Never Stop Exploring : Kiwi/US Culture Differences #1

I have a feeling there may be several posts on this topic. This first one is almost more of a values difference than a culture difference, but it seeps into the culture of life here so bear with me. There isn't a neat and tidy way of putting this, but its the difference between the US culture of acquiring 'stuff' in your life much of which is inexpensive, often low quality and more often than not disposable; and the Kiwi culture of value and usefulness of all things until they are literally dust.

The best examples I can give of this are Trade Me and second hand shops. As I mentioned previously, we have suffered from a decent amount of sticker shock here on everything from toasters to office chairs. As we have been setting up our simple Kiwi life, and without a paycheck for a couple of months, we have looked for creative ways to save money and cut costs. Chris and I have always been big fans of second hand - whether that means antiques or furniture from Craigslist. Most of the furniture in our house in Alexandria in fact was from Craigslist, local vintage shops and even Goodwill. So after arriving here, we sought out much of the same equivalents. The difference comes in the kinds of things you find for sale here. Things that people would not donate to a charity store in the States but would just go straight in the trash, are for sale here (albeit for a few bucks). In fact, one of the second hand shops is literally at the local dump. Some things that people have been thrown out have been rescued and can be bought from a shop at the same location. This is not a criticism and is in many cases not simply due to lack of resources, but more a difference in values.

Kiwis seem to have more of a culture of 'making do' and less of an expectation of new and shiny. Our discovery of this first hand started with the housing search and was reaffirmed with our Trade Me experiences. For example, when looking for an office chair, we found the following...

Office Chair on Trade Me