Everyone Knows Someone From Lord of the Rings, And Other New Zealand Fun Facts

Tomorrow is Waitangi Day - which, as you likely don't know, is a national public holiday in New Zealand to commemorate the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (if you want to know more, attend any kind of school in NZ). So I thought, what better way to celebrate than tell you a few home truths about the country I've lived in for my entire life. Because you've always wanted to know more about New Zealand. I suppose.

1) Everyone knows someone who was in Lord of the Rings. 

If you watch Lord of the Rings (as most NZers are required to do and required to like), then yes, you're essentially watching a nine hour long tourism video for our vast green landscape and mountains. And then you add in the nine hours of The Hobbit and wow, that's 18 hours of tourism endorsement from Peter Jackson. Seriously, it will take most of you 18 hours to fly here, so you may as well just spend that time watching Middle Earth because all you can really do here is make like a Hobbit and go walking around on mountains and stuff. But anyway, one of the coolest things is that in those 18 hours, literally everyone in NZ can go "hey, I know someone who worked on this". I know several jockeys who were a part of the big horse riding scenes. And just recently the guy who was used as a height scaler (because he is over two metres tall) for scenes where Gandalf and the Hobbits are together just moved into Dannevirke, and now he lives next door to my sister. I have him a membership at Blockbuster, and he is besties with Peter Jackson. Plus some guy from my high school did effects work on The Hobbit. So yeah.