It’s not all puppies and sunshine

I’m sick as a result of walking dogs in the storm for two days, so you can imagine my level of grumpiness. I hate this weather like I hardly hate anything else, so I thought I’d break it to you: there are also a bunch of things I don’t like about New Zealand.

• The weather
  Well, this relates to Wellington in particular. Wellington is a lovely city, but like most of the lovely cities I’ve visited/lived in (I’m talking to you, Edinburgh), the reason so it is so lovely is that it has to make up for the shitty weather. I can’t even begin to describe how strong the wind is here. Unless you’ve experienced it yourself, you wouldn’t understand how it feels to try and maintain an erect posture while walking against the wind. Northerly, Southerly, the fuck you know where it comes from, this fucking wind makes it hard to breathe (literally). You can’t either open your car door, or prevent it from swinging wide open right against the car parked next to yours. Sometimes blasts are so strong that the whole house shakes.
  Now, add rain to the wind and you have a fucking storm. This makes it impossible to start walking from point A and reach point B not looking like a psycho-schizo who just stuck their fingers in an electrical socket. I mean all this is great if you are in the windmill business, BUT I JUST NEED TO BE IN A WARM SUNNY PLACE FOR A WHILE OK.
  

  

                                                             Before and after

 

Summer

• Living in an igloo
  I know what you’re about to say: But surely you can just stay nice and cosy inside. NO YOU CAN’T. Because for some reason unknown to me and to probably every other human beings in their right mind, house heating is not a thing in New Zealand. DON’T EVEN ASK. This is probably the thing I hate the most. New Zealand is not the tropics. It’s a fucking cold country. Why on earth would you think that you don’t need fucking radiators? People get by with electrical heaters which are 1. expensive 2. not efficient and 3. fucking lame. I’ve been wearing my ski attire inside for the past couple of months and I still feel the chill inside my bones. I have been constantly cold for the past 12 months (as summer didn’t really happen) and will be for the next six months (as we are going home for Christmas) and I’m not happy about it.

Me most days

• Basically, New Zealand is like Europe 30 years ago
  I know this is probably just me being a spoiled First World country brat, but most of the commodities I’m used to are yet to reach this side of the world. Health and safety regulations, mobile phone plans, free WiFi, people calling you rather than replying to emails…
  Not to mention that it’s SO hard to find nice, good quality gear and clothes over here. I’m big on hiking/sport equipment, and all you can get in New Zealand is lousy, cheap, non-ethical crap from the Warehouse.
  And if you’re hoping to find relief in online shopping…
• Good luck finding a company that ships all the way over here
  Nobody gives a shit about New Zealand. Amazon NZ doesn’t exist, and its replacement is TradeMe, the lame Kiwi version where everything you want to buy is fucking expensive. Because guess what:
• Everything is fucking expensive
  When you can’t grow/produce/build stuff on land, you have to import it, and that makes it really expensive. The worst part for me is that greens, fruits and veggies are so freaking pricy. Along with the lack of heating, this is definitely on the Top Three of things that annoy me. A vegan, plant-based diet has always been the cheapest option anywhere else I’ve lived, while here is pretty much as costly as eating meat and cheese, and as we currently live on a part-time income it breaks my heart every time I pay $5.99 for a bell pepper. But I’m trying to find a balance between living on bread and canned fruit and actually eating what makes me feel good.
  (This was also my biggest struggle when we were living in a van. I’ll talk about this in a separate post.)

  
  You can always go to the farmers market, but organic produce will still cost you an arm and a leg

• We are far away from everything
  This is something I knew but didn’t fully realise until I moved here. New Zealand is fucking far away from fucking everything. Even Australia is 5 hours away on a plane. I miss my friends and family like crazy and it kills me that I can’t just jump on a plane and go home and visit them for a weekend.
• You can’t get coffee after 4pm
  Coffee is big in New Zealand. However, the heat dies down in the early afternoon and cafes close at 4pm, and after then if you want to meet up with a friend you’ll have to find an alternative drink to chat over.
• Everything is slow
  Although I do appreciate the Kiwi chillaxed lifestyle, it really bothers me in situations where you need to get things done. It takes forever to get email replies (I’m getting rejected for jobs that I applied for five months ago), organising get-togethers always involves people confirming and never showing up, and just in general everything takes longer than people from the Northern Hemisphere are used to. Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that people are never in a rush (that’s what I found sad about London), but sometimes you just want to pay for your groceries without the cashier asking you about your life story and showing you pictures of their granddaughter.
• Earthquakes
  The first thing I see when I walk into my house and the last thing I see when I leave it is my earthquake kit patiently waiting in the hallway. Now you can imagine how relaxing that is. Everybody knows that an earthquake is going to happen at some point in the near future, and to me this feels like living with the infamous sword of Damocles hanging above my head. It’s just a matter of hoping you’re not in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Our livingroom after the Kaikoura earthquake

• It’s fucking hard to get a job
  Number three of the Top Three things I hate is how hard it has been for me to find a job. I pretty much gave up on the idea of getting into Publishing (partly because of the fact that no one ever replied to my emails). I’ve worked in a couple of cafes and I’m now walking dogs which I love but I can’t help but feeling torn between being grateful that I get paid for petting puppies and the frustration of being 31 years old and not having a job that gives me benefits/holidays/sick leave etc.

 

As you can probably tell, im not having the best of days. Also, I think I’ve broken the record for the amount of times I said fuck in one single post. I apologise, but I thought it’d be just fair to make it clear that New Zealand is not this magical happy place that I’m constantly praising in my IG feed. There are things that bother me on different levels – and I’m not gonna lie, some of them I really struggle with. Overall it’s been ok down under so far, but it’s definitely not all puppies and sunshine – quite literally, in my case.