For the last two weeks I've been in a holding pattern, trying to find a place for myself in this new country and often coming up short. But because of something that happened right after I arrived, I knew everything would work out okay. I usually don't say things like this, but I'm pretty sure I was 'meant to be here.'
The first two days I was staying with Melinda at her house, spending almost all of my time looking for rooms to rent. The rest of the time, Melinda was showing me around Auckland, commenting on the livability of neighborhoods as we went through them. We also checked out a couple hostels so that I'd have an idea of the options that were available to me before I booked a room with any of them. We went to a place called Bamber House in Eden Terrace, a suburb that's about a 45 minute walk from Uni. It felt super chill, and they had a bed I could stay in for a week without moving around between rooms every night. I booked the room on the spot.
But that's not how I knew everything was going to be okay. I figured that out on Sunday when Melinda took me to Piha beach. It's a gorgeous drive just getting out to the beach, which is on the west coast of the North Island and washed by the Tasman Sea.
Melinda told me that this was the first place that Thegn took her when she arrived in New Zealand when she moved here. Piha beach was also where she went beachcombing with my former housemate Mike (who works on fur seal archaeology) and his then girlfriend Lisa (another archaeologist; it's a real small world) when they visited New Zealand. They found a fur seal carcass and put it up on a rock so they could come back with a cooler or a big plastic bag and haul it away in a car. But when they came back it had been taken away by other people or the tide.
So Melinda was relating all of this to me as we walked out at low tide to a hole in the rock, and to an area where there's sometimes a spouting horn. It was also super windy, and I put on a hat just so I wouldn't lose my hearing. It was a relief to be walking in the same direction as the wind on the way back to the car. And then I saw something white sitting over at the high tide line near the one dune on the beach. I walked over and found...this guy.
On Monday I picked up all my bags once again and took them to the University of Auckland, where I was able to keep most of my stuff in Melinda's office. I got a quick tour of the Anthropology department, met some of the people that were around, got introduced to my desk space, and was told repeatedly that I'd have to leave it soon as the office was getting renovated and all the PhD students had to move their stuff out. I enrolled in the University, and spent most of my time dealing with administration.
In the evening, I moved into Bamber House for the next week. While staying there, I met Eduardo the Argentinian who is bilingual in Spanish and French but speaks French better, Julian the French traveler looking for a car who knew some mechanics but didn't know English very well, and Justine the french traveler looking for a car who's fluent in English but doesn't know much about cars.
During the day, I went to campus, made piecemeal progress on administrative tasks, researched houses to rent, went to visit rentals, and did a little preliminary reading on my doctoral research. At night, I went back to the hostel, and tried to figure out if there was anyone around that I knew, or if they had all left for good. It was a very stressful time. Fortunately, Justine and Julian were cool people to hang out with, and just having someone around that I could get along with really helped me get through it all.
The main problem I'm facing is an uncanny valley. Because this is an English speaking country, and America and New Zealand are both culturally related to the English Empire, things feel familiar, or at least look like they should feel familiar. At the same time, they aren't, with just enough differences to be profoundly disturbing. But with patience things are starting to become more familiar.
On the weekend I went out to a bar in Ponsonby (the yuppie neighborhood) to watch a big rugby match (New Zealand v. Australia) with Justine. Eduardo invited me to go out to the beach with him and his friends. I took a ferry out to a volcano island and met a random hiker: Dijana from Australia who's working here to cover a co-worker's maternity leave. On New Zealand's Labor Day, I moved hostels and met a whole new group of folks. Where Bamber House was full of French and German tourists, Oaklands Lodge was curiously full of people from England.
One other big change happened: after viewing an apartment on Thursday, I made a tentative agreement to move in with a couple living only 15 minutes walk from Uni. They are John from Colombia and Sehui from Korea. The only problem was that I didn't have a bank account to actually pay my bond (that's Kiwi for security deposit) or rent. But they put their faith in me, and this week I managed to open an account and get a wire transfer from my US bank.
And finally, I've moved in. I've settled (or at least I'm starting to). I have a room with John and Sehui, who are taking me to a Halloween party this weekend. I also just got keys to the room on campus where my desk is located (though on Monday they shut that office down for the renovations and I move into a new office, which I don't have keys for yet). Which basically means that it's time to stop having fun and get down to my PhD work.
But first, I think I'll going on a field trip for an excavation on Great Mercury Island.
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