A lot can happen in three weeks in New York...: Thursday 6th June

I enjoyed Thursday a lot more than I had expected, we spent nearly the whole day at the United Nations headquarters on 1st Ave. First of all we went on the tour that is open to all members of the public, we had to go through security clearing first though (for obvious reasons!). Unfortunately the General Assembly is closed for refurbishment and we couldn't go into the Security Council room as it was actually in session, we did go into some other conference rooms which were in session, which was a weird experience- it felt very intrusive but also quite surreal that you are in a room in which huge decisions are made which can have an effect all of us. One of the pictures is of something I found particularly cool on the tour, an artist made an AK47 into a guitar to show how something beautiful and peaceful like music can be produced from something that was intended for violence. another picture is of one of the images on display in the museum part of the UN which shows some of their conservation work, I was particularly interested in this as I support Shark conservation and I did not realise it was an important mission at the UN.
We were fortunate enough to have a meeting with three people who work in different parts of the UN who took time out of their working day to meet with us, tell us what they do on a daily basis and why/how they got into the UN work. What was really interesting was that staff at the UN are not supposed to show allegiance to any country in their work and as a result they end up feeling like the UN is their country/nationality, the Korean guy actually said that the only time he feels Korean is when the football team is playing :)
The best part of the day was definitely meeting with the UN ambassador of New Zealand, he definitely had the laid back attitude that I've seen in every Kiwi I've met. Again he took time out of his day of campaigning to meet with us and answer our questions about New Zealand and about working in the UN with other ambassadors. He was seemed genuinely interested in us too and asked us just as many questions. Over all such a nice guy and it's nice to know that some of the people in these high, policy making decisions are decent people!