Thanks to Earth's tilted rotational axis and some brilliant planning on my part, I have a 32-day gap between the end of my classes and my flight home to enjoy New Zealand's summer scene. My dorm will close, so I have no choice but to take a road trip around the country. Tough luck, I know. I'll be joined by Thorvald, my Danish classmate from CBS, as we experience glow-worm caves, bungee jumping, zorbing, the sheer excitement of sheep-shearing, and some of the world's most dramatic scenery. We agreed that the best way to travel with flexibility and convenience is to buy an inexpensive car and sell it as we leave. I'm of the opinion that this is a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and I want it to be accompanied by a once-in-a-lifetime car. I've done some preliminary shopping, but I wanted to do my due diligence and make sure I make the right decision. Here are a few candidates:
1. 1991 Toyota Sera ~$750
Cons: Body damage on rear-right quarterpanel. Small 1.5L engine. Actually, small in general.
Pros:
It has effing gullwing doors. Short of a Lamborghini, this is the best way to cruise into our youth hostels' parking lots in epic style.
2. 1986 Daihatsu Mira ~$500
Pros: Past commercial usage indicates that we always mean business. Low 72,500 km mileage (...kilometrage?). Spacious rear cargo area for our luggage, friends, or a hot tub. Cons:
That's the engine. And that isn't where it belongs.
3. Arrow AX8-KT100 ~$1000
Pros: Convertible. Combine with costume party to create Mario Kart reenactment. Mouth may be held open while driving to provide supplementary meals. Cons: Fitting 2 people and 100 lbs of luggage on it. Clearing any barrier higher than 2 inches.
4. 1990 BMW 318i $(Best Offer)
Pros: Racing tuned. Spaceship-esque cockpit. Included back-up set of wheels and tires enables (over)aggressive driving. Could easily but illegally reduce transportation time by half.
Cons: You can outrun debt collectors and jilted lovers, but you can't outrun the law.
5. 1986 Toyota Hiace "Death Van" ~$900
Pros: Bullethole decals provide instant "street cred." Optimal vehicle in the event of spontaneous zombie attack. Thorvald loves heavy metal. As the seller described, "Can cart the coffins of deceased loved ones around." "The photo was taken in May of this year. It was at a park in Nelson at a wedding. The speakers on the ground because they are blasting out Black Sabbath tunes while we wait for the Bride. You can use it at your wedding!" Cons: May be mistaken for rapists. Loose wires could result in shocking problem. Interior beat harder than Rihanna.
6. 1966 Abbott FV433 $(Best offer)
Pros: Front-mounted 105mm Howitzer with 18.3 mile range ensures that road rage will be vindicated. Recently passed inspection. Treads render inaccessible areas accessible. Amphibious kit included. No matter how far you go, you've always got a full tank. Cons: Mildly intimidating and slightly conspicuous.
When I get a degree, get a job, and get settled, I plan on enjoying luxuries my last four years of travel haven't afforded. Two main things are on this list: a subscription to National Geographic, and a dog. Both of those things are pretty normal, but I'm not a huge fan of that. Normal is boring. Anybody can do normal. There's not much I can do about NatGeo, that's a pretty standardized item. But the dog...well, there we have some leeway.
My classes start in 2 days, and I should be reading a document entitled "Cross-Hedging Your Security Portfolio with Futures Contracts." That's exactly why I'm dog shopping instead. I was originally thinking about a Newfoundland. A family I used to babysit for had one, and that thing was awesome. Well-mannered, loyal, relatively sedate, and the novelty of its enormous size came standard. I looked into the topic a little further though, and something else caught my eye. There's a dog with very similar characteristics, shorter hair (less shedding!), and even more massive size. It's called the English Mastiff, and I would love to cruise around the neighborhood with this thing in my back seat:
I'm no mind reader, but I'd wager that right now you're considering how impractical that dog is, on many different fronts. Practicality is boredom's less-attractive stepsister. If my job doesn't require ridiculous hours or excessive travel, I'm getting me one.
In the fall of 2007, I was presented with an opportunity that would truly change my life. The globe program, which allowed me to visit 18 countries and 3 continents over an 8 month span, forever changed my perception of the world and yielded some friendships I'm sure will be lifelong. But opportunity sometimes comes with a price, and globe certainly did. The traditional path of an undergraduate business major involves a summer internship between the 3rd and 4th years, potentially (typically) leading to a full-time offer. Financial institutions fill between 70 and 90 percent of their entry-level positions with interns. Globe students would be studying abroad in Hong Kong during that summer. The two were mutually exclusive. Some kids accepted into the program chose the internship and dropped out. One now works at Goldman Sachs, another at Morgan Stanley, two of the most competitive, prestigious Wall Street firms.
At that time, my international experience was limited to a two-week trip to Italy in 7th grade. I knew I had the rest of my life to work, I wanted to see the world, and Globe wouldn't look half bad on a resume. I could still get a job, right? Wrong. Those same firms offering internships indirectly caused the financial crisis that, quite literally, left the world's economy retarded. Then, in response to their own blunder, they stopped hiring. They honored the full-time offers extended to the previous years' summer interns (as they should have) and locked the doors. I watched classmates and friends with inferior academic credentials head off to the jobs I wanted. That's not to diminish them, I just feel I could have been among them had I taken that route. And I don't pretend to be alone in this, the other 14 members of my program faced an equally grim job market. Most were able to find employment of some kind, but few found the same opportunities afforded to similarly qualified students the previous year. My last bastion of hope, Wachovia, was bought by Wells Fargo 2 days before my final round interview. "Don't call us, we'll call you," they said.
Even then, all hope was not lost. I got an incredible opportunity: get paid to live in a place that I absolutely love, get a Master's degree, and change pastures while the grass regrows. Sold.
Everybody knows "that guy" at a party that picks up a chip, dips it, bites it, then dips the slobber-ridden edge back in the salsa. The double-dip is a tremendously unpopular faux pas. Unfortunately, by most analyst accounts, the economy is about to do just that. One model, which has actually been relatively accurate in the past, predicts a stock crash during September and negative economic growth in the second half of 2010. Funny, those are the exact circumstances I faced two years ago.
I'm a believer that one's first job plays a considerable role in the overall trajectory of a career. I want to start off strong, but it seems as though the invisible hand of the markets serves only to bitch-slap the crap out of me. I honestly don't know what to do. My options are far more limited this time around. Continuing education gets dicey...I could go for a PhD and defer private sector entry even longer, but firms don't typically hire doctors with no work experience. And I've been more or less transient since I left for globe. With the exception of my senior year at UNC, I haven't spent more than 6 months in the same country. I'm craving a sense of permanence and some disposable income. I feel so incredibly capable of performing, and performing well, for anybody. But like the geeks at the middle school dance, it's hard to get the pretty girls to reciprocate...especially when the football team walks through the door every time you make your move.
I wouldn't trade my globe experience for a corner office at Goldman Sachs. Still, I can't help but survey my current situation and wonder what the heck to do now.
The two countries do stand differentiated regarding native heritage. Future Australians crossed a series of land bridges in a single, large migration to arrive from Southeast Asia somewhere between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago. These people must have annoyed the crap out of each other en route because geographic dispersion on arrival resulted in hundreds of individual colonies and 250-300 different languages. Colonies developed unique cultures, but all retained facets present prior to divergence, most notably the metaphysical concept of "Dreamtime." Dreamtime refers to a parallel, cyclical plane of existence that transcends perceived reality. Occurrences in this sea of souls shape and govern a tribe's social values. Of course, some are more capable of tapping into this spiritual realm than others. Religion often serves to stratify the masses, and Aboriginal dogma is no exception.
The association of music with The Dreaming led to the development of "song lines," melodies synonymous with certain emotions or feelings. Historians hotly debate which came next: accompanying instrumentation, or the first season of Aboriginal Idol. Many tribes began using clapping sticks (banging two sticks together) to accompany their song lines. The first didgeridoo was fashioned shortly thereafter, probably in an attempt to drown out the incessant percussion of clapping sticks. The two were found to sound quite nice together and became staples of ceremonial rites.
New Zealand was void of mankind until Polynesian settlers arrived around 1280. A small group of people boarded an even smaller group of oceangoing canoes and paddled over a thousand miles to an empty island. And nobody knows why. I've plumbed the pipes of the internets and used the google, and all I've unearthed are rather pedestrian hypotheses about food shortages and tribal disputes. I have my own theory that these people were discontent with their customs and, quite frankly, considered everybody else a bunch of weirdos. That would explain why they left and dubbed themselves Maori, meaning normal, upon colonization. Researchers insist that the name implies acknowledgment and humble disassociation from the divine, but I like my explanation better.
One of the most interesting and atypical things about the Maori is their cultural influence in New Zealand. Since America has either eradicated or marginalized its natives, this influence, to me, is incredibly pronounced. In 1840, New Zealand was composed of 100,000 Maori and 2,000 Europeans. In 1896, those numbers had changed just slightly: 42,113 Maori to over 700,000 Europeans. Sociologists assumed a distinct culture was untenable due to integration with the West, but the Maori countered by assimilating some Western elements while differentiating and exposing their own. The result has been several prominent Maori politicians and the addition of Maori to New Zealand's list of official languages (joining English and sign language) in 1987. Government offices, schools, and most business list names in both languages. Apparently there were petitions to add sign language as well, but no one showed up at the hearings. Several star players on the national rugby team are Maori, and the team performs an iconic war dance, the Haka, before every match. You can see from the Youtube video that "Haka," roughly translated, means "Woman, where's my dinner?" As a minority subgroup, they're still socioeconomically depressed, but I can't help but feel like mainstream cultural prominence is a strong road to equality.
I'd long considered New Zealand to be the Tonto to Australia's Lone Ranger: always nearby and in some ways more exotic, but largely irrelevant and likely conceived to keep the solitary star company. Apparently I'm not the only foreigner harboring this perspective. School orientation for international students included an entire subsection designed to illustrate the many (subtle, very subtle) differences between these two entirely independent, completely non-overlapping, individual, autonomous landmasses. In an effort to dispel some vicious cultural stereotypes, I've decided to create a field guide that expands upon this concept. The guide begins with a video providing a brief overview of the topic at hand, before narrowing down and focusing on specific areas of frequent cultural confusion.
Geography and Colonization
The average distance between New Zealand and Australia is roughly 1400 miles (slightly greater than the distance between New York, NY and Miami, FL), clearly large enough to warrant disassociation. The two countries were even discovered by completely different people. Willem Janszoon first stumbled upon Australia in 1606 and, mistaking it for a continuation of New Guinea, returned to the Netherlands and called his discovery (of Australia, mind you) Nieu Zeeland after the Dutch province of Zeeland. The name didn't stick, but his voyage was enough to inspire countryman Abel Tasman's return to Australia in 1642. Tasman mapped much of Australia's coast and discovered modern day Tasmania in addition to a separate pair of islands he inventively named Nieu Zeeland. This time, it stuck. Colonization too happened for completely different reasons. The first Australian colony was founded by Britain in the 1780s as a dumping ground for political prisoners and repeat offenders. The first New Zealand colony was founded by Britain in the 1830s to address reports of lawlessness and overzealous adventuring, probably by the same idiots initially banished to Australia.
Fauna
Australia
When dealing with an animal indigenous to Australia, bear this important tenet in mind: it can probably kill you. Even if you're Steve Irwin.
Kangaroos I debated whether or not to even mention the kangaroo due to its widespread notoriety, typically in situations where a token reference to Australia is due. Still, there are some interesting elements of these marsupials worth repeating.
Size: The Red Kangaroo, largest of the four primary species, stands roughly 6' 7" tall (2m) and weighs up to 200 lbs (90 kg).
Habitat: Various species reside throughout the entire Australian continent, but there are no wild kangaroos in New Zealand. None. Don't ask a New Zealander if they have kangaroos; they don't.
Predators: Most prehistoric predators of the kangaroo became extinct, allowing the species to briefly flourish before the arrival of man and man's best friend, the Dingo.
Locomotion: Kangaroos are the largest animals to utilize hopping, but evolutionary adaptations have made it an incredibly efficient form of propulsion. Spring-like tendons, as opposed to muscles, in the hind feet launch the animal forward at top speeds of up to 45 mph (70 kph).
Mating: Female kangaroos, like most women prior to industrialization, remain pregnant throughout their entire fertile lifespan, taking a break only on the day they give birth. Since the gestation period is shorter than the developmental period (where the "joey" is in the pouch), females can support 2 joeys at once by producing separate milk for each and even regulate the gestational period by a biological mechanism called embryonic diapause.
How It Can Kill You: Kangaroos have a right hook that would make Mohammad Ali blush and a roundhouse kick with the added effect of disembowelment (via claw-like toenails). Chuck Norris can't even do that. If all else fails, they're strong swimmers capable of dragging pursuing prey into deep waters and, using its arms, drowning it.
Fun Fact: the aboriginal Kurnai fashioned stuffed kangaroo scrotum into balls used for their tribal game, marngrook.
Koalas Another marsupial, the Koala is actually not a bear at all. Its appearance and severely stunted brain make it the animal equivalent of that cute girl that's just too much of an airhead to date. The giant koala (now extinct) predated its contemporary by about 50,000 years and apparently had much more going on upstairs. Scientists link modern koalas' cognitive retrogression to a change in diet from now-extinct rainforest flora to nutrient-poor eucalyptus leaves.
Size: Koalas range by species and gender between 11 and 31 lbs (5-14 kg). The brain comprises just .2% of total body weight. Homo sapiens have roughly 10 times that ratio, and I've still encountered some really, really unintelligent people. The koala's cranial cavity is almost entirely fluid, with 2 nut-sized brain hemispheres (that aren't even wired to interact with each other) perched atop the stem. Such a relatively minute control center makes the koala, along with the ostrich, one of the planet's "simplest" land animals.
Habitat: Southeastern Australia, in moisture-rich woodlands. There are no wild koalas in New Zealand. None. Don't ask a New Zealander if they have koalas; they don't. Predators: Adult koalas have few natural predators. Man has proven to be their biggest threat, and koalas were nearly hunted to extinction in the 1900s for their fur. Koalas also face microbial predators in the form of chlamydia (yes, chlamydia) and other diseases. Locomotion: Though usually arboreal and mindlessly munching eucalyptus, they're rather slow quadrupeds when moseying from tree to tree.
Mating: Koalas are actually twice as likely to get chlamydia than humans. This is because, unlike most women prior to industrialization, there are two plugs and two outlets involved. Forked man-bits lead to twin uteri in the female, doubling the likelihood of conception and contraction.
How It Can Kill You: Koalas have large, razor-sharp claws and opposable thumbs for gripping tree branches. They can actually cause significant deforestation by scraping off all the bark as they climb. They're passive and entirely benign, but trouble is, with an IQ of 4, human limbs looks just as good as a branch.
Fun Fact: Should you ever find yourself accused of a crime based on fingerprint evidence, it may behoove you to insist that the culprit was a koala. Their fingerprints are so close to humans' that the two are often indiscernible.
New Zealand
New Zealand's animals, in contrast to their Aussie neighbors, are entirely benign. Most appear, instead, to be purposeless accidents conceived and tested in God's workshop for amusement purposes only. This probably explains why they're confined to the world's most isolated locale.
Kiwis If Australians are Aussies, New Zealanders are Kiwis. While it may be a country of full of fruits, the actual Kiwi namesake is derived from a flightless bird endemic to the country. Prior to the introduction of invasive species, New Zealand's only mammals were 3 types of bat. Other organisms grew to occupy the void in this ecological niche. Enter the kiwi, an even more awkward relative of the emu with feathers more useful for fur than flight. I have no clue why a nation would choose to identify with this languid blob of fureathers. America's bald eagle is a stately predator with so much confidence it skips the toupee. It's the regal eagle. In New Zealand's bird, we have something so evolutionarily inept, it can't even figure out what it wants to be covered with.
Size: The largest of the 5 species grows to about 18 inches (45 cm) in height and weighs between 5 and 7 lbs (2.3-3.2 kg).
Habitat: Kiwis are primarily nocturnal and reside in the coniferous and beech forests that litter both the north and south island. They once inhabited the entire country, but deforestation has driven them into endangerment.
Predators: Kiwis' rather bizarre developments can be attributed to the lack of natural predators prior to the advent of man. In 1989, a single loose dog killed nearly half of the 1000 birds inhabiting a nearby forest.
Locomotion: They run, often covering the extent of their territory (several football fields in size) in a single night. They also dig, since that makes perfect sense, constructing burrows and even labyrinthine underground tunnel networks beneath the forest floor.
Mating: Like penguins, kiwis mate monogamously for life, often 20-30 years. The female is physically and behaviorally dominant, often with a little domestic violence thrown in. Between June and March, the couple shares the same burrow every third night, but sing distinctive duets while foraging nightly. The egg, relative to body size, is the largest of any animal. A 5 lb female may lay a 1 lb egg. Ostrich eggs, by comparison, are roughly 2% of body weight. To provide sufficient nutrients, the female must consume three times as much food as normal, but the size of the egg makes this difficult as the stomach eventually becomes crushed, forcing fasting.
How It Can Kill You: It can't. But they are fiercely territorial, and peck-and-run attacks have been reported by unsuspecting (and undoubtedly bewildered) humans.
Fun Fact: Unlike most birds, kiwis have a keen sense of smell. Their nostrils, of course, are located at the tip of their unusually long beak. Embedding was disabled, but click here to see a pretty cool youtube video on kiwi preservation.
Coming up in part 2: heritage, culture, and industry
Two things...first, I promise to have a proper entry up in the next couple of days. Keep an eye out for that. Second, I felt compelled to comment on what I just saw on cnn.com. Here's a screenshot: I was on the international site, to be fair, but I think I can still summarize these 14 articles succinctly: Some people died all over the world, more are in position to die, others narrowly avoided death, and a South African with a spell-check defying last name won the British Open.
By all accounts, keeping up with current events is a great way to stay informed and develop global perspective. But who honestly wants to read this? Some kids surviving a flood is a feel-good story, and seeing Tiger Woods fail does illicit a small nod to karmatic justice, but the overwhelming morbidity is just sickening. There are 7 billion lives and an infinite number of inhuman happenings to pull stories from at any given time. Is this the best that one of the world's largest news agencies can do?
As an addendum, I researched CNN a bit and discovered that they're in the midst of a ratings slump and actually losing their best, longest-standing anchors to competing agencies (see http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62I02R20100319). If they're looking for a way to turn it around, I think I may have a few suggestions.
Ben Jones holds a Master's Degree in Economics and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School and a Bachelor's Degree in Business Administration from the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. He currently works for a major construction machinery manufacturer and tries to stay current on macroeconomic affairs.
