Home Life in ChCh

Thanks to my amazing Kiwi friend Liz, who is also working on her Ph.D. at Stanford, I've gotten a head-start on some of the common abbreviations and turns of phrase used here in Aotearoa (the Maori word for New Zealand).  For example, "ChCh" is short for Christchurch, "cheers" is pronounced "chiz", and "tea" can mean pretty much any meal, as well as friendly mid-morning and mid-afternoon tea breaks during which we all sit around and chat about life and science, and, as the new kid on the block, I get ragged about American politics.  (I'm going to need to start a glossary pretty soon!)

But before I get bogged down in linguistics, the purpose of this post is to pontificate (OK, Holly, that's enough alliteration for one day) about daily life in New Zealand.  I arrived on Tuesday, January 17, 15-or-so hours after leaving San Francisco on Sunday, January 15.  Wait a minute!  How does 15 hours turn into two days?  Well, New Zealand is both across the Equator, and across the Date Line.  That's right, I'm in a whole new quadrant!

Technically, New Zealand's time zone is GMT+13:00.  But, as I prefer to think of it in relationship to being home in California, I'm a day ahead and three hours behind (or 21 hours ahead, if your brain prefers to compute with double-digits).  If it seems surprising that New Zealand should be only three timezones away (the same amount that Hawaii is during North America's summer), remember that here in New Zealand, we're on daylight savings time, while the United States is not.  So, the time change between California and New Zealand can be five hours (during CA summer and NZ winter), four hours (when no one's on daylight savings), or three hours (right now; NZ summer and CA winter).

But the great thing about the Internet is that time doesn't matter!  Though I have to be careful not to Skype-call Dad (back on the US East Coast) in the evenings here.

Anyway, back on the ground here in NZ... I'm staying with a wonderful (read as: slightly irreverent, incredibly hilarious, and truly warm and generous) couple in Halswell, a suburb of Christchurch (which is the largest city on the South Island -- sometimes shortened to Southland -- of New Zealand).  They've built a beautiful home to their own design, with room for a garden, lots of glass sliding doors to keep the place feeling airy and light, and a couple spare bedrooms for guests.  Since their son just moved to Australia, they had a room free for a tenant -- albeit an orange and black room!

My brilliant orange-and-black bedroom (with baby blue and pink sheets).
The walls not shown are painted black, and the curtains are all black, too!
Since I won't be doing a whole lot of decorating, it's great to have a bright
room to keep the walls occupied, especially since I've been stuck in white-
washed dorm rooms for the past couple of years!

So far, I've really been enjoying my stay, and am starting to feel like one of the family -- as I should, since we're all so casual around here!  (Almost) every day, I find time to go for a run around the neighborhood, and am slowly discovering local gems like a little park frequented by ducks and schoolchildren.  (Because this is New Zealand's summer, most of the kids are off from school until the end of January.)

What a great use for a right-of-way!  (You can see the infra-
structure for the high-voltage lines in the top-left corner.)

A twenty-minute walk (shorter jog, and much shorter bike ride) down the road, there's a shopping centre with banks, a post office, lots of ice cream vendors, and a supermarket.  Luke says one of his favorite things about visiting foreign countries is checking out the different stuff found in the markets, so that's what I did on my first day in town.

Clearly Americans and New Zealanders have very different
taste in their spreads!  But my favorite thing about shopping
here is the chocolate!  It's so much cheaper than in the States.
And naturally, that's why I bought only chocolate on this trip.

So that's home life!  Not too shabby for a graduate student!