Gun-loving religious nuts; dudebros; trailor trash; and fame-hungry wannabe Hollywood stars.
There are a lot of stereotypes banging around about Americans, and seeing if there is any truth to them was an adventure Rowan Barrie, 22, was drawn to.
He spent last year travelling the United States, going from meeting a hip-hop heavy weight, to putting complete trust in strangers he couchsurfed with, to working on a scientist’s garage project.
You took a year off your studies to hit the USA. What were your expectations when you arrived in Los Angeles?
I didn’t have a whole lot of expectations. I did have some biases going there, about the typical stereotypes of an American – the tendency to assume Americans will be quite ignorant, or Christian and conservative. It’s easy to build stereotypes. I was hoping I would break that down, and eventually I did. If you don’t expect too much, you just see how you survive when you get there.
After a short interview process, you found yourself fitting people into ski boots and hiring equipment at a Californian resort in Mammoth Mountain. How did that go?
I was working at a rental shop on the mountain, so people would come in with their snowboard and I would set them up. I was dealing with people coming up from Los Angeles. I got a few real rich-listers and gold digger wives sometimes; it was quite interesting. It reinforced the stereotypes I had there for a while.
One time Lil Jon came in. I had no idea who he was at the time, bur everyone who knew who he was were all, “Look!” They came into the boots room, and were sitting there like they were too cool for school. They didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone.
But I set up Lil Jon’s wife and son, which was cool. They were really nice.
So you met some gold diggers and hip-hop royalty. With the ski season ending, what came next?
Couchsurfing was amazing; I can’t shut up to people about it now. I don’t know why people are so hesitant about doing stuff like that.
I had a bit of cash saved up, and my friend Ollie, who is also from New Zealand, was doing an exchange in Texas and was going over to Miami for Spring Break. I ended up flying out for that for five days.
It was pretty American. If you get the chance, you can’t say no to that. It was pretty wicked, and reinforced a few more stereotypes about the typical American experience ... lots of jocks and bros on South Beach in Miami.
And then, something a lot of people may be too afraid to do – you did rideshares and couchsurfed with compete strangers. How did that work out?
I think I was travelling for about two months. I started in Key West, at the bottom of the East Coast, and went through Georgia, the Carolinas, Washington DC, New York, Boston, all the way up to Maine, up the East Coast and then through Canada before I flew off to Colorado for my job. All the way those two months, I did it all couchsurfing.
Couchsurfing was amazing; I can’t shut up to people about it now. I don’t know why people are so hesitant about doing stuff like that. The system they have to do it makes sense – the way you review people after you stay with them and vice versa. It’s got a good safety factor to it.
And after such adventures, back to work – this time in Loveland, Colorado.
I was doing a paid internship for a startup company, building a chemical apparatus. It was really cool for me, because I could put my engineering skills to work, doing the electronics and the software that made it work.
It was a garage project. There were eight to ten interns and our boss was a mad scientist who knew everything. He was cool. I did that for six months, and learnt a lot.
How did you find the people through these travels, did you finally bust your stereotypes?
I got the impression people who live by the coast seem to know more about the outside world; the further you get inside, it seem to go the other way.
You imagine the typical American being fat and hardly moving off his couch. But when I was in Colorado, the amount of fit people there was insane, and how much exercise they did. Most of the towns in Colorado are right along the Front Range so people go running up the mountains, biking, kayaking, skiing.
They put lots of my friends in Wellington to shame, that’s for sure.
And you took up these activities yourself, leading to one of the most lasting impressions?
The coolest memories hiking in the Rocky Mountains was when me and my mate Ollie stumbled upon a moose in the middle of nowhere, which was pretty crazy.
We had heard moose were meant to be pretty aggressive or at least defensive; you don’t even want to approach them or you’re dead meat. This one was five to ten metres away from us on the path. It noticed us but didn’t mind.
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