A Couple Funny Things About New Zealand

Other than the fact that the houses are not insulated, there are another couple things that I find rather funny here.

1) The taps are not consistently set up with hot on one side and cold on the other. You have to figure out which way is which each time you use a sink or shower. Speaking of which, most sinks have spearate hot and cold water taps, so you can't mix them to get nice, warm water. Who ever thought that was a good idea?!

2) One lane bridges on major freeways around the country are quite standard. One direction of traffic is given right of way while the other waits for any traffic going the opposite direction to cross the bridge before they are allowed to cross. Some bridges are so long that they have passing bays in the middle, where if you are coming from the give-way side, you are expected to pull over and give way to traffic coming from the right of way side even when you are in the middle of the bridge. However, I experienced a new level of this the other day. I crossed a bridge where that I was expected to share not only with traffic coming from the opposite direction, but also with trains! The train tracks intersected and shared the bridge with all of us motoring folks, obviously getting right of way over any of us. Luckily for me, there were no trains coming when I crossed. Also lucky that it was a short bridge, because I think it would be awfully scary to pull over into one of the passing bays in the middle of the bridge to let a train pass!

3) Another little New Zealand thing that causes me endless confusion (still! although I'm getting better) is the light switches. They have the same up and down alignment as our light switches at home, but theirs are set up so that they turn on and off the opposite way as ours. That is, if you flip the switch up, it will turn off. Only that's not even the end of it. They aren't light switches that stick out of the wall and are easy to find when you're running your hands along the walls in the dark. They are more like buttons, flattened switches barely sticking out from the wall. You have to press on the side that you want, rather than just flicking the switch.

4) In a different vein, I have to say that their cheap feta cheese here in massively better than the cheap feta at home. It defintely blows that hard, dry, wincingly salty Athenos stuff out of the water.