Købe's Adventures Week 2

Købe posing in front of some of the houses in the Christchurch area.

Woolworths is the name of a chain of grocery stores in New Zealand. Not the same as the Woolworths in Massachusetts!

Købe posing in front of the traffic. The cars are driving on the wrong side of the road! It took Købe a little bit of time to get used to the cars driving on the left instead of the right as they do back home. He had to keep reminding himself to look right first and then left before crossing a street.

You can see the city of Christchurch behind Købe. In the distance you can see the Pacific Ocean.

Købe crashing a wedding.

060923 Week Three

It is hard to believe that I will soon start my third week here in Christchurch. It does not feel like I have been here long, but nor does it seem like I have been here for three weeks. Adjustment has been easy, probably because I have moved to new countries twice before and because the language is English. Actually, that English is so widely spoken kind of freaks me out sometimes because I grew used to not being able to understand or to easily communicate when living in a foreign country. It is almost too easy, but I am not complaining.

I have not had any really big adventures yet, so I have decided to compile an email of random observations about Christchurch so far.

Last weekend, I decided to point my bike towards the tall hills to the south of the city which separate Christchurch from the Lyttelton Harbour to the south. There is a tunnel under the hills which is some sort of engineering marvel, but I went over the hill. I mapped out my route on my GPS and just followed the route up the hill. However, the maps that I have seem to think that very steep staircases are roads which was not a problem on a bike, but would have been problematic in a car. Judging by the number of other cyclists climbing the stairs while carrying their bikes, I was not the only one to get caught by the dead end streets that ended in staircases. I was amazed by the number of people out walking and biking along the roads and trails up the hills. It was the first nice Saturday after I very cold winter (so I am told) and Kiwis love their tramiping (hiking). The parks at the top of the hills offered great views of the city below and the Alps in the distance. Definitely a great place to come if you are new to Christchurch and want to see the whole city at once.

Last week I set up a bank account so that my scholarship money could be directly deposited once a month. I have set up accounts in other countries and usually it takes a few minutes. So I was very surprised when I walked into the ANZ branch at the university to inquire about an account and was asked to wait until the teller could check if the bank representative had time in her schedule to see me. The appointment was necessary because the process took about 45 minutes and I only opened a student savings account. All of the banks offer students great deals with penalty free accounts. However, once you stop being a student, watch out! It appears that there are all sorts of charges on accounts just to put your money in the bank. In addition to the account, I got a ATM / Debit card so that I don’t have to carry lots of cash with me to the grocery story any longer. Nor do I have that harrowing few minutes at the register when I am hoping that the total value that I had calculated is correct so that I don’t wind up with too little cash to pay my bill.

I also applied for a credit card to establish a credit history in NZ. Offering credit cards to foreigners with no credit rating is something new for the bank and I was happy to take advantage of it. However, as I had my letter showing of offer showing my annual income from my scholarship, they knew that I had some sort of steady income. The paperwork for the credit card required the bank representative to determine my disposable income. She had to enter in my rent, spending on food, etc. As I had not been here long, I had not yet calculated what I was spending on food so I told her that. She estimated that I was going to spend $50 a week on food. There was another field for how much I was spending at bars or entertainment. She estimated that I was spending $200 a month on beer which is pretty funny considering that is the same as what I spend on food, but as her final numbers showed that I had enough of an income left after expenses to qualify for a credit card, I did not complain.

Købe the cat has been making his way into photographs around the city. For those of you who don’t know Købe, he is a Beanie Baby cat who I have been carrying with me while traveling. I write postcards to my mother’s second grade class and send them photos of the cat posing in different places. That is one well traveled cat. Last weekend, Købe even made it to a wedding, much to the amusement of the students.

You would be very hard pressed to find paper towels in bathrooms here. Instead of paper towels, bathrooms are equipped with those air bowers under which you hold your hands before wiping them on your pants. Throughout the university bathrooms are signs reminding people to wash their hands to avoid spreading infection. It was not until I saw one sign that mentioned avoid spreading infections like SARs that the other signs made sense.

People here take pride in their gardens (lawns to those of you in the US) and the little houses in this area have nice gardens. The grass is kept really short, about the height of the putting greens on a golf course.

Last week, I attended a meeting of the Acoustical Society of New Zealand branch here in Christchurch. The meeting was a tour of a glass plant here in the city which didn’t have much to do with acoustics, but was pretty neat. There isn’t a single glass producer in New Zealand and so all glass is imported. The source of the glass depends on the color desired and the properties such as glass that is self cleaning. A lot of the glass is imported from Indonesia and it is transported in open top, metal containers similar to the ones that you see trucks hauling the world over. Inside of the container are special rigs that hold 8 bundles of glass with ten sheets in each bundle. These sheets are each massive, some of which looked like they were 30 feet x 30 feet. Such large sheets stick out the top of the metal container and therefore when they are transported by ship, the glass containers are put at the top of the stack of containers. This can be a problem if the ship passes under a low bridge in a harbor and there have been cases when whole shipments are shattered when the ship passed under a low bridge.

The glass plant is basically a big distribution center for South Island. Glass is cut by robots into the shapes needed by the customers. They will grind the edges, temper glass (to make it safety glass that shatters if broken) and even make double paned windows. Double paned windows are something new here in New Zealand, but based on the number of double paned windows we saw being loaded onto trucks for shipment, they have taken off. Kiwis tell me that most of the houses here in Christchurch are poorly insulated with only single pane windows. My flat, for instance was only built a few years ago and is cold even now in the spring due to the drafts coming through the large, single pane windows. The theory was that it did not get cold enough to justify the extra cost of building better insulated houses. I wonder too if the idea of inexpensive, plentiful energy from the hydroelectric plants on South Island contributed to this mentality as well. In any case, energy is no longer cheap and renovated houses and new constructions are being built with more efficient materials.

The people in the Acoustical Society are all acousticians working in the Christchurch area. There used to only be one company here, but now there are a lot of one person shops competing for the growing number of projects. I hitched a ride to the meeting with some people who work not too far from the university. On the way back, we dropped off one of the people at his house in the suburbs because he had taken the bus to work which is easy to do here in Christchurch. There are ample city busses that ply the streets of Christchurch and my flat is on a major bus route. At the bus stop down the street, there are digital displays showing when the next bus is coming. I don’t know how common the digital displays are or if they are something special due to the number of students who use the stop. There are even monitors in the library that show when the next bus is due, maybe so that students can study till the last possible moment before they run to catch the bus. There are frequent busses which is quite a departure from Baltimore where you never knew when the bus was coming if it was coming at all (I was bitten by busses that never showed up a few times in Baltimore).

I am usually the first person to be wearing shorts in the spring and the last to be wearing them in the autumn. It is spring here now and I see people wearing short sleeves and shorts, but I am still wearing long pants and jackets when I am not riding. I think that others are experiencing the 70 degree days and relishing the change from winter whereas I am coming from a very hot summer. Either that or people here are like those fabled people in Minnesota who wear shorts in the winter.

Things are still going well here, although I am a bit disappointed to be in town this weekend. The last time that I was in NZ, I had taken the Tranzalpine train up through the Alps. The train stopped at a little town called Arthur’s Pass which is said to offer spectacular hikes. I had hoped to head up there on Saturday morning via the bus. However, the weather in the mountains is unpredictable this time of year with a lot of rain at the low levels and snow up high. The web site for weather only projects the weather out one day which makes planning difficult. So on Friday morning when I saw that the weather was to be nice in the mountains, I tried to book my trip on the buses that cross the Alps to the western side of the island. However, what I had not realized was that this weekend marks the start of vacation for secondary school students and the busses were full. Bummer. I will have to wait till another weekend or until I get a car.

Second hand cars can generally be had here for less than US $1000. The glut of cars is unbelievable and NZ is only second to the US for the number of cars per person. Some days I feel like I am the only person here without a car which I am happy to be except when I can make trips like the one to Arthur’s Pass. I am keeping my eye out and hopefully that will change soon because it will make exploring more fun since I can broaden my range.

I started writing these emails when I was in China over six years ago. A lot of the emails from China and Denmark are archived online on my various websites. One would almost call the sites blogs so I have decided to make it official. I will continue to send out the emails, but you can also find the New Zealand emails posted on my blog at jeffreymahn.blogspot.com. The advantage of the blog is that I also post photographs to match what I am writing.

Cheers,

Jeff

060909 Arrival

In case you missed my last email or are new to the list, I am now a PhD student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

My flights to New Zealand went off without a hitch despite my prior stress over the weight of my bags and the packaging of my bicycle. Security in Boston removed enough of my careful packaging of my bicycle that the frame was pretty badly scratched up with some deep gouges in the frame, but I would not find that out until later. They were strict about that, but amazingly people brought drinks onto the plane out of Boston. They had bought them in the terminal and the crew had missed them bringing them onto the plane.

I had a really long layover of 7 hours in San Francisco, but it passed by quickly and before I knew it, I was on a half empty plane on the way to Auckland. Everyone on the plane who wanted a row to themselves to stretch out had one and I slept well despite Air New Zealand’s attempts to prevent people from sleeping across three seats. The armrests only raised to forty-five degrees which meant that you had to slide under the armrests and deal with them digging into your side if you wanted to lie down. I was glad for the extra space to sleep and to spread out my meals. Although I was ecstatic at the size of breakfast, it was served at 3AM so that we could eat before our 5AM arrival and so the meal did not keep me filled until lunch.

Once in Auckland, I was pleased to pass customs in only fifteen minutes, which was much better than the hour and a half wait that I had faced a few years ago. New Zealand takes the threat of the introduction of foreign species very seriously and last time that I was here, I had to have my boots disinfected because there was a patch of mud on them. My dread about biosecurity wanting to take my bicycle out of the box despite my careful cleaning of the bike proved baseless and I actually wound up chatting with biosecurity for a while before exiting and checking my bags for my flight to Christchurch. It was at this point that things went awry with a flight that might or might not be canceled and with having to collect my oversized luggage along with others who were also bringing skis and bicycles to Christchurch, but it all worked itself out in the end.

As my friend Jessica (formerly of Ecuador, now in NYC, but currently living in Brazil) once wrote, it is one of the best feelings to arrive at an international destination knowing that you have someone waiting to meet you. In this case, Dr. Pearse, my advisor at Canterbury University was there to collect me and my bags to take me to the flat that I had rented till the end of the semester in October. I am currently living at housing just off campus made up of several four story buildings, each with eight suites. Each suite has six bedrooms with a shared kitchen and bathroom. I am going to be honest and write that the idea of this living arrangement scared the pants off of me. I have been living on my own for years now and I dreaded the idea of the loss of privacy and the sharing of bath and kitchen (the later because I am meticulous about my kitchen, something I learned in China where one had to be to prevent contamination from unpurified water for example).

I chose to live in the student housing, called Ilam<> Village after it had been highly recommended to me by an associate professor at Washington University who had just recently graduated with his PhD from the University of Canterbury. I had tracked him down using google and he had been nice enough to answer the myriad of questions that I had about Canterbury University. He told me that Ilam Village was the best place to meet other New Zealand and international students. I saw the wisdom of his advice because if I lived in my own flat off campus, I would know no one but the people in my department. Therefore, I took the plunge and got a room in the suite which has worked out well so far. My flatmates are from China, Korea, the US, Singapore and Germany. They are a mix of final year undergrads, masters students and PhD students. There are two women and four men. I am glad that I am living in the village and I will get over whatever concerns that I may have had.

On my first day, after dropping my bags off at my flat, Dr Pearse took me around the department to introduce me to the people who I will be working with for the next two and a half years. The mechanical engineering department in which I am studying has offices on the fifth floor of a massive, concrete building near where I live. All of the buildings on campus are massive, concrete structures, but they are not as boring as the construction sounds. The campus was built in the 60’s and the architects tried to make unique looking buildings with lots of glass, skywalks and interesting touches.

I share an office on the third floor of my building with one other student. He just recently earned his PhD and is currently doing some consulting work and publishing papers that grew from his research. There are two of us in our corner office as opposed to the eight or more students in the other graduate offices. I suspect that I have a strong advisor to get us so much space. From my desk, I can see the snow covered Alps beckoning from the distance. I suspect that they will be a distraction unless the call to travel there is heeded at some point.

The only problem that I have run into at the university is enrolling. At every other university that I have attended, I arrive, smile, and have a student ID. Here, I need a dozen forms signed. No one seems sure which form I need next and so Thursday was spent running from one office to the next to collect signatures. Key people are on holiday which is delaying my quest for signatures which is problematic. I can not get email access in my office or my flat without a student ID. I can not open a bank account without the ID or get access to my scholarship funds. Pretty much, I am stuck. I have been warned by other students that it took them up to two weeks to finally get enrolled.

My enrollment was completed on Monday, the email was activated on Tuesday and I got email in my flat on Wednesday. I had to wait for enrollment to access the internet because students here must pay for their internet usage by the megabyte transferred and for printing by the sheet. Fast, free internet and the ability to print are supposed to be the perks of being a poor university student and I was shocked to learn that this was not the case at Canterbury. Granted it definitely cuts down on downloading and wasted printing, but it seems drastic.

Other than fighting the desire to go to bed at 6PM, things have been going well. I have found grocery stores close to where I live and pretty much everything else that I need within walking distance. There is even a Kmart nearby, but it is as bad as the ones in the US. I found a Borders for books which is a luxury after having lived in countries where finding books in English was more difficult. However, they paperbacks are expensive! They are easily NZ $20 - $30 each. Even with the exchange rate, that is pricey and far too much for a university student on a budget.

Every time, I approach a street to cross, I repeat to myself, “right then left”. If I do as we do in the US and look left first, I will miss the cars coming at me as they drive on the left side of the road. I waited to painfully reconstruct my bicycle until Friday night and Saturday morning because I did not want to go into traffic until I was used to everyone driving on the wrong side of the road. There is some weird rule in New Zealand about left turns that I will have to look up once I have web access. This whole thing about making right turns from the left lane freaks me out a bit. At least on a bike, if I freak out, I can just hop off and walk my bike across the street. I am learning from other cyclists of which there are many. Apparently, cycling has just taken off here recently and is being well embraced, especially by students. Helmets are mandatory and there are now even bike lanes showing up on some of the streets. Regardless of the laws, I would wear a helmet as I am learning the new traffic patterns.

I have been spending the weekend cycling about and learning the city. A lot of the downtown is familiar to me from the last time that I was here about two and a half years ago. The actual downtown area is not very large and in fact, I suspect the massive park downtown is larger than the main commercial area. Most of the city extends outwards from Cathedral Square which is the focal point and the area with the tallest buildings. The Avon river ambles its way through the city and punting (boating) is commonly seen on the river. The sprawl around the city center is made up mostly of one to two story houses that are rather small in size compared to the US. The older houses around the city center are made of brick and wood and are better built that the newer houses in the outlying suburbs which are said to be very cheaply made. Each house has a small lot with fenced gardens. Trees are everywhere and the mix of palm trees, evergreens and deciduous trees is interesting to see.

Finding my way about the city has been a breeze thanks to the GPS unit mounted to my handlebars onto which I downloaded every street in New Zealand. I can just check out my position on the map and even create routes to follow with turn by turn directions. Thanks to Jeff and Jen for getting me into geocaching and GPS units.

The winter in Christchurch is said to have been particularly hash this year and it even snowed three times in the city. The Alps in the distance (the peaks are about 40 miles away) are covered with snow. The weather is only now beginning to get nice with warm days, but cool nights. People remind me that New Zealand is a small island in a big ocean and the temperature depends heavily on the direction of the wind. Winds from the west have come across the Alps and are usually warm. Winds from the south are coming from Antarctica and needless to say, bring cool temperatures.

One last thing to mention is the drinking water in Christchurch. It is fantastic. I was surprised to hear that it comes directly out of the ground without any sort of treatment. There is no chlorine taste or smell. People tell me that it is a joy to come back to Christchurch to drink the water after traveling to other parts of the island where the water has the chlorine taste. There is a beautiful botanical garden outside of my flat and the Avon River runs about 100 feet from my front door. It is amazing to walk along the river because although it is quickly flowing, it is absolutely crystal clear. You can see straight to the bottom where the plants are waving in the strong current.

Cheers,

Jeff