New Zealand: A Pre-planned Journey

September 19, 2016

New Zealand is about as far away from Georgetown as you can get. On the other side of the world, the country is known for its isolation both in location and in diplomacy. Am I trying to get away from something? You tell me. Here, I’m staying in Carlaw Park Student Village, which is code name for “this is where we put all the international students.” It can be difficult to meet actual Kiwis, as classes here are recorded and many local students commute—if they come at all. This goes to say that the majority of my friends are international students like me.


That may not be all bad and somewhat predictable as the entire population of New Zealand is right at 4.5 million. To put this in perspective, that’s comfortably less than the combined boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. Another common misperception about New Zealand is its size. The bottom of the South Island could be placed at the Florida panhandle and Auckland would be found close to D.C., with the northern tip at the base of Lake Erie. Those numbers indicate a sparsely populated country. Especially when considering 1.2 million live in Auckland. The rest of the country is bathed with large swathes of unpopulated land, unaltered by human interaction. This may be a somewhat idealized view, but compared to the east coast of the United States, the land is nothing short of pristine.

Before I left for my journey abroad, I kept hearing about how people in New Zealand are active and outdoorsy. Instead of sitting around during the day and going to parties at night, people were keen to take on the great outdoors. While this may be marginally more true than at home, it was grossly overstated in the assessment of the New Zealand people. In truth, people here aren't all that different from back home. When I say back home, I mean Tennessee. Yeah, they talk a little funny, but so do I. Both places tend to have an affinity for nature over that of a city. In all honesty, my time here in New Zealand makes me feel as if I’ve been transported to East Tennessee in a parallel universe.

It hasn't been the differences that have given me pause; it’s been the similarities. Trade football for rugby. Trade the Appalachian and Smoky Mountains for the South Island. Trade the good ol' country boys of East Tennessee for the people I met late one night at the hot springs in Rotorua. It’s all there—the sites seem to be a slight variation of things I’ve already seen.

Now, what I’ve said may sound a bit cynical, but I certainly don’t mean there isn't unique beauty here. Likely it’s the romanticized view that the other side of the world holds to many people, me included, that’s responsible for an inaccurate perception of affairs. It’s hopelessly difficult to comprehend just how big the world is without people just turning into numbers. With a population a shade over seven billion, it would take you more than a couple of lifetimes to shake everyone’s hand that is alive today. Needless to say, there are a lot of stories out there you’ll never get to hear no matter how hard you try. At some point, people become numbers, and there’s nothing you can do about it. With .06 percent of the world population, the people of New Zealand are statistically insignificant, but that doesn’t exactly capture things, does it?

New Zealand really isn't all that different from Tennessee, especially given the fact that the people from Tennessee and New Zealand probably haven't interacted all that much over the years. It is nothing short of remarkable that New Zealand has so many shades of my home state when the two could not be farther apart geographically. I think this just goes to show that we are human before anything else, and that is not a fact we should treat flippantly as we are so apt to do.
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