've felt (first one was in California while I was asleep so by the time it shook me awake it was over). After recovering from the first one only to have another one come a little while later, I now have more empathy for the folks here who went through not only the big ones in 2010 and 2011, but many aftershocks that probably rattled them every time. It was weird timing coming on Christmas Eve.

He has recovered from his shock and taken over the chair.

Christmas

Even though we are careful about acquiring too many things since we won't be able to take most of it back with us, since we are here for a while and it's hard not to, we got each other a couple presents for Christmas. D got me some wall hangings, a sweet Shakespeare puzzle, and of course a bird feeder and seed. He also got both of us Civilization: Beyond Earth which is a new science-fiction-themed version of our favorite computer game that has fun alien siege worms and other science-fiction elements. I got him some international-food-section candy and a cast-iron tortilla press and corn flour. His parents got us some travel gifts: Hobbiton movie set tickets and passes for the inter-island ferry so we can get our car over to the North Island to explore. Hobbiton sounds so cool - we will be going there soon and will definitely be posting pics! 

I think this is the first Christmas where I've ever been able to wear a tank-top. Also the first one where I went on a walk on a beach. Several people had recommended a place called Taylor's Mistake where all these old holiday homes still exist -- they call them baches (pronounced "batches") - - so we had a nice drive along the coast to get there. It was super windy, but very sunny and warm with lots of other people out enjoying the water and weather. I plan to return and have a picnic soon.

Boxing Day

Sales weren't very good. The only thing I found were some beach towels on sale at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Gearing up for that picnic! We did get some lights at K-Mart. For some reason, almost all of the holiday lights here are solar-powered or battery-powered. And they are LED so the big strands were still $27 even at 50% off. We got some smaller strands and tested them out -- they worked! I guess the upside of solar is that you don't have to pay for power. The 6 balls change color too. I can't wait to decorate next year! :)

Next we saw Big Hero 6 at the movie theater. This time the employee let us pick our assigned seats -- we told her that we don't have those in the U.S. and she was shocked and said she wouldn't like that at all. We emphasized the importance of having buffer seats, but I still don't think she was convinced.

Drive Around Christchurch

We got to visit our kitty today! He had sad eyes when he first saw us, and he is still a bit scared, but he purred a lot and rubbed us. We gave him lots of love and brushes since he is shedding up a storm. He still has another week in quarantine.

View of Sumner

Our host drove us around Christchurch. There is a lot of damage in the city center from the earthquake with buildings damaged or missing and construction everywhere. We passed by the summer hotspot of Sumner and the harbor of Lyttelton, and we stopped at a farmer's market and picked up some sourdough bread. It's not San Francisco sourdough, but it was fresh and fluffy and good.

We went to our first garage sale which was a success. I got a dishware set, pillowcases, and a portable heater. The lady threw in a Brita water bottle to prove that Kiwis are a generous people. She and her spouse were a cute old couple. Considering the high prices for retail, garage sales are even more of a good deal here.

Containers are stacked up as retaining walls

We checked out an apartment for rent in the afternoon. There were lots of other people there - it reminded me of the California apartment hunting I did when hordes of people showed up at any decently affordable housing in the area. I filled out an info sheet, but the kitchen was small with a tiny fridge and the bathroom was old and not very nice. The bedrooms were large, but with how much time we'll be spending in the kitchen cooking and baking, I want better.

We came home defeated, but our host was helping us look places up online and found a couple nice places for more money but still close by. I think we'll head downtown on Monday to the realty office to inquire about properties. A realtor is going to be the way to go I think since there's just not that much available. We're competing with students, working people, and people temporarily moving out of their homes for earthquake repairs.

We had Chinese take-out for dinner: lemon chicken for D, beef, bok choy, fried rice, and pork wrapped in Chinese pancakes. Those were pretty tasty. Our host is going out of town for a week tomorrow, so we'll have to fend for ourselves along with the other homestay student from China. She's studying fire engineering and learning English. We tried Afghan cookies which are made out of cornflakes and cocoa. No relation to the country!