There and Back Again

Today is a post for multiple audiences!  First, the very different world of residence life in New Zealand, followed by visiting the real and awesome Shire from the Lord of the Rings trilogy out in the NZ countryside!

Accommodation Services in NZ
The residence hall experience (known as a hall of residence here) here is pretty different here than in the United States (and I'm not referring to New Zealand's seemingly indifferent attitude when it comes to heating).  First and foremost, over 80% of the student body is from Auckland and as a result are commuter students.  Many live at home since it doesn't make financial sense to live in a hall of residence when they can continue to live with their families.  A majority of the students who do live in halls of residence are generally from the rest of New Zealand or from out of the country itself.

Originally, residence life (known here as accommodation services) wasn't a university priority.  Kind of like how the '80s didn't hit Canada until the '90s (see video below), the university eventually chose to make the development of accommodation services a priority after seeing the benefits of such experiences for their students, with much of their data showing that a majority of the most satisfied first-year students were ones that were in halls of residence and viewed their experience favorably.  Now they want to keep expanding, but run into problems of funding and where to put them in a downtown metropolitan area (it doesn't exactly scream "room for campus expansion").

Just like in Canada, trends take awhile to travel the world.

 
Last week, I got to go on a tour of several of the campus residence halls (known here as halls of residence) that are geared primarily towards first-year students.  Unlike U.S. universities of Auckland's size and location, there is no 24-hour manned desk in the residence halls (although staff are available during business hours).  There are still RAs on duty, but each hall staff has a different system upon which they operate.

This leads to another aspect of campus that's significant to talk about: autonomy.  Many entities in within the university structure here are highly autonomous and develop their own ways of accomplishing required tasks or goals.  Going back to residence life/accommodation, each residence hall staff (director and RAs) work off of their own models of student support and programming rather than there being a university-wide system for accommodation programming.  This means that different halls of residence can have very different forms of satisfaction as well as different outcomes.

A unique hall of residence on campus is the recently-built University Hall.  The building and operation of the hall is outsourced to Campus Living Villages (CLV), a company that works in cooperation with colleges and universities around the world to provide new housing for college campuses without the campus needing to divert large amounts of funds, time, and resources to such a project.  Essentially, you contract out an entire residence hall. 

Sidebar:  A policy in this hall of residence is that consumption of alcohol is only allowed to take place within common areas, meaning residents are not allowed to drink in their rooms.  Since this policy is essentially the reverse of traditional policies I've seen in the U.S., so I figured it was worth mentioning.  (You may engage in a heated debate in the comment section below).

Basically, the hall director and the RA staff for the building are employed by CLV and report to them, while also reporting to those who work in Accommodation Services.  Accommodation still controls filling the hall, while CLV staff take care of all day-to-day and programming responsibilities for the hall.  It's definitely an interesting model, and one that Auckland was interested in because of their desire to improve the quality of service to all of their halls across campus.

There's more I could discuss on this, but I'll leave it for another time.  And now for an adventure in Hobbiton!


There and Back Again
Last weekend, I took a day trip out to the small town of Matamata , where just outside of it lies the actual place where the Shire was built for the Lord of the Rings (LoTR) trilogy.

Matamata's definitely embraced Hobbiton as a tourism
draw, as indicated by the creepy Gollum statue.

When the Shire was first built on the farm outside of Matamata, it was built with a lot of fake plastic and materials designed to be temporary, since it was only going to exist for the duration of LoTR's filming.  When there was a delay in tearing down the Shire set on the farm, people started visiting the location to see all of the Hobbit Holes still built into hills, and thus the idea for Hobbiton as a place to visit was born!  Once filming for "The Hobbit" was given the green light, the entire Shire was fully rebuilt with much more permanent materials with the idea that it will exist for as long as it can following the conclusion of filming for both Hobbit movies.

Everything you see is real.  That's just how incredible this place is.

The film crew actually took the time to build this Hobbit Holes into the hill.  Now, the actual filming that takes place inside houses like Bilbo's still takes place in studio sets in Wellington.  However, there's enough space beyond the door for a couple of people to walk into the houses and close the door behind them for when they are filming outside.  We were toured around the entire village, and as we arrived at a given place, we found out which scenes were filmed there and were shown exactly how the scene was filmed on the spot we were standing (such as Gandalf arriving in the Shire and Bilbo's birthday party.  To say this was cool would be like saying "One does not simply walk into Mordor." 

It was amazing how real the village and Shire looked, as it was all completely revamped within the last year and a half to do filming for The Hobbit.  Getting to walk up to Bag End and see the big (and surprisingly fake) oak tree above it was awesome.  The gardens in the village, however, are very real, and are actually tended to by four full-time garders, in addition to helping maintain various parts of the Shire and protecting it from any harmful weather.

You knew a picture like this was going to happen.  I can't help myself.

With a little under four weeks before my return to the states, I'm quickly thinking of what things I will do during the remainder of my stay here in NZ.  A trip to the South Island (Queenstown and Milford Sound, in particular) has already been booked, and I'm excited to find a couple more things to do before having to leave.  And so, that's all I've got, except for a nice up-close picture of Bag End.  Ciao for now!

I know I'll be ready to take "An Unexpected Journey" in December...