Lars: Now that we've left New Zealand, here are some of my impressions of the country.
- People are quite friendly and helpful. Customer service actually exists, and it's useful, rather than just a way for the shop to get more revenue. But even people who aren't selling me things are nice. People whose job it is to keep me out of the country are nice, too.
- In the eight months we spent in NZ, I started appreciating how annoying hemispherism can be. "Let's do this next summer"—whose summer, exactly? This is not, of course, all that big a deal, but in a global context, don't refer to times using seasons.
- New Zealand is always asleep when Europe and the US are awake, and vice versa. This makes IRC be pretty difficult to use for co-ordinating anything. E-mail works better.
- The air in Wellington, and elsewhere in the country, is exceptionally clean and fresh. This is probably due to the closeness to the oceans, and the constant winds.
- New Zealanders don't like to mark street names clearly, and have a distinct dislike to using house numbers for navigation. Nobody knew our address, everyone knew the house by name, or by street corner. Telling people the address just resulted in confusion. Quite weird.
- What's up with putting beetroot in hamburgers? Ugh.
- Custom license plates must be cheap in NZ. I had a lot of fun reading license plates. A lot of people put in a lot of creativity in them.
I miss NZ already. Need to go back some day.