A Recipe for New Zealand

If I had created a “New Zealand Soup” before attending this course it would have probably contained the following ingredients:

• 81 % Stunning nature
• 9 % Different cultures
• 6 % Native animals and trees
• 2% Rugby
• 1% Housing problems
• 1% Earthquakes

These are the kind of things a typical tourist might notice while travelling through New Zealand. And therefore I was also quite surprised when we had started our first course lesson discussing whether New Zealand should have a “100% Pure” tourism marketing campaign, because for me, it was totally fine.

Nevertheless, during the last three months, I experienced a little shift in my “New Zealand recipe”. I learned that this country has to deal with much more frequent earthquakes than I had expected, that the relationship between Maoris and Kiwis is still quite tense due to historical events and that the sentence “houses are really expensive” has a great impact on many families.

Although I wasn’t always too excited to hear about all these problems my appointed favourite country has to face, our group discussions were really helpful to understand the struggle in dealing with these issues. Some topics seemed a little bit easier to solve (e.g. supporting the Maori language with obligatory school lessons) whereas some were just shocking or kind of ridiculous compared to others (housing problems and flag debate). However, I would have also been interested in a lesson referring to the things that make New Zealand such special or different compared to other countries (nature, animals, daily life, houses). But all in all, I have to say that I really enjoyed this course and wouldn’t mind learning something more about this country.