The Kiwi Way

Jet lag is finally starting to wear off, my wake up times have improved each day: 1:30 am; 2:30 am; 4 am; 5:30 am. With her work in the ER, Dana is used to sleeping at all sorts of weird hours of the day so she hasn’t had any problems with sleep adjustment, just problems with me waking her up. We’ve mostly spent the past couple of days trying to get ourselves set up with the essential things like cell phones, housing, and a car. The Kiwi’s do a few things differently than we’re accustomed to. Here’s a little snapshot of the things we’ve found to be interesting:

-          Internet access is normally capped at some set amount of data usage or time whether you are at your hotel, a coffee shop, or sign up for a monthly plan to your house. Exceeding whatever benchmark is set, you normally would have to pay additional to continue. For example, in our hotel you receive an internet code daily, and that provides wifi internet access of 200 MB or 24 hours (whichever comes first). The coffee shops are normally pay by use at $3 per 60 MB, and the monthly plan at your house you could choose from plans from 10 to 45 GB at escalating costs. 200 MB isn’t all that much in the way of browsing time, so we’ve had to prioritize our internet usage at the hotel (which unfortunately for now means no picture uploads to blog!)

-          Car shopping is fun. There are no slimy used car salesmen. With a few questions, the car salesmen will just blurt out all the risks with buying their used car, even how much they plan to make on the car you are buying! Auctions are a popular way to purchase a vehicle, and from our research, this appears to be the best deal. We’re going to a car fair this morning (people bring cars to one location and buyers show up to review and buy), so we’ll give that a try as well. Since there are no car manufacturing plants in New Zealand, most of the used cars are shipped in from Japan.

-          Kiwis are crazy about sports. It seems like about half of their news shows are dedicated to sporting feats around the world. Their national teams all have nicknames that revolve around the color they wear: womens handball- The Silver Ferns; soccer- The All Whites; basketball- The Tall Blacks; softball- The Black Sox, and of course the world famous rugby team: The All Blacks. If for some reason you have a severe dislike for rugby, don’t visit New Zealand. From the moment we stepped off the plane, we’ve been seeing or hearing about the All Blacks and their chances in the Tri Nations Challenge and the upcoming Rugby World Cup. There is some sort of rugby on TV at all time (note, I just turned on the TV to check at 6:30 am….and yes there is some rugby to watch.) We watched our first All Blacks match last night. It was part of the Tri Nation and against the South Africe Springbots. Next Saturday there is a Tri Nations match against the Australia Wallabies in Auckland…..Go All Blacks!

-          The housing search got off to a comical start. Many of the apartment rentals are listed online, and the first place we visited was advertised to be in Albany, a fairly large suburb with a Westfields mall and nice housing. Should have known something was wrong when the GPS couldn’t recognize the reported address in Albany. On the way there it became more and more obvious that we had moved far away from Auckland’s civilization and into farming country. Pulling into the driveway, we saw a chicken and some sheep. A turkey walked right infront of the car and started to crow at the front grill. The apartment was essentially the garage, right next to the owners farm house. Questioning why the address didn’t pop up in the GPS the owner responded that it ‘sometimes’ is known as Dairy Flats. Dairy Flats??? All was not lost as the owners commented that we should check out Brown’s Bay on the way back to our hotel. It was beautiful, reminded me of Southern California with a beach and steep hills that provide a stunning view of a dormant volcano in the distance.