garryhg

just another one of those threads for you to sharefirst impressions...good or bad....

i for one am shocked at the amount of chinese people here......i sometimes think i got on the wrong connecting flight in lax.....

walked down queen street in auckland city and every shop is chinese.....
must feel wierd for the kiwis .

apart from that shocked at how much new zealand looks like scotland

garryhg

just had to add i'm not complaining about them,they have as much right to be here as i have

just in case i offend anyone::

Ash1

Hi ,

I was shocked at how trusting some of the people are. When we came on our recce 2 years ago, we had only been at the hotel for 20 mins when the owner spotted that i had a tow bar on the back of my hire car. He said that he had a speed boat on a trailer ready to go whenever I wanted to borrow it.
Also , I popped into an off licence to buy some beers and wine and didn`t have enough cash on me. "Pop it in next time your passing" said the lady behind the counter!!!! Unheard of. Nice to see that the some kiwi`s still have trust in human nature.
On a negative, been shocked at some of there driving especially at roundabouts.

Ash

mickey_d

The cost of living & house prices, how much they had gone up between our recce in Feb 2005 & us getting here in June 2006
The OH's (nurse's) wage packet

Colin in the middle

Where shall I start

brussels_sprout

Yes, i agree about the house prices being so shocking compared to my salary, virtually no family allowance (NZ government takes so much of my salary ), and the poor standard of the health service, but apart from that it is very stressfree place.

Am Loolah

Racism, predominately against Maori's ... I no like ...

SirEglamore

Finding a road on a map and not being able to go down it because of logging/ summer only rd/ no bloody road there, only on paper.... whats that all aboot.

lardyl

It also applies to other foreigners, including the asians mentioned in the first post.
I was surprised that the public transport system is so poor, that lamb is so expensives and that the sun burns incredibly quickly in the summer. Initially I was really amazed by the standard of driving, now I am shocked that I dont notice it quite as much!

P2L

not brave enough to argue with a logging truck, or the Mack trucks we have around Marlborough for transporting the vino, although have to say how shiny their trucks are, the drivers seem to regard them as their babies

P2L

The price of tomatoes and cucumber in the winter!!!!
We may need to buy a cucumber farm before long the amount my kids eat

Cava Fizz

the topography of auckland trually stunning.

Negatively I haven't found a decent boozer yet. I don't want english pubs Im bored of belgian gaffs and don't get me started on faux irish pubs.

jads

The price of NZ wine, cheaper oz wine, sushi bars every where (i ate fish), mad bus drivers (i thought the other drivers looked ok, but the maybe I'm a bad driver aswell!!), please install central heating in the houses, how hard skiing is, but thats not nzs fault!

other than that i'm struggling

Cheers Jads

oh and the price of food seemed the same as uk.

FishermansFriend

How inexpensive fishing and power boats are. I'd always thought of running a boat as a rich mans hobby but $30,000 can get quite a decent 6 metre(ish) power boat and they don't seem to depreciate as fast as cars.

Lenmil

Well in our situation i think NZ has priced us out of going. We could have bought a good house with no mortgage back in 2004. We had to come back to blighty and still stuck here now. With PR and no job to go to yet. Bloody crazy. Well i might have some news on this soon. but i wont spill the beans untill i know for sure.