Day 5: MUSEUM.

An Englishwoman, a Canadian, and an American walked into a museum.

There's a joke waiting to be made there, but I can't quite make it work. In either case, Helen, Claire and I did walk into the museum and we spent a few hours in its surprisingly expansive exhibits.

I mentioned this earlier, but Auckland feels sort of generic, as far as cities go, and the museum was a weird reflection of this lack of cohesive character. Individually, the exhibits were great (even the one on VOLCANOS!!!!!!), but as a whole I didn't get the sense that this museum needed to be in central Auckland the way, say, the British Museum needs to be in London. Even with the wealth of Maori culture the Museum felt like it was still struggling to find a balance between a few different identities. There's the Maori cultural identity, and the British commonwealth identity, and then it has the Asian/Polynesian influence, and they're all significant, but I didn't get an underlying sense of unity. Granted, I might also get that feeling because there is such an ideological bent to the American story that I can't help but expect some sort of analogue. Where is the rags to riches belief? The source of that annoying American arrogance? Oh right. We're in New Zealand.

I'm sure I'm missing out on nuances or I'm effectively flattening out centuries of British oppression or something, but I do suddenly get the general "Meh, Auckland," attitude Kiwis have towards the city. The rest of the country seems so full of character that it's hard to explain where Auckland took a left turn when everywhere else went right.

Which is not to say that Auckland does not have its ups! They are just not the ups I anticipated!

Anyhow, things that I found interesting:

+ No matter where you are on the globe, if a museum can make use of SHAKING and THUNDER in a volcano exhibit, it will.

+ The largest flightless bird, the moa, stood at 3 meters tall and had no wings. No wings! There was a replica of one at the museum and it is unbelievably weird to see such a large creature with only two limbs. (Not surprisingly, it had massive thighs.)

+ The tuatara (only one of my favorite creatures!) has a chevron pattern of bones where we would have a sternum. It is very cool.

+ The Maori people place a huge weight on lineage and ancestry. I only have a tremendously basic understanding of the Maori, but as far as I know, they command respect through how much mana they have, or how much strength. Mana, in turn, is dictated by whakupapa, or their ancestry. The facial tattoos that the Maori are known for declare their whakupapa, and pretty much everything ties back to the oral tradition and who they are from. The most interesting part, in my opinion, is that this is not restricted to people. They gave lineages and basic phylogenies to plants and animals and minerals around them, tracing back to the earth mother and sky father. If I recall correctly, the most useful plants and animals are given lineages that trace back through significant ancestry, that would not only explain the biology but also the usefulness. They also confer names and respect to special weaponry, and the weapon ceases to become such-and-such's belonging, it takes on a history of its own. It's just one of those things that remain so consistent throughout a culture that I just found it really interesting.

(Corollary: "wh" in Maori is pronounced like an "f.")


AND SO ON.



Finaly, I had an odd moment today where I realized that hanging out with Helen in the middle of Auckland is messing with my vowels. We were talking about plans for tomorrow, and at some point I said something along the lines of, "Well, we have each other's numbers." Except something went wrong with my perfectly American rhotals, and I mushed out something like, "Each othaaas numbaaas." It was obvious enough that all three of us paused for a bit and then pretended it didn't happen. I don't intend on picking up a New Zealand accent, much less an English one, but, dang, it's weird when your mouth starts to do things you don't anticipate.

Tomorrow: Auckland Food Festival! Packing up our smelly things to go to WELLINGTON. (Claire and I have been basically wearing the same pair of pants for the past week. Mmmm. I assure you, we smell great.)