ROSEMARY ABBOTT | World
YOU SHALL NOT ASK
Hannah Smith, 26, has been enjoying her OE for the best part of a year now, but had been growing tired of the constant barrage of questions about her home country being the movie set of Lord of The Rings.
The Peter Jackson directed trilogy, which was filmed in New Zealand more than 20 years ago, always seemed to come up in Smith’s conversations with foreigners around Europe.
However Ms. Smith was able to reach something of a milestone during her time in Berlin. The born and bred Wellingtonian went a whole week of travel there without locals even mentioning the trilogy.
“When I mentioned to some of the locals that I’m from New Zealand, I wasn’t met with the usual, ‘Oh beautiful scenery, I loved how it looked in Lord of The Rings’ blah blah blah. Maybe they’ve finally moved on from The LOTR craze?” hypothesised Smith, who had been growing sick and tired of explaining that Kiwis don’t all live in hobbit houses.
“Usually when someone hears my accent they go ‘Hey aren’t you from New Zealand? That’s where they filmed Lord of The Rings!’, which is where I have to explain to them that New Zealand’s got a bit more to it than just those movies from the early 2000s.
“It was quite nice to just talk about the All Blacks instead of Gandalf and Frodo for once.”
It appeared that Smith was in a relaxed state, and no longer felt the need to brace herself for chat about hobbits and orcs. “Well it has been nice to just talk about my country as it actually is in real life, and not have it referred to as “Middle-earth”.
More to come.
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