Okay, so overall impressions of New Zealand. I hardly know where to begin. Everything was nicer than I expected. The city, the university, the houses (I saw), and beaches and hikes were all beautiful. All of the flowers were blooming everywhere. There were clear little streams running through the campus and the city. The campus was full of little paths along the rivers and through the ferns and blossoming foliage.
Everything is more expensive there. Milk was $7 nzd for 3 liters, so $5 US. Gas is a little bit more, about 1.89/l. I guess it would be like Hawaii, where you would be paying for more the lifestyle and only spend your money on the basics. (Houses, although more than Crawfordsville or Lewiston, are much cheaper than in Hawaii.)
The city has its own composting program and recyles everything. There are bike lanes everyone and lots of people using them. The public transportation is great. There are even nine members of the green party in parliament. As a liberal, I felt a little irrelevant. Especially in contrast to Crawfordsville, where I count my visible bike riding a minor public service. The lady running the restaurant at the hotel assured me that their conservatives were more liberal than President Obama. Who knows, maybe, in New Zealand, I would actually be conservative.On the lifestyle, it seems pretty ideal. I found surfing, rockclimbing, hiking all within a half hour from the city.
There seems like a pretty incredible amount of adventures within three hours, and the entire south island within 7-8 hours. Alpine treks. Week-long kakaying tours through island or fjords. Hotsprings. A system of mountain huts were you can stay inexpensively in the back country, some with hotsprings. Seriously. Where do I sign? My only complaint, and, after living in Maine, I feel like a whiner even bringing it up, is that is was kind of cold. Like it would never really be warm enough to want to jump in the ocean without a wetsuit on. Like Santa Cruz (another pretty near ideally situated city). They feel like it’s cold too, but I think because it is colder than everywhere close by, like Australia or Oceania, they feel like it is colder than it really is. They aren’t comparing it to Maine.
