New Zealand!

sheeplass and I have successfully returned from our long holiday in New Zealand (with 4-night stop in Sydney.) We had a wonderful time together; it's been a long time since we had three weeks to just spend with each other.

New Zealand was a truly beautiful country, contrasting rugged wilderness with bucolic rolling hills of farmland.

Where by "farmland" I mean "land completely covered in sheep." Sheep everywhere. Nineteen breeds of sheep. Sheep everywhere you can put a sheep -- just because it's a rocky mountainside in a national park only accessible by boat is, in New Zealand, no reason not to put sheep on it.

A few random observations (I will no doubt add more as I think of them):

Hamburgers in New Zealand seem to almost invariably (though we did not check out fast food places for this) have onion and other yummy stuff mixed into the ground beef. It's a nice touch.

Driving on the left side of the road is odd. However, you get used to it after a day or so. Roundabouts are more odd -- they seem straightforward until you get into one with two lanes all the way around and have to figure out how not to clip someone when turning out. The most odd, though, is that the person turning across two lanes of traffic has right-of-way over the person turning across one. Imagine if in the U.S., when making a right turn you had to yield to the guy across the road making a left. It's the other sides in NZ, of course, but it still seems very strange.

The New Zealand accent sounds like an Australian from Boston.

Oh, there were sheep. Did I mention sheep? Sheep.

McDonalds is ubiquitous. However, all McDonalds's have a Starbucks-like espresso bar in them called McCafe. Burger King is also seen frequently. In Australia, on the other hand, Burger King is called "Hungry Jack's", but it's still Burger King, complete with the same logo.

New Zealand lacks the concept of tipping. There are no tips for anything expected anywhere. When you pay with a credit card at a restaurant, there is not even an option to fill a tip in.

Restaurant service, at every single restaurant in New Zealand that we encountered, is amazingly, hilariously slow. You sit down, and maybe 15 minutes later you get menus, and then you order promptly. The food comes out pretty quickly after that. You will next see a waitperson around 15-20 minutes after you're done eating. At that point, asking for your check (you must ask for it, always, or it never arrives) and paying for it takes 30-45 minutes. During this time waitpersons will be milling all around you, but doing non-customer-related things (e.g. tidying up the restaurant.) They're not busy, they're just in no hurry whatsoever to pay any attention to customers. They're not unfriendly, either -- the service was generally quite friendly, and is just apparently what's expected there -- but by American standards of dining service it's startling. Allowing at least two hours for a meal is required every time, and things like drink refills or being asked if you need anything are absolutely nonexistent (never happened to us the whole time.) I wonder if this is just a cultural difference, or directly related to the fact that there is no tipping.

Diet Coke tastes different. Not bad, but different -- fruity. Chocolate, on the other hand, tastes much, much better -- probably because all the candy is made with sugar rather than corn syrup like it is here.

It was lambing season. About every other adult sheep was accompanied by 1-3 adorable baby sheep, doing the things lambs do (e.g. prancing about, leaping, bleating.) So cute.

Auckland and Sydney are both truly beautiful, nice cities. Christchurch was also a very nice city, and in a totally different way (it was a flat, expansive city, like a Midwestern city, rather than being built up tall.) Wellington, on the other hand, is the least livable city I have ever seen... it's a tight, confused, random warren of streets that contains approximately four times as many cars as it can reasonably accomodate, yet is so hilly and filled with natural barriers that getting around by walking is equally impossible (and there's no coherent system of public transportation we could find, either.) Queenstown was gorgeous (on a lake, surrounded by mountains) but very much a resort town -- everything there caters to tourists. There isn't as much to say about Rotorua or Dunedin, but they were both quite nice.

Like on any long vacation, I read a lot of books. About 4,500 pages. I also played Metroid Fusion from beginning to end. Of course, 35 hours on aircraft has a lot to do with this.