Differences between NZ and the US:
No tipping in restaurants here. Hardly any tipping at all, actually.
They even pay wait-persons overtime for working on holidays, so some restaurants charge a 10-15% surcharge for meals on holidays. At first this seemed weird, but now I think it makes sense. Why shouldn’t wait-persons get paid extra for working on holidays?
Restaurants serve you bottles of water, so you can pour yourself extra water if you want it. In many restaurants, these bottles (and water glasses) are just sitting out, so you can serve yourself water if you want it.
It is fairly common to order your meal at the counter, and then you find a table and sit down and they bring your meal to you. To make this easier, many restaurants give you a number on a stand, which you take to your table.
When you order at a counter, you pay for the meal when you order it. Likewise, you tend to pay for hotels when you check in, not when you check out (although you can do either).
There are more kinds of accommodation here. In addition to normal hotels, motels, and B&Bs, they have hostels (like the rest of the world, except there are far more of them), backpackers (similar to hostels, but used for any place that caters to backpackers), and holiday parks (places that usually have camping spaces, but also have cabins and maybe even motel rooms). Cabins are in general very common, and quite cheap. We’ve been paying between NZ$40 and NZ$120 for cabins for the four of us, ranging from small single rooms with bunk beds and a walk to the toilet, all the way to large two bedroom affairs with bathrooms, kitchens, and a living room (with a TV).
There are signs along the road, pointing out accommodations, and telling you how far they are. So as you are driving down the highway out in the middle of nowhere, you will often see a small sign pointing down a side road, telling you that there is a B&B 2 km down that road.
Most towns have a tourist information office that will book accommodation (and other things) for you. For free. Even accommodation in some other town.
Every town, no matter how small, has public bathrooms. And they are clean.
Skate parks are very common. We’ve seen them even in small towns in the middle of nowhere.
There are walking tracks (trails) everywhere. You can’t drive down any road without there being tracks going off in different directions. At the start of each track, there is always a sign telling you how many minutes it will take you to get to various interesting things. Like 5 minutes to a waterfall, or 30 minutes to a lake, all the way up to 3 to 5 days to some remote place. The trails are extremely well constructed, with drainage ditches to keep them from getting muddy, lots of bridges and boardwalks, even warning signs like on roads.
Businesses are very trusting. Like, when you take a boat somewhere there are no tickets or things like that. They just assume that you remember to pay (either before or after you take the boat). Likewise, when you use the internet, you often tell them how many minutes you’ve been using it, and they just believe you.
I’ve already mentioned the one lane bridges and driving on the left. They also have round-a-bouts (traffic circles). Hardly any traffic lights.
I haven’t seen a parking meter yet, but they do have “pay-and-display” (like in Portland) where you buy a ticket from a machine. Even this is not all that common, except in big cities. When there is a cost for parking, it is usually pretty expensive.
When they repave a road, they pour gravel on top of the tar, and then let cars drive over it to push the gravel into the tar. When they do this, they lower the speed limit to 30 kph, and have warning signs showing a car kicking up gravel and breaking the windows of another car.
Sometimes, when a road is being worked on and only one lane is open, they don’t bother with flaggers. People just take turns and somehow it works out. Other times they do have flaggers. The flaggers often smile.
Car horns aren’t used very much here, and when they are, they are more for greeting than warning. You can stop right on the road (say, to take a photo) and nobody minds. They go around you, or wait.
Groceries are more expensive than in the US. But restaurants are about the same price. The quality of food in restaurants here is very good. We’ve had some awesome meals here.
Mexican food, when you can find it here, is considered fancy, and is expensive. On the other hand, sushi is cheap. Kebab shops are everywhere, and are very cheap. Hamburgers tend to be expensive.
Petrol (gas), of course, is very expensive. We have paid NZ$1.15 to NZ$1.35 per litre. All the gas stations in a town will usually charge the same price for petrol.
In addition to national parks (which they have a good number of), there are lots of scenic areas. Any pretty area, even a small one, can be designated as a “scenic area”.
NZ has possums but unlike opossums in the US they are furry (even their tails). They are doing quite a bit of damage to the forests because they climb trees and eat the blooms (along with bark and leaves), which keeps trees from reproducing. They are not native to NZ, so there are huge campaigns to eradicate them. We’ve even seen poster contests for young children, where the winners were a crayon drawing extolling the virtues of poisoning possums (“so the trees will bloom”) and a drawing of possum road-kill. They also make clothing from possum fur — we’ve seen possum yarn, possum hats, socks, gloves… even possum willy, nipple and belly button warmers.
Despite the sand flies here, people in NZ don’t seem to believe in screens. Even in areas where there are lots of sand flies, we’ve only seen screens on windows once or twice. The norm seems to be to just open the windows and let the flies in.
Despite the fact that it gets rather cold here in the winter, people in NZ don’t seem to believe in central heating. Instead, most homes and other buildings are heated by small portable electric heaters and electric blankets. Even cabins we’ve stayed in seem to have electric blankets on the beds.
Like in England, Kiwis seem to like their hot and cold water separate. Most sinks have separate faucets for hot and cold. And they can’t seem to decide whether the hot water faucet goes on the left or the right. They will always have a stopper so you can get warm water by mixing hot and cold in the sink (then splash around). We’ve seen a few sinks with a single faucet, but they are rare, even in new construction. The only time they mix hot and cold is for showers (which is by necessity, I suppose).
Kiwis also like to keep their toilets separate from their sinks and showers. The toilet is usually in a separate room, all by itself. The cabin where we are staying has a US-style bathroom, which contains everything (toilet, sink, and bathtub) but this seems to have upset someone’s sensibilities so much that they built an elaborate curtain system so you can hide the toilet.
Toilets have two buttons on them, one for a half flush and one for a full flush. This saves water.
NZ apparently never had the fierce range wars that were fought in the US. Sheep and cows are commonly grazed together in the same field. For some reason this looks very strange to us. They also graze deer in fields — venison is much more common here than in the US. We haven’t seen any open range grazing. Animals seem to always be fenced in (although they do get out occasionally and run around on the roads, which causes everyone, even the locals, to take pictures).
Constellations are all different. Orion is upside down.
Not only is the northern side of a house the sunny side, but the Pacific ocean is on the east. Disorientation city!
