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

This led to a discovery of the $1 reserve category, which led to the following...

Selection of $1 reserve items

And my absolute favorite...

Yep, this dust could be yours for just ONE DOLLAR!

Happy shopping people :-)

Wellington Beaches

We've been pretty busy for the last couple of weeks getting everything set up so we haven't had a lot of time to explore the area. Fortunately, Wellington is a very reasonably sized city - still big enough for you to feel that it IS a city, but small enough to get anywhere pretty easily. Chris and I joke that wherever we need to go, google will always tell us it takes 16 minutes.

While we haven't managed to go too far afield, we have managed to check out some awesome beaches. Considering its the middle of winter here, its still pretty pleasant to walk on the beach as long as you have a thin jacket and a wind break. I don't know how busy it will get in the summer, but with the exception of one or two other dog walkers, and in Lyall bay the crazy surfers, often we won't see anyone at all.

As well as just amazing wild beauty, the beaches are also full of awesome shells, polished stones, drift wood and sea weeds. It's definitely not the groomed sand of South Beach, but its all the more impressive to me because of its savageness. You can really imagine that things are pretty much unchanged between your footsteps and the footsteps of the first person to discover the beach. All of the photos below are from beaches within 15 - 45 minutes of downtown Wellington.

Owhiro Bay - 15 minutes from downtown

Pauatahanui - 30 minutes from downtown

Queen Elizabeth Park, Paekakariki - 45 minutes from downtown

Paua Shells and Driftwood

Car Buying NZ Style

Once we found somewhere to live, our next priority was finding a car, and after driving around these crazy narrow streets for the last week, we both agreed that smaller was better. Back to our old friend Trade Me again to get a sense for the market and figure out all these new car brands that we'd never come across before. As an auction driven site similar to eBay, many of the listings show two prices - a no haggle 'buy it now' price and an auction price and end date. We started online, then headed out to visit a few different places. 

Cars in NZ are split into two major types right off the bat - "NZ New" and "Imports". As you might have guessed, NZ New cars are those that were imported here as brand new cars and have stayed registered in NZ. Imports were originally sold overseas (Usually Japan) then imported to NZ and registered. The big difference is NZ New cars have a verifiable track record in the country, while Imports are a little more variable, but also cheaper. A lot of dealers provide warranties or guarantee odometer readings but often there are still little quirks with imports. For example, a lot of times the radio will be super fancy in a reasonably old car, but everything will be written in Japanese. In some of the newer cars with electronic odometer and information panels integrated as part of the car itself, you will see the messages in Japanese. Unfortunately the Japanese characters for "Check Engine" or "Oil Change Due" are equally indecipherable to me. 

  

We started off visiting an auction house in Lower Hutt because they had a lot of listings on Trade Me. They have auctions on Wednesdays and Thursdays and their auction house also sells a lot of 'buy now' cars you can just jump in and drive around the yard. Unlike in the US, you are basically left to your own devices. There is no car dealer following you around chatting you up and trying to pressure you into anything. There are people there to answer your questions, but they pretty much leave you alone unless you need them. 

There also seem to be a good number of smaller dealers who have a handful of inventory that you can make an appointment with. We visited one guy we found on Trade Me who basically sells cars from his house - he has them dotted all around the streets surrounding his flat (and now the random parking we see everywhere makes a bit more sense). Then we found another guy who specializes in little imports and works out of a big garage in an industrial park. Somehow he managed to cram about 20 cars in one unit with barely enough room to walk between them. Basically you decide which cars you want to test drive and then he plays car Tetris moving about 10 different cars to get to the one you wanted.

The other random thing about test driving cars is no one asks for your license or any kind of identifiable info before slapping a dealer plate on the back of the car and handing you the keys while they stay behind moving cars to get to the next one you want. I thought this was another crazy example of Kiwi trust and openness, which it is, except after driving a dozen or so cars now I also realize all of them have zero gas. Which basically means if you wanted to run off with them, you'd only get a mile or so away before you broke down. Brilliant. 

Well we finally found 'the one' - after flirting with a Ford Fiesta, a Mitsubishi Colt Plus, a Toyota Corolla and a VW Golf, we settled on a Mazda Axela (Mazda 3 to us in the States). Its a 2005 but looks brand new, reasonable mileage and, of course an awesome Japanese GPS system that will helpfully navigate us around Tokyo, but sadly not Wellington...

 If the process of test driving cars was ridiculously easy, the process of buying one was even easier. After we took it for a spin and decided to pull the trigger, we went inside handed over our US driver licence, then a runner literally ran across the road to the VTNZ with our license and the signed one page sales agreement and came back less than 10 minutes later with our new NZ license plates. Paying was also a lesson in trust -  most debit cards here have a $5,000 daily limit on them for purchases unless you call the bank and change it, so the guy just charged us $4,000 on the spot (at his suggestion, in case we wanted to make additional purchases that day!) and then he basically handed us an IOU form with the balance written out and their bank account details. He was like just transfer the rest of the funds over today or tomorrow, whatever works... The dealers insurance covers us until we get home, so in about 27 minutes we were driving out the gate with our new car.

I freaking love this country! 

Sticker Shock

We knew before we got here that some things were going to be more expensive than in the States just based on the location of New Zealand and the market size. We were nowhere near prepared for just how much more expensive some random things were. Take for example, our $100 toaster and $149 kettle.

A pretty similar looking Black and Decker toaster is about $18.99 on Amazon, while a Hamilton Beach glass kettle is $28.02. Even taking the exchange rate into account, that's about a 400% mark up on each. We didn't bring any small kitchen appliances like these because 1) they would have taken too much space and 2) the electricity is 220 V here and even with an adapter, we'd  probably blow out the internal workings pretty swiftly. Which means we are beholden to NZ prices...

Except... sales. Kiwis LOVE sales. While there are only a handful of big store brands here (So far we've tried Briscoes, Farmers, Harvey Norman, The Warehouse and Noel Leeming) there seems to be some kind of sale on pretty much all of the time. We stumbled across Briscoes pretty early on and thanks to a VERY helpful person there, we discovered that they have 30-60% off sales pretty much every time you turn around. Then there are the catalog sales which have even bigger discounts which means we ended up paying $29 for our toaster and $49 for our kettle - or only about a 25% mark up which is slightly less nauseating.

Food is a bit more expensive than the States, but the quality of general day to day stuff is much higher it seems, so it pretty much evens out. Eggs for example. OMG, New Zealand eggs. They are amazing.

The most randomly expensive things have been plastic things like trash cans, storage bins or anything that is molded plastic. When we were packing up our life in the States we bought dozens of these huge black plastic bins to store our things in. Costco has then for about $8 per bin, a comparable bin at The Warehouse (which is New Zealand's answer to Walmart it seems) was $70. SEVENTY DOLLARS. For a molded plastic bin. What?? I even checked two different stores to make sure they didn't just accidentally add a zero... Meanwhile, our trash can. We didn't want to pay the hundreds of dollars a metal trash can would surely cost, so we thought we'd go with a nice cheap plastic one. Except the nice cheap plastic ones still cost about $40 BUT they all assure us, they are Made in Italy. Hmm... Italian leather, sure. Italian molded plastic??

The Kiwi Accent

I love the Kiwi accent. I'm still not 100% sure I can accurately differentiate between the Kiwi and the Aussie accent, and I know admitting to as much is like saying I can't tell the difference between a Canadian and an American, but I am loving the process of getting my head around it.

First of all, Kiwis have a strange case of vowel slippage. What this means is vowels that we know and love as Americans sound quite different here - and confusingly, they are usually swapped with other vowel sounds. The most common example is Fish and Chips becoming something like more like Fush and Chups. But its much more entertaining than just that.

The 'e' sound like in 'men' becomes an 'i' sound like in 'itch'. So for example, Chris and I were listening to a local radio station that as far as I am concerned is called the 'Idge', but is in fact called the 'Edge'.

The 'er' on the end of words also disappears somewhat and becomes more like an 'ah' as in British English. So an American glass of water, becomes a glass of wohtah - but not in a Boston/New York way.

This becomes confusing when whole sentences as strung together - so for example, if a man has a tennis lesson at ten after six in the morning; in New Zealand is sounds more like a min has a tinnus lisson at tin aftah sux in the mohrnin. That's a terrible approximation, but you get the idea.

Lots has been written about it apparently - a quick google search turned up this, but these idiosyncrasies  have definitely led to some moments when Chris and I have had to take a time out and have a recap of a conversation to make sure we're grasping everything correctly - especially over the phone. By no means is it as confusing as learning a new language, but by its very similarities lie the biggest pit falls.

Some of my favorite and most dangerous vowel swap outs are as follows:
- Pen to Pin as in "Can I borrow your pin?" = hunh?
- Men to Min
- Sex to Six
- Six to Sux
- Deck to Dick - probably best if I don't give examples of the above...
- Tennis to Tinnus
- Winter to Wuntah

And many more... There are also some wonderful examples of Kiwi slang words that we have come across too, but those are for another post... :-)

EDIT: My brother just shared this awesome youtube video about New Zealand Deck Sealant. Slightly politically incorrect and definitely NSFW...

In the mean time, here is a random beach Chris and I found about an hour from Wellington. As Chris said, its not very crowded...:

"You don't look like axe murderers..."

Our first priority once we arrived in Wellington was to find an apartment or 'flat'. Everyone we spoke to directed us to New Zealand's equivalent of Craig's list - which is called trademe.co.nz. I had been looking at listings for a while from the States to get a sense of price points, neighborhoods and get a feel for the market, but I hadn't been able to set up many viewings ahead of time as I needed a NZ cell phone number to fill out the online forms.

New Zealand is both incredibly open and very protective at the same time. There aren't a ton of rules, but their systems really only work when you are in country and starting to get set up. For example, I needed to get a Trade Me account to save listings I was viewing, but I wasn't able to set an account up from the States because they saw my international IP address and blocked me from signing up. I emailed their generic help desk number expecting nothing to happen, but I quickly got an email back from a real person who was able to manually set up an account for me once I explained that we were moving to Wellington, but weren't in country yet.

The rental market in NZ is different to the States in a number of ways:

• Renters pay the listing agent fees. Unlike the States where the landlord does. Of course you can find some listings direct from owners who don't charge a listing fee, but these are few and far between. It seems like the listing fee is equivalent to approximately one week's rent. Which brings me to the second big difference...
• Rent is listed and charged by the week. So you will see listings for $600 or $700 but that's really $2,400 or $2,800 a month. People are really flexible on terms, you can pay your rent by the week or bi-weekly if you prefer and I suppose you can also pay monthly, but that seems to be an exception. As one of the rental agents said, does it matter if its a week or a month if someone isn't paying their rent?
• Quality of housing is... variable... I felt a little prepared for this as everything I read mentioned how cold NZ homes can be, that a lot of rentals aren't well insulated and the cost of electricity is high. That said, I was still surprised by the variability of quality within the same price point. We looked at a little new construction home on top of a hill with a lovely view about 12-15 minutes from work for $500 a week and then a dreadful inner city flat with a view of warehouses and the road for $480 a week. The photos below were for a lovely but rather expensive place with incredible views over the bay.

• Listing photos are... entertaining... When we listed our house in Alexandria for rent, we removed a ton of stuff, staged some of the rooms and had a professional photographer come and take pictures. Now maybe we went a little overboard, but we wanted to find a good renter and we were asking a fair bit of money. In comparison, the listing photos in NZ often have unmade beds, almost ALL of the toilet seats are up, dirty dishes are in the sink, clothing may be draped on chairs or the floor and there is just a huge amount of 'stuff' around.  
• Security deposit is called a 'bond'. It seems around 2-3 weeks rent is the norm for the bond and it is held in what we would called escrow - or an independent account. Same as in the US, this is returned at the end of the rental period.
• Lease periods are variable. We came across lots of six month leases, a few one year leases and even some 2-3 month leases. A lot of people go over seas for a month or two and lease out their home while they are gone. 
• Background checks and credit checks are... optional... We came prepared with copies of our visas, employment offer letters, bank statements from the US, letter from our mortgage company showing we had paid every month on time but no one asked for a single thing. When we asked the realtor about back ground checks two separate guys told us "we don't really do that here, you two don't seem like axe murders so you'll be fine..." and I guess that was the approval process!

We looked in a lot of different parts of the city and surrounding areas. From Seatoun, Miramar and Mount Vic on the East of the City, to Te Aro, Thorndon and Brooklyn in the middle and Karori, Kelburn and Crofton Downs on the West. We were concerned about commute time and traffic but after testing out the runs during 'rush hour' in the morning, we discovered that google map's version of red on the traffic map here generally means 'slow down a bit for this corner' or 'there's a traffic light'. We also found, like in England, one continuous street (admittedly a twisty turny one) can have as many as half a dozen names depending on which bit of it you're on. Nothing is straight, the streets are super narrow in places and people park on the road all over the place making it a bit like a terrifying video game to navigate around the city. Fortunately I learned to drive in the UK, so its been a bit more natural for me than Chris. 

In the end we settled for a cute little duplex flat in Crofton Downs. Partially furnished and just up the hill from the train station in to town. Its not the most exciting part of town, but its a nice place, pretty view, easy and cheap and will give us six months to get our feet under ourselves until we either decide to stay there or find somewhere closer into town. We do have an extra room, so we're ready for you to come visit!

And So it Begins...

This move has had so many different stages that it feels like it has been happening for months. This week however was when the rubber met the road. We had been staying with our immensely generous and patient friends Tammy and Chris, who in the midst of their own new home purchase and move offered us not only a bed but also loaned us their car so we could get the final few bits and pieces sorted. We owe them big time!

Wednesday, July 13, we handed over our beautiful home to the property management company, a process which included the 11th hour drama of a plumbing issue requiring cutting through a wall to replace pipes and finding someone to replace drywall, all in less than 24 hours... super fun and not at all stressful...

Thursday was Chris' last day of work, and finally a chance for him to gain some freedom from email and work deadlines. We also met the people who will be renting our house for the next three years. The seem great and are experiencing what we are just a few weeks ahead of us - they landed on Wednesday, did a walk through of the house on Thursday and are moving on Friday.

Friday was my last day at work which started with some last minute logistics, and ended with a happy hour on the roof of our offices which was fantastic.

Saturday we finished our packing, did a final weigh of all of our bags (340lb of checked luggage plus about another 80lbs or so of carry on each....) and found an Uber big enough to take us down to a hotel next to the airport so we would have less to stress about on the morning of our flight.

The hotel was a great idea in theory, and had an incredible view over the Pentagon and most of down town DC, however we were woken up at 2am with a fire alarm which required the entire hotel to evacuate into the parking lot in our pajamas.

At this point it occurs to me that if the hotel really does go up in flames, all Chris and I are going to NZ with is our back packs full of laptops and technology items, passport and the clothes on our backs. Fortunately it was a false alarm and we were all back in bed for an hour or so before my alarm at 4am.

Sunday we somehow managed to make it to DCA will all of our luggage, get it all checked in, made sure it met all the weight requirements and headed to the Admirals club for a very early mimosa. The bunting on the way to the airplane was a nice touch - reminding us, as if we needed it, that we were leaving America.

Our flight to LAX was uneventful until we deplaned and were accosted at the gate by my brother! He had flown down that morning from Seattle to surprise us and boy, did he! We then spent a wonderful day with Chris' sister Sabrina and my brother (also Chris). Sab took us to a very cool winery in Malibu where she had prepared an incredible picnic lunch and we sat under the olive trees drinking wine, munching on stuff and listening to the band in the glorious California sunshine.

Eventually we made our way back down to Santa Monica where we walked along the beach and brother Chris took some fun pics to remind us of the day.

 Late Sunday night we boarded our 787 Dreamliner, settled into the rather wonderful business class seats we had managed to upgrade to thanks to all the points collected due to my weekly flights to Dallas for the last six months, and slept much of the way to Auckland.

Monday didn't exist due to vagaries of the international dateline and transpacific flights.

Tuesday we landed in Auckland at 7am, slightly delayed but feeling remarkably refreshed thanks to the awesome flight we had.

Everyone lined up to deplane only to be met with a team from New Zealand's Department of Spraying Down Foreigners (I don't know the real name of this department, obv...) . These guys protect against nasty insects and bugs that we could bring into this pristine country, by walking up and down the aisles of the plane spraying aerosols over all of the passengers and  luggage.

Much to the amusement of many of us, the spray smelled of... kiwi fruit... I guess I should have seen that one coming....

Immigration was beyond simple - Chris and I both have E-passports which basically meant we could scan our passports at a kiosk similar to the self check in booths at the airport, collect a ticket, get photographed and never speak to a single person. Once we collected our bags - all six of which arrived together in less than five minutes, we progressed to the customs and biosecurity stations where I had to declare my duty free chocolate purchases and our feather duvet (as an animal product). Fortunately neither of these were an issue, our bags were swiftly scanned for any other biosecurity contraband, returned to us and we were done!

Welcome to New Zealand!