The last two weeks have been a bit of a roller coaster. I felt really down, had some really good times, ended up feeling lonely and sad again, got excited for a couple trips, then felt really out of place, and finally like I'm beginning to feel comfortable in New Zealand. At least for the moment.
I was feeling a bit sad and tired after being sick all the way through Thanksgiving and missing out on family dinner when John and Sehui cheered me up by inviting me to go to a Mexican birthday party. We went down to Queen Street and grabbed some food for a cook out, and went on a long trek across town to Parnell, where we barbecued sausages, steak, and chicken with an eclectic group of Mexicans, Colombians, and Scotsmen on the beach of a small lake by the sea. I was in heaven the moment they busted out the tortillas and started making small quesadillas with cheese, grilled chicken, guacamole sauce (??), and pickled nopal slices. I thought I'd never have delicious Mexican food in New Zealand. Being proven wrong has never tasted so good.Things got shaken up in a weird way after we'd been cooking and eating for a couple hours. Apparently a skinny kid, maybe 13 years old, came over and told somebody in our group that we needed to leave because his family decided to have a private party at the public grill in the public park. He came back again a little bit later and looked super uncomfortable as he told us that we had to leave or his older brother was going to come over and beat us up. We were a little divided on the appropriate response as a party, especially since only a couple people knew what was actually going on. We ended up leaving after cleaning off only one of the two grills that we'd been using, and someone spit on the other one. Nobody liked going, but there was a Kiwi with us who had a very reasonable perspective: sure we could have stayed and started a fight, but for what?
So the party relocated to the birthday boy's house and people switched to some heavy drinking. I hung around for a little while more before ducking out. Overall it was a mixed evening, but I feel like it totally made up for missing out on Thanksgiving.
The New Zealand Christmas season started way back in October, or maybe September, but it reached a new pitch that Sunday in Auckland with the Santa Parade, which shut down the city center to show off a bunch of angels, nativity scenes, random spirits, and a giant sleigh for thousands of children and their cranky parents. Those crowds made grocery shopping much more difficult than it needed to be.
On Monday the Anthropology Department hosted a Christmas Party on a party boat in the Hauraki Gulf. About 12 people showed up for the floating potluck and we did our best to run down a $400 bar tab, but I'm ashamed to say we only got about halfway through it.
On Tuesday I went to the airport and took a plane with Melinda and Thegn out to Christchurch in South Island for a mini-conference at University of Canterbury. My doctoral research is being funded by Te Pūnaha Matatini, a Centre of Research Excellence, and my advisors were taking me down to meet the organization's fisheries working group and attend Bio-Maths Day. We had a long discussion with game theory researchers and computational mathematicians about my archaeological project and a Canterbury PhD student's maths models of cooperation and competition in fishing strategies and tried hard to find possible collaborations for us to work on. It was a difficult conversation and I came away feeling like we had spent a lot of the time talking past one another. Fortunately it's just a start.
That night we went out to dinner near downtown Christchurch and had an excellent time at Pomeroy's Old Brewery Inn, which had the craftiest of crafty beers and $5 scotch whisky singles. Being there brought to mind a lot of the craft brew culture that I miss from Portland, and that vibe continued as I took a walk through the downtown. A lot of the city was destroyed or made uninhabitable by the 2010 Christchurch earthquake and its aftershocks, and now the entire city center is being systematically leveled and rebuilt. Despite those challenges, there was a thriving street art culture and people have quickly adopted shipping containers for temporary mall and restaurant architecture, showcasing the city's creative spirit and adaptability.
Our conference continued on Wednesday with presentations from the Complexity and the Biosphere theme of Te Pūnaha Matatini. People showed off a lot of research on network analysis, tree transpiration, kiwi bird conservation, Mike's fisheries modelling, and much much more. I continued struggling to find overlaps between my research interests and the diverse disciplines in the group, without much success. At the end of the day I flew back to Auckland feeling out of place.
Finally, this week I went to Victoria University in Wellington for another Te Pūnaha Matatini meeting for the end of year hui (Māori for meeting). I gave a three minute lighting talk on my research topic to the entire organization as a rite of passage, along with all the other new students and investigators. After that, I spent the last couple days with the Whānau (literally, extended family; in this case, the emerging researchers of the organization) in workshops on programming in Python, creating science media for the public, and commercializing our research, and in brainstorming sessions for future Whānau events and programs.
In between meetings, we had social tea times, and a giant dinner at an Italian restaurant in downtown Wellington, which is a beautiful city. It is much smaller than Auckland, but Wellington feels alive at all times of day, and even where the city has been built up it retains so much character. Auckland doesn't compare at all in terms of creative expression, which is on display throughout the suburbs, on the street, and in the atmosphere.
After most of the organization had left Wellington or returned to their families, I stayed on with a few of the Whānau committee members and we went through the night market and stayed up late singing karaoke. On Saturday, we went to brunch at a cafe, and then went to a wildlife refuge within the city that was teeming with birds and other creatures. The highlight was getting to hang out with a takahe and some tuataras, lizards from an incredibly ancient lineage of vertebrates that can't be found anywhere else in the world. Unfortunately, I didn't come prepared for the crazy rainstorm that opened up on us while we were hiking. I got soaked through my jeans and windbreaker, and spent the rest of the day in wet clothes as we ate hearty soup and bread at a cafe and flew on the plane back to Auckland. None of that mattered in the end, because somehow going through that experience with the people I'd met at the hui finally helped me start to feel like I can make friends and find the sense of belonging that I've been missing.
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