Kia ora koutou – I’m back and blogging stateside!  This is a novel experience.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this blog after I got back from New Zealand.  My mom told me to keep writing in it, my dad told me to at least wrap it up, but the Kiwi part of me didn’t want it to seem so final.  So the blog just sort of trailed off into nothingness… until now.

It’s been the classic return-from-study-abroad experience.  New Zealand is all I want to talk about, but understandably not all everyone wants to hear about.  I look at my pictures about as often as I eat or sleep.  But I think I’ve found a more constructive outlet for my nostalgia: I’ve chosen NZed as the topic of my honors capstone thesis.  It’s still sort of free-form, but the end result is going to be a significant amount of writing – hopefully sort of a travelogue thing.  My project mentor is an anthro professor at Geneseo, so I’m also planning on incorporating a lot of information about the Māori culture and its presence in New Zealand.  My resolve to tell people about this truly amazing culture was strengthened this week when seniors had a meeting with the director of the honors program about our capstone projects.  After explaining my project and my hope to focus on the relatively unknown Māori culture, she replied, “Well… it’s not like you went to Kenya.”  Case in point, Dr. Ignoramus.  Case in point.

This blog isn’t only going to be about New Zealand anymore; there are other things in my life.  But hopefully it will be a way to still talk about it when the mood strikes me, and other people can much more easily avoid reading this blog than they can talking to me in person if they’re not feeling Kiwi-inclined.  Everybody wins!  Maybe remembering it this way will help me with my project.  Other than that, this will partially be just a normal blog.  I haven’t really done that before… unless you count the LiveJournal I had in ninth grade, but I didn’t mention much in that other than how much I loved Moulin Rouge and how much I hated history class.  I’d like to think my priorities have changed since then, however slightly.  Let the experiment begin!

Mikaela and I are down three flatmates and having a super lonely last night in O119 – right now, we’re in the gump eating mango sorbet and watching Iron Man 2 – but we just received a little ray of sunshine in the form of a tixt missage from Chelsea, who’s currently awaiting her connecting flight to LAX.  I quote:

“Bret from Flight of the Conchords was just spotted in the Auckland airport!”

THIS IS NOT A DRILL.  She is there.  He is there.  I am not there but I’m at least in the same country.  Before I got here, when I still knew basically nothing about New Zealand, the only thing I really wanted to accomplish was finding Bret and Jemaine.  This is probably as close as I’m going to get, and at this point, I’m willing to compromise.  Thanks, NZed – we’re going out with a bang!