Dunedin NZ Male Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Dunedin NZ Male Conversation

Conversation

New Zealand. Dunedine in New Zealand, bottom of the South Island. But I’ve been in Auckland for the last five years.

Male: Have you traveled around a lot of New Zealand?

Yeah, I’ve seen all of New Zealand, fairly much. Fairly much over the years I’ve been round a couple of times, so… Well, I’ve been in London for the last five months. I’ve only been to Rochester and Bedford with the work, but I’ve been to Portugal, which is good. It’s just so different over there, which obviously isn’t in England, but… Yeah, it’s real nice over there. Most everyone over there speaks fairly good English because, basically, they can’t survive in the tourist industry if they don’t. I don’t think, anyway. Good trip there. I’ve been to Dublin; that was good. But I haven’t seen much apart from Bath.

Male: So what’s this job you’re doing now?

Surveying. Basically we’re, at the moment, we’re just doing topos of roads, topographical surveys of roads, so they can do redesign, and make the motorways better or extend the motorways or do whatever they do with motorways. So it’s mainly roads for this stuff. In New Zealand I was doing housing stuff. So we’re doing subdivisions and all that sort of stuff, and got a lot into high-rise buildings and that as well. It’s stressful, though. Make a cock-up in one of them and it’s, you know, half a million dollars down the drain at worst case scenario. So that’s why I came over here, really. Get away from it. That’s why I took the job in the bar as well. Made me realize how good the job was.

Male: Did you miss it while you were working in the bar?

Yeah, I did. Yeah, I missing doing something that I knew back to front, you know? I was managing the bar, which I’d never actually worked in a bar before, but I met someone when I went in to buy New Year’s Eve tickets for, well, New Year’s Eve, obviously. I ended up getting talking to the manager who was from the same town as me in New Zealand, so, and he offered me a job as assistant manager, so it’s good. He was doing- When he was here he was doing ninety, a hundred hours a week. When I gave up, I was doing seventy hours a week – he just sort of gave it away and let me do the lot, so – and the problem was is you would burn the candle at both ends. You know, you finish work at three in the morning, so you have drinks with the locals, and finish at six or seven and then get up the next day at twelve o’clock with a hangover. Yeah, so…

New Zealander from an Aussie? Particularly in the females they have a tendency at the end of every sentence to raise their voice – raise the pitch of their voice, which in most other cultures is – means that it’s a question. So that’s about it. A lot of the times I can’t tell if an Australian’s a Kiwi or an Australian. Apparently red is the one that you can tell the difference from. I met someone in the bar and they said, “Say red.” “Red, red.” And he said, “Right, you’re a Kiwi.” I don’t know how you tell the difference. I haven’t actually asked an Aussie how to say red, so…

Dunedin NZ Male Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Dunedin NZ Male Conversation

Conversation

You want to ask random questions, but really I just want to talk about myself. I am twenty-five years old, and I am slightly balding which is kind of tough for me because you know God gave me very good hair and you know, now that he's decided to take it away from me, I'm, you know, I'm not sure he knows exactly what he's doing, but I unite myself to His wonderful plan for me in my life. What else is going on?

I'm from New Zealand, beautiful country in the South Pacific and I lived there for the first eighteen years of my life before I came to this country of which I'm not been able to leave due to religious consecration and religious obedience. I’m trying to think of something funny to say but I can't think of anything.

My favorite sport to play is rugby because I had this great position and I was on the side of the scrum. The scrum's like you know, the eight guys and they would like hit each other, you know, but I was on the side so anyway, it hurt, but then I was really loose so there will be – right outside of the scrum, there will be like a first five and then the second five and the third five and then there was like the back line, so it's kind of like the quarterback. Then the running back. So I was right outside of the scrum so I would just be able to nail that guy and I would just – I just loved it because he was pretty much totally vulnerable, and I just got to nail him. I mean it was just – it was fun and it was kind of a glory position because I didn't get hurt too much but I got to score a lot of tries. Yeah, that's good. That's good for me.

Christchurch NZ Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Christchurch NZ Female Conversation

Conversation

Well I'm probably not – they're probably isn't really an aside to the stress. The stress is pretty dominant. So as of last week, I was doing okay. I was doing a lot of reading and getting ready for Christmas, thinking about what Christmas presents to get everyone. So this week, I've decided I'm not going to put up a Christmas tree. I'm not going to do Christmas. I can't be bothered. I might just – I've got friends’ houses to go and stay at so I might just go and stay at – you know, stay at their houses and I'll go and see my mum and dad on Christmas day because my sister who lives out of town, her and her husband and children are going to be – have come down to stay for a week. So I'll be off to going and see them. Yeah, so everything that I normally would be doing, I've not really got the inspiration to do. I haven't really got the energy. Yes, so…

So I've got two boys, Daniel and Morgan. They're twenty-three and twenty and one of them’s a musician and he's in – he’s just finished his second year in drum school and he's going to be majoring in arranging and he's – yeah, he's got time off over the summer break and my other son, Morgan, he's taking time out at the moment. He's actually training to be a personal trainer at the moment and then he's going to go and train as a pilot which is quite a big stake for him. So he's a bit worried that he's – about his health so he's going to have to go to have a test and all of that first because he won’t to be able to come up because it's a lot of money, and he's pretty active, really. And I've got two cats who I absolutely adore their – one’s a – they’re both half chinchilla, half shaded silver and I just got one of them groomed today and the vet had to come around and sedate him because he's a real ratbag. He's really scrappy and so we spent an hour and a half shaving his knots out.

And yeah, and we've got – my son's girlfriend has got a Chihuahua and so she lives here so she's just adorable and we've got two mice as well. Actually my son's girlfriend makes clothes for dogs, and so Tinkerbell wears little frocks and she wears her pearls. It's so very cute. Yeah, I think they'll probably stuck pretty close to me in the next couple of months and I think they're both going to go and get part-time jobs just to help out and Morgan’s actually flying to Auckland this weekend to see David Beckham play. He's the soccer player and – yeah because David Beckham's coming to Auckland – and Daniel, he's addicted to gaming on the internet. That's what he does with a lot of his time and he plays in a band. So that seems to be his life really. Yeah.

Christchurch NZ Female Reading

Christchurch NZ Male Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Christchurch NZ Couple Conversation

Conversation

Female: You gave us a glass of wine, and then we went – we had –

Male: There was two glasses in the bottle from – that we found the bottle store with the – with Krista’s wine.

Female: Yeah, we had a carafe of that, you know, those big carafes you have with a meal. The guy said, “Do you want some Ouzo on it?” They said, “Aw, go on; have some Ouzo.” Okay.

Female2: And did you like it.

Female: Oh, yes I do. Yeah, anis seed. It’s nice, yeah.

Female2: I don’t like it.

Female: No, I would never have it in food.

Male2: I’m not much for the flavor, yeah.

Female: And I would never have thought of a big – It came out on a big tray, two little wee glasses…

Male: Well, we got caught a few times in, um…

Female: Czech Republic

Male: – and that stuff would appear on your table; you think, “Aw, that’s nice.” And then you get the bill for it.

Male2: Really?

Female: Oh, yeah.

Male: Where here, you know, I think it’s quite a – I’ve had to ask – just checking – and it’s, like, been an insult, like, part of their hosting, hospitality is – because the guy said, “Look: The Ouzo’s on the house.” Like, you know, and I thought that, aw, you know, I think that’s – he’s picked up that this tourist doesn’t want it because they’re going to have to pay for it, you know, but it’s all part of the same, the complimentary –

Female: One place in the Czech Republic – it was in Prague – they had music playing and we got charged for the music, like, there was a –

Male: Twenty Euros to our bill.

Female: And then she said, “So what about a tip?” and I said, “No. Now that was the tip.” I felt that was unacceptable. Now that’s their job. And I wouldn’t have minded tipping for that, but not to be charged for it and then asked for a tip. We’ve never been asked for a tip before.

Male: Because when we got to that restaurant, we’re just looking for a main, so we just went to that, you know, to the main section, not all the trimmings, and, so when the bill came with the music on, we – I just grabbed a menu from the other table, and there was a little note in it, but it’s buried in the part of the menu that we never looked at.

Female2: That’s so strange.

Male: So you’d have had to have read the menu right from the beginning to the end to see these add-ons, which should have been right at the front end, yeah, or at least…

Female2: But at least you got a good story out of it. How strange, I mean…

Male2: Kind of an expensive story.

Male: Yes, it was.

Female: And I thought I got unwell from that meal too, I would – and it was a vegetarian meal, but I felt ill the next day, so I just felt like it wasn’t a good place to go. I wouldn’t recommend it. But it was a good orch- ___ because they were sort of a set piece, weren’t they? Three or four guys playing.

Male: Yeah, that was good. Good jazz music.

Female: Yeah, there was nothing wrong with the music. It’s a once in a lifetime…

Male: And we were talking about, like, just before, just walk up there and you’re suddenly part of a wedding and a baptism. Yeah. They’re not planned in your trip.

Female: It was a really small wedding, though. It was only, like, six or eight people at it. I didn’t realize it was a wedding as well; I just thought she’s dressed like a bride.

Male: Cause they kept coming out with all these candles… I thought, families do get dressed up for a baptism.

Female: We found that at, we were at – I think it was at-- in Paris.

Male: Thank goodness I’ve taken a journey – a journal! I’ve taken a journal, and it’s been two months, but it’s a blur!

Female: And there was a band, well, it was kind of like you could come up and sing if you wanted to. They had a microphone, so lots and lots of young singers were up there, and some were playing and some were just singing. And then in the midst of it all, he – because it’s dozens and dozens of steps up to the church – It’s a lovely white church on a high hill, so it’s, like, hundreds of steps, and then through the crowd up the steps comes the bride and groom and – you didn’t know –

Male: No, I didn’t notice.

Female: You were actually holding them up for a few moments because you were actually looking at me to take a photograph of me up in the crowd and I was looking down, so I could –

Male: The husband and wife to be were behind me.

Female: Yeah, so when they came up – and as they came up, the person who was singing immediately switched to “You Are So Beautiful” in a very – just sort of quick enough to see what was happening, and began singing that, and she was waving. It was really lovely and it felt so, kind of, public, but so, kind of like, community at some level, like this international community because in it – there’d be people in it from all over the world that were –

Male: Where was that?

Female: That was in Paris.

Male: Paris, oh, yeah. Well, we’re on a, sort of, bus-about trip somewhere, and the driver – there’s opportunities. People, you know, you could put your earphones on and listen to different channels or DVDs or whatever, but the driver, from time to time, would turn everything else off and play his or her music, and there was two songs in a row from New Zealand. Yeah, modern New Zealand artists, like – wow!

Male2: Who’s really wonderful in New Zealand for music?

Female: For music… from – that we would like from the States, or New Zealand musicians?

Male2: No, for New Zealand musicians.

Female: Well, I’ve said that currently the Finn Brothers would be – they were part of Crowded House, weren’t they?

Male: And before, they were Split Enz

Female2: Yes, because we love Split Enz and Crowded House.

Female: Neil and Tim Finn. They’re two brothers – part of it – have done individual work, and Neil’s son, Liam, is quite a musician on his own rite, so that they’ve kind of become a bit of a group to follow.

Female2: See, I never even knew they were New Zealanders.

Female: Right. Yeah.

Female2: You don’t always know.

Male: Well, yeah, they come up from the south, and that’s, yeah –

Female: Bic Runga would be one of our top singers now. She’s a young mixed Māori and Filipino woman, so she’s stunning to look at and stunning voice. Very breathy. Yeah. I think she writes quite a bit of her own music, so she’s got quite big.

Male: There’s a rap artist called Scribe, native New Zealander, and he’s been big and, well, when you read his stories, he’s, you know, broken – he’s done American tours. And the big band at the moment, as far as, is Fat Freddy’s Drop.

Female2: Fat Freddy’s…?

Female: Drop. Weird name, huh?

Male: So again, that’s sort of –

Female: It’s rap/hip-hop.

Male: Hip-hop/rap, and the other band is Salmonella Dub…

Female2: Salmonella Dub? That’s a great name. That’s hilarious.

Male: But it’s interesting because the rap – you know, the rap/hip-hop has created huge opportunities for indigenous Pacific peoples. Like, it’s absolutely connected into their –

Female2: So they’re grabbing onto that, into their experience as well.

Male: – into their experience, yeah.

Female2: Interesting.

Female: Well, the Pacific young people really followed American black people, didn’t they? Because the groups…

Female2: I’m sure. Well, they had some similar –

Female: Yeah. The whole bit that’s – especially like Samoa, American Samoa, those young people there, and then it went across to the more Pacific culture, and right through Māori New Zealand. It’s very like that now.

Male: The style’s very similar, but it’s their stories. It’s their street story, their poverty stories, their unemployed stories, their oppression stories.

Female: Oppression, that sort of – Injustice. So social injustice runs right through it. Colored liberally with some fairly explicit language at times, not always, but –

Male: Which white New Zealanders –

Female: It turns people off as well, because you hear a couple of those words come out and you go, you wipe the soul. But actually if you listen – I mean, a word is as powerful as you make it, but we give a lot of emphasis to bad language, you know, so that gets a lot of attention, so therefor, people think it’s – it becomes underground because parents don’t like their children listening to that sort of music, so that creates its own culture. And I think black American music’s been like that as well, so it’s the same story done to a – it’s probably the same story – because it’s usually about injustice, you know. Or perceived injustice anyway and it – often it has been injustice. Certain bits, or isolated bits, or…

Male: And what’s been fascinating for me as I’ve, say, tried to follow Scribe, luckily today he’s seventeen or eighteen, he’d been part of street gangs since he was about ten in Christchurch, New Zealand. And I thought, now what was that point of influence that – cause I was listening to him one day talking about it – that said, This is crazy, what’s going on in my life. I’ve got to do something different. And music – so, you know, where did – just who was the person, or that moment, that shifted him out of where – he’s saying he’ll come back to our own area or the eastern suburbs of Christchurch and remeet with those guys who are still in gangs, in street gangs, and warfare and whatever, and out of that one shifts…

NZ Male Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

NZ Male Conversation

Conversation

I was born in Rotorua, which is in the central north island in New Zealand. I grew up in Waikato Valley, which is a small farming community on the outskirts of Rotorua, and I stayed there until I was eighteen. When I was eighteen I moved to Christchurch, which is in the South Island, to study engineering. And I stayed there for around six years. I left just after the Canterbury earthquakes. I moved to Queensland in Australia after that, where I traveled and worked for around six months. When I left Australia, I moved to Mexico for four months, where I traveled, did some sailing, and learned Spanish. After that, I moved back to New Zealand where I stayed for two years working as an engineer in the North Island. And then eighteen months ago, I moved to New Castle, which is in New South Wales in Australia, and that's where I still live today. I hope that in that time I haven't picked up any Australian accent, both for this tutorial and for personal reasons. My friends tell me I haven't, though. So that's good.

Invercargill NZ Male Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Invercargill NZ Male Conversation

Conversation

Rangiora is the place I live these days.

Male: How do you say it?

Rangiora.

Male: Rangiora.

R-A-N-G-I-O-R-A. It’s a small country town of approximately fifteen thousand people servicing a rural area. Born right at the bottom of New Zealand. The closest part to Antarctica.

Male: So what brings you to Texas?

I’ve been coming here since two thousand and one as a visitor. But I used to work for Air New Zealand, and I used to come to the United States from the nineteen seventies through to nineteen eighty. I’m a people watcher. I don’t… I’m not interested in shopping very much. Apart from what you see in quality, as here. But not… I’m not interested in cars or motorways or as you say freeways. But people, I like talking to people. People who tell me they get paid two dollars fifty an hour, that’s a shock.

Male: Yeah. Yeah, I overheard that conversation.

That’s a shock.

Male: Waitresses. Yeah.

I wouldn’t… I mean, I own a couple of trucks now. Big truck and trailers. And so… Someone who gets paid two dollars fifty an hour is… My guys get paid almost forty dollars an hour. New Zealand dollars admittedly, but that’s still about thirty-four American dollars an hour. And they work hard, but you know, I’m retired, and so when I’m down there I do the fill-in work. So I drive perhaps four hours a day, something like that.

Male: Yeah. Is it… I’m not very familiar with New Zealand, is it like… How long would it take to truck stuff across the entire country?

Across or length?

Male: Either way.

We’re a very long country. We run from a almost semi-tropical area. We can grow bananas in the north, right down to the south, which is quite cold and that in the wintertime. Lots of snow. That distance is about, I think it’s about eighteen hundred miles. And across, the longest across would be about s-- eighty miles. So we’ve got the sea on both sides. You’ve got the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia, and you’ve got the Pacific Ocean right ‘round the other part of it. So we don’t have a big… We don’t have humidity for a start. Very little…

Male: Not at all?

Very little humidity. Some in the north, but not a lot. And our sea influences our weather all the time. We have a weather pattern that’s fairly typical. Every three days we get rain comes through from Australia.

Male: Really? And that’s…

Very green place.

Male: Yeah. Yeah, I have a cousin that lives in Australia, and I know Australia’s…

Where abouts?

Male: I’m not quite sure. I haven’t kept up with him in a few years

Well, if you took Florida off the United States, that’s the size of Australia.

Male: Okay.

And there’s twenty-five million people there.

Male: Yeah. Man.

That’s… It’s a vast country. Vast country. I love Australia. I also love the United States.

Male: Yeah. So what’s something you do for fun?

Fly fishing.

Male: Fly fishing?

Yeah.

Male: Yeah? Do you go around the States and do that? Like have you been out to the Rockies and do…

No. No, I haven’t done a lot of fishing in the States. I’ve been out on the Gulf. Did some sea fishing. But no fly fishing. I’d like to, but… time and money and all those sorts of constraints. So I… There’s a lot of good fly fishing in New Zealand, and I mean, we have… I know of a very elderly man now, I think he’s still alive. He comes down to New Zealand from, I think he was living in the Maine, Boston area, somewhere up around there. And he comes down to New Zealand almost every year. And the last time I heard of him, he had a terminal illness that... And I talked to him about it and I said, “What’s the plan?” And he said, “As long as I can fall over on the banks of a river, preferably in New Zealand, with my, clutching my fly rod and my, laying there… and fall over dead,” he said, “I’ll be as happy as hell.” And he was a good man. He was a very… quite an educated person. I’ve had a small stroke.

Male: Really?

When I look at you, I’ve got a small distortion just up there. I’ve got a… I just had a… It was to do with flying, too. It was to do with deep vein thrombosis, which is long-distance flying. I just made some mistakes when I was flying. I wasn’t walking around. Drinking liquids. Drinking…

Male: It’s a long flight, right?

Absolutely. Fifteen hours both ways. Well, the longest I ever did with Air New Zealand was about ten hours with them. And that was… I thought that was enormous. And these guys these days, they’re going sixteen and a half hours to Chicago. From Auckland, New Zealand, right around to Chicago.

Male: And it’s a straight shot. There’s no layover.

Straight shot. And that’s not… I don’t think that’s the longest actually. The longest is going to be Dubai to… I think it’s… Dubai to New York. I mean, there’s some guys, they’re gonna do I think it’s about eighteen hours or something like that. Which tells me something very interesting. First of all, the planes and the engines are in… just the most amazing things, because the frugalness of the engine on fuel is extraordinary. Must be just… These things just sip gas like. When I was sixteen years old, we took off from New Zealand. I had my seventeenth birthday in Sydney, Australia, and we bought ourselves a Ford Falcon station wagon, which is sort of similar to the one you had here in America.

Male: What year was this again?

Sixty-seven. And we drove across Australia. And this was sixty-seven, so half of the journey of going from south Australia to western Australia was done on dust roads. I mean, dust. Not dirt, not gravel, these were just dust. And plenty of it. And it was red. It’s called bulldust. It’s just red dust. And that was just amazing for kids out of New Zealand. I mean, we were just little, green kids from New Zealand. We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know anything about the world.