Quick! Everyone run around like headless chickens!


(animation shamelessly stolen from Checkers, who I think stole it  equally shamelessly from Emmaco...)


Quick background for foreigners (aka 90% of my flist): Maori, otherwise known as Te Reo, is the language of New Zealand's native Maori people. As a direct result of European governance since 1840, the language came very close to extinction in the first half of the 20th Century and is only recently gaining some ground. Stats say about 130,000 of Maori adults can converse about everyday things, but only 18,000 speakers are 'fluent'. Maori Language Week is a government initiative and has been running since the 1970s.


So, understandably, the Maori Dept. at Uni has been going berserk ALL WEEK doing stuff to promote my favourite second language, in the hopes that MOAR PEOPLE WILL SPEAK IT ONE DAY. As a FIRST language even.*
Fun activities for the week included a faculty-wide debate in Maori (debating one of the wuuunderful suggestions of the Maori affairs minister, pai kare...), kapa haka demonstrations in the centre of town, a hangi (a proper underground one, ohhh nom nom nom) and, as 20% of my assessment for this trimester, going into a primary school to teach Maori to a class.
Let me elaborate on that: TEACHING A CLASS OF 28 HYPED-UP ELEVEN YEAR-OLDS. FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF. I take my hat off to y'all who deal with hordes of middle-school kids all day for a living. I couldn't do it.

 

Oh, and in honour of Maori Language Week, click here for an internet game about traditional Maori marae. It amuses me. You can click the language toggle at the top of the pane to change the instructions into English (if you really want :-P)

I totally considered writing this whole thing in Maori, but the grammar!fail I would cause gave me a headache. Safer this way :D
I whakaaro ahau me patopato i enei whakaaro i roto i te reo, engari i mamae taku mahunga mo te whakaaro o taku wetero koretake. He mea haumaru ake tenei :D

The powers that be at my University have lost their minds.

Today I tripped into the city to return my library books, and realised that something was very wrong in my former safe haven. The University library has two staircases, one of which is open to the library floor and covers three levels, and one behind a door that covers all floors.
In the first, open staircase, as I climbed up the curving steps, admiring my favourite view, I was assailed by an unidentifiable, insect-like high-pitched whining noise, which turned out to be emanating from strange sucker-like things attached to the curving glass exterior wall that half-encloses the staircase. 'Ouch, my head,' I thought, and then 'must be some kind of strange meteorological thing.'
Things began to get weird when I reached the top of the open staircase and switched to the enclosed one. Jogging my way up to the sixth floor, my eardrums were pummeled by rhythmic thumping and clicking noises. 'Some kind of structural repair work with high-pitched instruments?' was my next guess. 'I hope they're done soon...'

On my way out of the library, I asked the issues desk librarian what was going on. I think my exact phrase was "that horrible noise in the stairs". She replied 'Sound Installation', which told me precisely nothing, and pointed me at a notice attached to the wall.

I read it.
I read it again.
This was no irritating but necessary interruption to be endured - it was 'aural architecture', a.k.a some kind of satanic torture dreamed up by the School of Music students to torment the rest of us who have EXAMS and need the library  - let me repeat that, the UNIVERSITY LIBRARY - to STUDY in.
Apparently it is meant to remind us of the aural landscape outside and the wider world which is obviously passing we sad cloistered students by.

ARGH. Aural Architecture? Hamiathes' hiney (to borrow a phrase from TLE Checkers*), the world is against me.


* I stand corrected