In 2011, the New Zealand city of Christchurch (Ōtautahi) experienced a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, killing 185 people and destroying property throughout vast areas in the city. Evidence of the destruction was everywhere when we visited in 2023, 12 years later. But, so too, was evidence of a community determined to come back and rebuild. The school where I worked for 21 years had a personal connection to this event. We had students and faculty studying in Christchurch on the

We all know that communication if a two-way street. When you’re in a country where English is not the primary language, you expect to spend time figuring out how to communicate. Funny though, when we visited Lisbon, London, Paris, and Helsinki in the first half of 2022, it was London where we found ourselves most confused. Why? Because it was “our” language, but not quite. As I said to my friends, they spoke English everywhere we went except London! Since November, we’ve

Paul and I have been to New Zealand several times, and we’ve visited some incredible spots in the past. Between 2015 and 2018, we had been to the Coromandel Peninsula, the Northlands, Dunedin, Central Otago, the Fiordlands, the Waikato, Queenstown, Auckland, Napier, Wellington and Marlborough. Because we are now slow travelers, we decided to visit friends in the Waikato first then spend most of the rest of our time in Wellington (5 weeks) and Auckland (4 weeks). But, we want