Cup o' Tea

I have found that my fellow kiwis and I have heaps in common. We watch similar American television shows, we enjoy common forms of socializing, we like to eat chocolate and pizza (separately, although now that I say it, a chocolate pizza sounds delicious!), and so on. However, I am still confronted with instances where I feel completely and utterly "different" than my New Zealand counterparts, due to a lack of shared experiences. One such example of this gap occurred in my Maori class just the other day when a guest lecturer came to speak to us about traditional Maori attitudes to land. He was attempting to stimulate our understanding by connecting examples from our assumed everyday lives to some of the land concepts. But you know what happens when you assume...

His example was this,

"Do you remember when you were younger, and every day you would run home for afternoon tea? Sometimes you would bring your mates home, and someone else might bring their mates home as well. So the mums were never quite sure how many people would show up, and would worry about if everyone would get an equal share of the pie. That is why mums use a circular dish instead of a box, so everyone would get a bit of the juicy and a bit of the crust--exactly like the Polynesian philosophy of land division!"

He lost me at afternoon tea.

Then he lost me further when I thought about all those poor mums slaving over hot New Zealand ovens every single day baking huge pies for children who might not even show up, or worse, bring a bunch of their uninvited piggy "mates" to devour the object of her kindness and then be ungrateful if there wasn't enough good bits of pie!!

Ignoring my inherent womanly need to sympathize with the mothers for the moment, the concept of land division to reflect equal division of resources was not hard to grasp, nor was the concept that pies should be made in circular tins instead of boxes so that everyone has the same type of slice.

But I still left class examining the other students in awe. In my mind I saw them all dressed in Victorian garb, running in their little knickers and shiny shoes home to large apron-wearing "mums" who sat them down while they sipped tea with outstretched pinkies and nibbled on sandwiches far too small to ever appease my appetite. It seemed to me as though we were a completely different people--they were the kind who drank afternoon tea every day and I was from the type who as a child ran home to watch Arthur every afternoon. It was perplexing.

While I have since come to realize that of course there are more than the afternoon tea and non afternoon tea types of people in this world, I still find the lack of perceivably common ground that is present here interesting. New Zealand may be quite Americanized in its outpouring of pop culture, but at its heart it maintains a vibrant unique New Zealander-British-Maori mix of cultures that leaves much to be newly experienced for a person from any background.

Cheers!