One thing that is hard to get used to when living in another country is holidays. I’ve gotten used to the Kiwi holidays such as Anzac Day and the Queen’s birthday, but the harder ones are holidays that I would celebrate in the U.S. but nobody pays attention to here.
Perhaps the hardest part of living abroad is being so far from family. My grandmother was 97 when I moved to New Zealand, she turned 99 this past August and we were hoping she would live to see 100 and maybe more. But it wasn’t meant to be and she died peacefully in her sleep…
I learned a new Kiwi phrase today so thought it was time for the third installation of “How to talk like a Kiwi”. Here are a few new words and phrases for you:
It’s an interesting time to be an American living overseas – I can’t count how many times I’ve been in a conversation with someone in the last few months who noticed my American accent and asked about Donald Trump. He is all over the headlines in the U.S. but he is also all over the…
New Zealand is famous for its thermal activity – we have hot pools, hot water beaches, hot water waterfalls, hot water streams, boiling mud pools, and an entire city with steam and boiling water that randomly comes up out of the ground. If you enjoy sitting back in a nice warm tub and soaking your…
It’s the digital age and smart phones have changed the way we travel. I thought I’d spend a bit of time today and tomorrow on apps that are useful when visiting or living in New Zealand. All of the apps I am listing today are free!
One of the things that I latched onto when I first started looking for work in New Zealand was vacation time. NZ is 8th of OECD countries for paid vacation and holidays – the highest outside of continental Europe with 30 days off per year. There are 10 public holidays in NZ.
A ‘hangi’ in New Zealand can be a pit that is used to cook food by heating stones, the food that is cooked in such a pit, or the meal or gathering where hangi food is cooked in a hangi pit :-). Hangis are a Maori tradition – the food is cooked by digging a…
Before I moved to New Zealand, my partner lived with me for a while in Seattle. He’s a native Kiwi and had quite a bit of fun exploring the birthplace of Starbucks. He sneered when Starbucks started a campaign in Seattle in 2015 ‘introducing’ the Flat White. Introducing? He scoffed. New Zealand has had Flat…
Anything ‘as’: In our first lesson on how to talk like a Kiwi I covered ‘sweet as’. There are lots of similar phrases with the word ‘as’ – ‘cheap as’, ‘mean as’, ‘hard as’, ‘easy as’, etc. I was dealing with a difficult person this week and referred to him as ‘rude as’ – it was…