Ski Trip Cancelled

Due to weather. The Alpine Club was hosting a trip to Mt. Raupehu this weekend. We were planning on staying at their hut, and skiing on Saturday and Sunday (in my case snowboarding). Unfortunately, we got word on Friday that the trip was cancelled because the weather was so bad that most of the runs were going to be closed on Saturday.

The reason I am writing a whole update about this is that I took the news of the cancelled trip rather personally. I was more than annoyed and felt as though I had been left behind in a way. There have been weekends before where everyone has gone off doing things and I have been left alone. This weekend most people are gone a tramp. I know that having a weekend to work on class work is probably a blessing if I want to get any sleep next week, but it didn’t exactly feel like that. This is the time of year when assignments are really piling up because spring break begins in a week.

Part of the reason for my reaction at the trip being cancelled was disappointment because I had been very much looking forward to it. I am the sort of person who secretly wants to throw temper tantrums when things don’t go my way, though apparently I’m told society frowns on that now. But it wasn’t disappointment alone caused my response. I realized that even though I had been feeling secure for awhile and loving it here in New Zealand, part of me is still a little vulnerable.

I really have been feeling a lot more secure and settled in, and I have realized it in the last couple weeks. At the end of last week I wrote this and intended to flesh it out and make it into a whole blog post:

Wow. It has been a month already. How crazy. It’s felt longer though, in a lot of ways. It’s hard to remember that it’s still summer back home. Cars are driving on the correct side of the road now. I’ve even started using words like “carpark,” “keen,” and “reckon.”

One night this week I was walking back to my flat in the evening, and just as I got out of the woods I looked up to see what I see every clear night: the sky ablaze with starlight, the Southern Cross front and center, the Milky Way laying a dull blanket upon brightest part of the sky, and Venus, blazing on the horizon. And I realized then that I longed to stay in New Zealand for a more than a single semester. It wasn’t just the starlight though, it was everything. The people—kiwis and international students, the Alpine Club, my flat, the air, the forest, the sheep, the weather, and everything in between. I know that one day I will have to leave and return home, but that seems like such a strange and alien idea to me now.

And yet, if I were truly settled in, and beyond all the emotional ups and downs of adapting to a new everything, then I wouldn’t have taken the news of a cancelled ski trip quite as I did.

So I guess this is my progress report. I’m pretty well adapted to living in New Zealand now. Almost.