A rambling account of the current status of my plans to do science in Kiwi Land

As you may, or may not, know, (or possibly don't really care) there is a certain scheme a foot that will take me to New Zealand for a week before I get to Melbourne.  The genesis of this idea came early this fall when Professor Zilm suggested that I do my senior research in the geochemistry department rather than the chemistry department since my interests seem to be moving further and further from the traditional laboratory and more in the direction of working in the middle of the woods and becoming a crazy liberal environmentalist.  That's not exactly what he said, but that is basically what is happening.

This took me on a hunt through the three geochemistry laboratories we have at Yale and brought me finally to the lab of Professor Pagani, who seemed like a pretty cool guy and he had a lot of ideas for me, so I figured I wouldn't be too much on my own.  When I told him I was going to Australia, he jumped at the opportunity to have me do field work in New Zealand and strengthen his connection with the scientists there.  I managed pretty well to not let that influence my decision of which lab to join as I figured the travel aspect will only be one week out of many.  But, I decided to join his lab anyway.  Since making that decision we have gone through multiple different versions of what I am actually going to do once I get to Kiwi land.  I have booked and unbooked hostel reservations, and have narrowly avoided having to call the airline to change a flight that lasts 2 days with 2 layovers. (Version 1.b of this trip had me landing after 35+ hours of not sleeping then driving for 4 hours on the LEFT side of the road.  This version I would refer to as operation 'total your car and yourself along with it'.)

So now that we finally have a plan which I hope will stick, I am looking forward to 3 days of road tripping through the Southern Alps collecting leaves and stream water for science.  I'm still somewhat surprised that this is actually going to happen, especially since there was a point last week where it seemed unclear if I was even going to continue working in this lab.  We'll see how this goes, but at least now I know that I will be meeting someone there who can help me out instead of trying to do this all by myself.  She sent me this email:

Hi Cathy 
I will be joining you at Christchurch Airport on Monday 7th for your field work. 
At GNS we have a health and safety policy that requires us to fill in a Field Intentions Form when doing field work.  So, could you please email me your next of kin details (name, address & phone number) so that I can add them to the form.  
I look forward to meeting you. 
Cheers 


Next of kin?? Gosh I hope this doesn't go that badly! I'm certain she means emergency contact, however she speaks New Zealand English, not American English, and really, they are basically the same thing anyway.  I guess we Americans just don't like to imply that it is a real possibility that you might die so we've created 'emergency contact' as a softer version.  It's funny how tiny differences like that come up so often.  Maybe I only noticed because I was looking for differences.  There is definitely more to a language than just the accent or the words in the dictionary.