Posts tagged new zealand
It's not the design of these Sunday-drive posts to simply be a litany of the worldwide march of Google Street View, but it does seem to turn out that way. This week I coincidentally started Keri Hulme's novel (and winner of the 1985 Booker Prize) The Bone People and discovered that GSV had finally reached the Antipodes, and I was thus able to get some sense of the novel's setting—and the town where the author lives—on the remote Westland coast of New Zealand's South Island. There I found this bit of local culture, an austere but well-labeled general store. The roadside forest outside town, meanwhile, is as ferny and wild-looking as one would hope and expect.
Nate: 
repost 
From Polynesia with love
From Polynesia with love
Rugby fan that I am, I find it odd to think of American football teams performing their own versions of the Polynesian pregame haka (here in Oregon I think it was brought over by Hawaiian football recruits). Still, it's a step in the right direction—now they just need to ditch the pads, helmets, and forward passes.
Nate: 
The high school football team in Euless, TX (population 52,900) starts their games by performing the haka, a chanting dance used to intimidating effect by New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team. What’s odd/interesting about this is that the Maori chant was appropriated by the team’s contingent of Tongan players—whose parents moved to the town to work at DFW airport—and has led to a greater sense of acceptance of the Tongans into the larger community. How’s that for multiculturalism?