Over a month! How is New Zealand?

I can't believe it's been over a month already!

I had meant to make a post when we'd been here a month, but the time has just flown by. So far we are loving New Zealand. The weather is great, the people are friendly, and the landscape is beautiful. There have been some things that have taken some getting used to though. Overall we have absolutely loved it, although there have been days that we have really missed our families and friends. Nobody is ever far from our thoughts and we miss and love you all!

The Lingo
At first I felt really self conscious about my accent, especially since a lot of people are slightly prejudiced against Americans and, much like we can't usually differentiate between the Australian and New Zealand accents, most of them can't differentiate between Canadian and American accents. For some reason I felt especially aware of it in the grocery stores. Other places, sure, most tourists go there and there are other people around, but the supermarket is usually the realm of locals. Everyone has been super friendly and helpful though and I've stopped being as self conscious over the past few weeks.

Mainly I've found that they tend to put the emphasis on different syllables than we do. Garage, for instance is pronounced differently. As are potato and tomato.

"Sweet As", "Cool As". Sweet as what? Apparently this is just the kiwi way of say "Cool!" or "Awesome!"

"Dairy" This is used to mean the local convenience store. So if someone's gonna take a pop down to the dairy, then they are probably walking down to the convenience store.

Prices
For the most part we have found that prices are mostly the same as back home. The main exception has been junk food, which isn't completely a bad thing. For example, a 1.5 liter bottle of Coke Cola is $4. A 350mL can is about $2.50. A pint of beer from the pub will run about $13, but we aren't much better off getting pop, since a pint of pop is about $7 and isn't refillable. Movies are also expensive, at around $20 per person to go out, or around $35 to buy a DVD/bluray. I guess that just means we have to eat healthy and enjoy the outdoors a lot!

Food
Food is great! Lots of good meat at good prices, organic vegetables everywhere, and tonnes of options for gluten free. Most of the gluten free food is also dairy free, so great for people with lots of allergies. It took me a few days to identify which food brands offer gluten free options and where to find them in the grocery stores, but I've had no issues since then. We have taken advantage of the abundance of farms to stop in and pick up eggs and produce directly from the farm a few times.

There are a few things that have odd names that took us a bit to figure out. If you want a bell pepper, look for capsicum. Also, if you want to find yams/sweet potatoes, look for kumara. No other oddities so far, but I'm sure we will find more!

Barefeet everywhere!
People here tend to walk barefoot. Everywhere! At first I mainly noticed the kids, probably because they are running around everywhere! Kids at parks, kids at school, kids walking around stores with their parents. I've rarely seen a kids under 10 years old here actually wearing shoes. I've even seen a number of adults walking around the streets, the grocery store, and everywhere else barefoot. It is completely normal and accepted here. I guess that our toe shoes won't seem quite so strange!