NZ Summary & Pics

Well, we are back in Aus as of Friday morning. Friday and Saturday were marathons to re-integrate ourselves back into our boring Aussie lives. Cleaning, putting crap away, setting everything back up, grocery shopping. Last night we had Marc and Alana over for dinner and a movie...ahh we're home again. I have managed to post the best NZ pics on my picasa website for all to see. Alana was surprised to see that I posted over 200 pictures in three albums, but she and everyone else should know the restraint I applied to not post more. I took over 2000 pics; 7 gigs worth. Isn't digital great? So, please feel free to view the pictures (if you haven't already been accosted by my mass email with the link) at this site: http://picasaweb.google.com/angiesommer. Hopefully, sometime, I'll be adding a fourth picture album of panoramic pictures after I Photoshop them together.

To briefly summarize NZ: it was good. The trip was well planned, it went smoothly, the weather was mercifully (and unusually) nice, and it was a good length and intensity. New Zealand is an interesting and beautiful country, and I recommend it as a travel destination to anyone who loves the outdoors, or just likes to photograph it. I feel it necessary to include a short list of "goods" and "bads" in this NZ summary to pointedly and/or humorously mention a few of the fun or annoying oddities that we experienced on our south island tour. I'm sure each trip would reveal something different about a country, but this is the stuff we noticed:

The Good Stuff:
1. Lots of land, not many people. Therefore, un-congested towns and highways (in general) throughout the island.
2. The NZ accent - I'm putting this under "good" because I find it funny and cute. The most noticeable accented words are "ee" words, example: head, bed, pen, pin, penguin, etc. They use a very heavy ee sound on these types or words and say "heed" rather than head, "peen" for pen, etc.
3. Money - this is the best money scheme I've seen yet. In America we do pennies - I can't handle that, what's the point? In Aus, they've gotten rid of the pennies but all the bills are different sizes and the sizes of the coins don't correspond to the value. In NZ, the bills are all the same size (different colors), the coins are in logical size order, and they don't use pennies OR nickels! They round to the nearest $0.10 which makes my life so much happier.
4. No tipping at restaurants.
5. The road signs - the train crossing and truck crossing signs look like pictures of trains and trucks from a children's book. So cute. I put a picture of a train sign in the online albums.
6. Wildlife - They have a really neat assortment including fun and pretty birds, dolphins, seals, penguins, and (of course) Kiwis, which we didn't get the chance to see.
7. Better exchange rate than Aus, $1US = about $1.20NZ.
8. Avocados are cheap. Kane was happy.
9. Speed limit on the highway is 100kph (70mph), even when it probably shouldn't be.
10. And the very best thing about the land of New Zealand is (...and I somehow forgot this when I first wrote this post so had to go back and add it later, which means no one will read it, but I had to do it anyway...) Hokey Pokey ice cream. This is surely the most heavenly frozen treat that exists on this earth. It is basically vanilla ice cream with little bits of caramel-toffee-honecomb-type pieces that combine into the most delicious food ever made. Hail to the Hokey Pokey.

The Not as Goods:
1. People turning right get the right of way against people turning left (they drive on the left, so that would be like people turning left getting the right of way in the US). It's not really bad, just confusing to foreigners...
2. Lots of smokers, seems to be the norm outside of CA =(
3. Ocean is freaking freezing.
4. Gas is expensive - $1.77NZ per liter = $6 or $7US per gallon. And Americans complain...
5. You can't use your Australian bank card as a debit card for purchases, even when they have the same bank over there...WTF?
6. It's rather expensive to travel there, even when you go cheap. Our final tally was over $5300NZ = about $4400US for both of us for 18 days. And that was staying in hostels and eating mostly grocery food.
7. Sand flies! They bite and it itches worse and longer than a mosquito bite!
8. One lane bridges. For some reason they decided to save money on bridges (since there are so many rivers) and make them only one lane. So you have to pay attention to the little sign before the bridge to see if you have to yield to oncoming traffic or if you have the right of way. At one point there was a one lane bridge that was for both ways of traffic and both ways of train tracks!! Ridiculous!
9. And last but not least (most, actually), is the Departure Voucher required to fly out of the country. This is my only actual complaint and it is the stupidest most red-tape, bureaucratic, irrational piece of bullshit that I've encountered in a long time, even for an airport. When you leave the country, you have to get a Departure Voucher. Now you think, ok, this is basically a mandatory tax, so just include it in the price of my ticket, right? Well that's what normal countries do. But in NZ, you have to pay for this voucher at the airport. This means you have to stand in a huge line, separate from the huge check-in line, to give them an additional $25 each before you can leave. Stupidest thing ever. And since we couldn't use our Aus bank cards, we waited in the ATM line to buy the voucher first only to find that it doesn't work. Grrr...

Anyway, all in all, NZ was great and we had a really good time. You can actually comment on the photos on the picasa website if you see one that particularly requires it. You have to click the picture so that you are looking at only that one (not the list of thumbnails), then there will be a comment box below it.

Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming of sitting around and playing on the internet all day. No, seriously, we have the work visas now, so we need to get jobs. Thom (our boss in SLO) just presented me with a Hilton Hotel project that he wants me/us to do...and we're still doing a bunch of other work for him, so at least we have some income in the interim. Stay tuned to see how it goes.