Not surprisingly, the culture shock in moving to New Zealand has been substantially less than moving to China.  In China, everything about life and living was different - it was overwhelming and impossible to observe and understand everything at once.  In New Zealand, cultural differences exist but they are much more subtle.  Learning new things about Kiwis or New Zealand come as little entertaining surprises which pop up occasionally and rarely cause the frustration or emotional stress that living in China brought.  Frankly, one of the largest culture shocks here is getting over the high cost of goods and services - it's outrageous and now I can understand why so many Kiwis move to Australia in order to find a more affordable way of life.



Living with two Kiwis offers daily funny insights on 'normal' daily life in New Zealand.  Sean and I end up doing most everything that Andrew and Kathryn do because we get along really well and have similar schedules.  We go to the pub, watch rugby, share nightly 'tea' (what they call dinner), make fun of each others' accents and vocabulary, watch the weekly popular Kiwi shows and try each others' new foods.  Our housemates particularly like it when we make "American" pancakes, brownies, cookies, casseroles and pizzas.

Tonight, Andrew and Kathryn invited me to share their tea with them - they were baking "savories" which are tiny pies filled with meats, potatoes, veggies and cheese.  They reminded me of pig-in-the-blankets and were delicious.  My favorite thing about the pies were that they came in a bag which claimed they were "Tasty As!" as well as "Proudly Kiwi."  Like I've mentioned before, Kiwis add the word "as" to every adjective like "heavy as", "easy as", "crazy as" etc.  As far as I can tell the "as" on the end means something like "super" or "very".  In any case, the savories were indeed "tasty as."

1 Comment

1. Sloan on July 25, 2012 at 3:29 PM

   So much you write about reminds me of when I lived in Austraila!!! Love it!