Things That Are Different

-- Auckland 18/11 --

There are many things about New Zealand that are different from being in the United States. I'm quickly getting used to them (like writing the day before the month...see above), so I'm going to try and write as many of them down before I forget that they are exciting or weird.

• Things aren't 'cool' here, they're 'flash.'
• You can say 'heaps' in almost any context to say 'a lot.' Like, "heaps of wine" or "heaps of trouble" or "he's puking heaps!" 
• More than two-thirds of all the sinks I've seen have split taps. So you have a tap for cold water on the right, and a completely separate tap for hot water on the left, which will scald you! 
• Bell peppers are called 'capsicum.' This was really hard to deal with the first time I went to self checkout at the grocery store. 
• Men's rooms don't have urinals. They have a stainless steel wall with a gutter at the bottom. Seriously.
• There is no minimum legal age for drinking alcohol. But you have to be 18 or older to purchase anything alcoholic. 
• Rent is paid weekly, not monthly. It's weird. But it sort of makes sense when you consider that you don't get short-changed on short months like February.
• The Christmas season begins in late October. At least that's when I first started noticing ads and Christmas displays. Now in mid-November, there are gigantic Santa Claus statues being erected on the sides of buildings. People are hocking Christmas cookies on street corners. Nobody questions this. Without Halloween or Thanksgiving, there is nothing holding the ugly tide of Christmas spirit back. 
• Traffic drives on the right side of the road, cross walks are about half as wide as in the US where they exist, and pedestrians commonly jaywalk to the middle of the road and stand on a little median while traffic from the other direction passes. 
• Soccer is called soccer, which I found out is short for 'Assoc.' which is short for Football Association. Sometimes rugby is called football.
• While England was voting on Brexit, New Zealand was voting on whether or not to replace their national flag. The voters approved a measure to replace the flag, and then some artists designed several alternative flags. Nobody liked them, so during the vote to choose a flag everyone voted to keep the OLD flag anyway.
• New Zealand is at the end of the internet, and everyone complains about it, but sometimes I think the internet in Auckland is faster than some of the connections I used in Portland. Which might be related to the fact that most internet and mobile data plans have really really low data caps. Basically, there are a lot of incentives to conserve broadband.

[26/11 - Edited to add]

• Brothels and prostitution are legal in New Zealand, which guarantees the women (and men) who work in the sex industry basic legal rights and a living wage.
• People say 'sweet as' to express enjoyment or to just acknowledge a situation.
• Paper products are rarely available outside of toilet paper. Bathrooms use cotton hand towel rolls for drying hands, people don't buy paper towels for their homes, and tissues are also rarely on hand. Restaurants offer very few napkins.
• There are an insane amount of traffic cones in New Zealand. There's a facebook group dedicated to this. I've heard it estimated that New Zealand has more safety cones than people. Those people also end up stealing about 20% of the cones from any given construction site, and put them on top of pine trees, statues, underwater...
• Some buses have television screens on them, which will show a map of the route with the bus' location, weather forecasts, and new headlines. Buses without the screens provide NO information, so you just have to guess where you are and know where you want to get off without any help from the driver. Although you could probably just ask the driver.
• The metric system is my favorite. But I still can't figure out how to estimate weight in grams, or temperature in Celsius. These are both especially problematic when it comes to food. How many grams of lunch meat do I want from the store? What temperature do I bake this casserole at? Why is the oven on fire?! How will I ever eat all this sliced ham!?!
• Drying laundry is an ordeal. I thought it was just me, and the shitty two-in-one washer-dryer - which can't dry - in my apartment that made it hard to dry wet clothes. But talking to North Islanders it sounds like it's a common issue here. People commonly air dry their laundry, but it's always humid in Auckland and it can take forever for things to dry up. I still don't know why the appliances are so bad other than I guess people buy cheap dryers.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I'll update the list as I notice other things that are worth pointing out.