Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

minor shocks

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I have caused two things to explode in the past month of living in New Zealand.

I feel pretty good about that number. It could be much higher.

For the record, I am not trying to blow things up. I do not have any hobbies related to detonations. Take note, current and future rental property managers!

What I do have is a house full of our American electronics, very few of which operate on the voltage and frequency that emerges from the wall in a typical house in New Zealand.

A map of the power outlets of the world via an awesome Reddit post.

The world has four or more standard kinds of electrical outlets, depending on how you’re counting the combinations of the shape of the plug, the voltage, and the frequency. This is a fun fact that most people usually only encounter on vacations.

Of course, on vacation your entire inventory of electronics that draw power from a wall (rather than by the now-ubiquitous USB) might be limited a laptop and an electric razor – both of which can typically handle power differences if you pick up a cheap wall adapter at the airport.

It’s a different story when you move all of your electronic possessions to a new country. Every piece of electronics you encounter while packing yield’s another Sophie’s Choice.

Do you want to give up your favorite reading lamp and have to spend time and money to buy a new one in a country where everything is expensive?!

Or, do you want to pack and ship your lamp and have to power it with a power converter or transformer for the rest of its life? Power converters and transformers are appliances that are about the size of a toaster oven but ten times as heavy. They invariably have something like 23% one-star user reviews that say awesome things like, “it created a cloud of foul-smelling smoke” or “it emits an ominously loud ticking noise if I plug anything into it for longer than five minutes.”

Given that rosy outlook, you could also choose to ship everything and then cross your fingers and hope your reading lamp will be just fine with a cheap wall adapter. And then it could explode in a ball of fire. Or the lightbulb could pop and flip the breakers in your entire house.

Those are just the results I’ve encountered so far. I’m sure if I keep plugging things in I can produce some more potential fiery or smoking outcomes.

(But I’m not! Again, take note, current and future rental property managers! I have learned my lesson.)

Alternately, you might buy a slew of those heavy power converts but also be the luckiest American in all of Wellington and rent a house that turns out to be dual-wired for both New Zealand and American power.

So different, yet so the same. Two sisters only have their parents to blame. It’s rare that two can get along, but when they do, they’re inseparable! Such a blessing comes to few, few.

I was quite suspicious when we first spotted the US-style plugs in the house. Sure, they looked like the familiar electrical outlets we knew and loved, but they wouldn’t be the first seemingly-familiar thing to fool me in New Zealand. I had learned my lesson with their “plush” toilet paper and so-called “ice cream.”

Plus, I wasn’t keen on experimenting on the mysterious outlets with a beloved standing mixer or a guitar amp, each of which easily cost three times as much to buy here as they did in the US.

We carried on with our lives as we awaited a visit from an electrician to divine the true nature of the outlets. That still involved a surprising amount of stuff that had to be plugged into a wall. High-end electronics tend to specify the voltage and frequency they require, which is how we learned that our printer is A-OK with being plugged into a wall in NZ.

Smaller things, like bedside lamps, not so much.

convenience fees

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As we enter our third week of Kiwi life the thing I’ve begun to appreciate about America now that I am outside of it is how everything there is convenient.

The first thing I noticed were credit card fees. I’m not generally one to use my card for casual, daily expenses, but it was a necessity here before we got our bank cards set up. I quickly discovered that it’s common for many places to tack on a convenience fee of at least 2% to a credit purchase – and, for small purchases it might be an automatic 30-40 cents. These fees are almost universally absorbed by the store in the US.

You might be thinking, “2% – what’s the big deal!” Except, are you the sort of person who puts big purchases on your credit card purely for the points or miles, only to immediately pay it off?

Suddenly you’re paying a $20 premium for every $1,000 you pass through your card that way. $20 isn’t nothing, and if you’ve got to buy a whole new set of appliances because rental properties don’t come with them, it’s several multiples of $20.

Yes, you heard me right: rental homes don’t come with the major appliances here. No washer, dryer, or refrigerator – which are collectively known as “whiteware.”

I still haven’t heard the full history of why this is the case. It seems utterly mad to me, because as a renter you are suddenly responsible for a few thousand dollars of appliances over their lifespan of a decade or more, and if you switch homes a few times there is no guarantee they’ll fit into each subsequent house!

That’s specifically the case with dryers, which just aren’t very common in New Zealand. We’ve seen tons of places that don’t even have a spot for one, and even if they do there’s no ductwork for venting. If you want a dryer in those houses, you have to buy a super-special, super-expensive “condenser” style dryers that suck the water out of your clothes just like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s farm.

The majority of people here line dry their clothes. We went on a walk to the zoo yesterday while the weather was nice and nearly every house we passed on the way had clothes hanging out on a line or a rack! [Read more…] about convenience fees

does it taste the same?

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We’re on Nomadic Day 23 here in Wellington.

I don’t know about you, but that’s way longer than any other vacation or break from the regular schedule of life that I’ve had since … um, let’s go with ever. It’s long enough that it’s starting to become difficult to differentiate between the days of the week, despite trying to hang on to some semblance daily norms like EV6’s bedtime routine.

That’s why I was so excited to visit a farmers’ market this morning. Saturday morning farmer’s markets were a regular fixture of our Philadelphia life for much of the year, no matter which configuration of the three of us decided to attend. Even if this one paled by comparison, it would at least let me know it was Saturday.

As it turns out, the Newtown Fruit and Vegetable Market in Wellington dwarfed our little Landsdowne Farmer’s Market. Or, maybe it just seemed big because there were so many vendors squeezed into such a small space all selling similar things. It created an effect similar to a hall of mirrors, such that you saw endless rows of peppers, pumpkins, and kumara no matter which way you turned.

Not only were there (perhaps literal) tons of fresh food, but it was much cheaper than in the many supermarkets we’ve visited like Goldilocks sampling bear housewares. A bag of veggies almost too heavy for me to carry was only $35! Plus, I snagged a beautiful brocade-covered canvas bag for just five dollars from a delightful woman who said she appears at the market fortnightly, and I honestly would have probably paid just to hear her use that word casually in a sentence.

The market helped introduce a little bit of gravity into my week, but it was a trip to the local Mediterranean Food Warehouse, that made me feel more at home here. It’s a high-end Italian-influenced grocery store and eatery chain whose local outpost commands one corner of a large intersection nearby. [Read more…] about does it taste the same?

Toyota down under

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Today we let a four-year-old choose our new car.

Sort of.

EV6 definitely picked our car out of a line-up of dozens as soon as we hit the lot. She is obsessed with the color blue, and this car is an unmissable electric blue that you could spot from a kilometer away, which she nearly did.

“Let’s get that one!” she insisted as soon as we entered the parking lot full of models certified to have been never before driven in New Zealand.

“Oh really? How much would you pay for it?”

“Three dollars,” she replied. This is how much EV6 thinks every single thing costs.

As for whether it’s our car… well… I wouldn’t say that we own the car as of this writing. It’s more that we put down a refundable deposit on a car with a US credit card for an outrageous fee because the car dealership will not accept our American money.

I knew car shopping would be hard, but I didn’t anticipate that the hard part would be forking over a giant pile of existing money earmarked for car buying!

This little wrinkle has thrown quite a wrench into the “What to do when we hit the ground!” section of my “Moving To New Zealand” Gantt chart (which is a real thing that exists).  I thought the crushingly obvious order of events would be bank, cell phones, car, house. That makes sense, right? Money, communication, transportation, permanent habitation.

In reality, the bank won’t even make an appointment with you until you are in the country and then it takes several days to wait for it, during which time you’ll probably want a phone and a vehicle, except purchasing the vehicle requires you to have a New Zealand bank account, but even if you visit the bank to try to rush things you’ll learn that the bank account requires you to have a permanent address with some form of bill associated with it, but you are probably still living in a hotel because renting a house requires you to wire a bank deposit, which is virtually impossible to do from a US bank (as we discovered), so you’ll need a bank account to rent the house where you can be sent a bill in order to get your bank account in order to buy your car.

At least the cell phones were easy. [Read more…] about Toyota down under

left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)

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In writing about last evening’s grocery apocalypse solely from my own perspective, one detail that got lost in the mix is E doing all of the left-side driving in a ridiculously large sports utility vehicle.

It’s terrifying. And that’s just from my perspective.

Of course, E is doing all of the hard work and shouldering the even-greater terror of actually piloting the vehicle – the mental gymnastics of staying left, doing shallow left turns and wide right turns, and figuring out how the fuck you “Give Way” in a roundabout.

Even before we could get into the terror of conducting our American-driven death-tank around the unsuspecting roads of Wellington, there was the misadventure of actually acquiring said vehicle at the airport.

We were forewarned by D, E’s Aussie friend on the ground in NZ, that our chosen car rental agency was a little … odd. Perhaps our first hint should have been their complete absence from the considerable line-up of rental desks in the international arrivals terminal.

An exhausted E posed this to me as a feature rather than a bug as I swung a delirious EV6 back and forth by her ankles in an effort to keep her from attempting to surf on the baggage carousel. Our car agency would pick us up and deliver us straight to our vehicle, she advised me as she rang them up to let them know we had arrived and would require a large luggage cart.

It was a concierge service. Perhaps they might arrive wearing a jaunty hat and carrying a little white-board with our names written on it.

I entertained that possibility for the first ten, or maybe twenty minutes of us hovering around our impressive island of nine bags for two-and-a-half people, being the most obvious weirdo, materialistic, “super-size me!” Americans we could possibly be. After that, my hopes began to falter.

(“We’re moving here FOR GOOD!,” I wanted to shout at every Kiwi passing by, “And our household belongings won’t be here for FIVE MORE WEEKS!” As if our suitcases didn’t contain more clothing than most of them had in their entire houses.)

Finally, our man arrived. Sans luggage cart and jaunty cap, but with a large mini-van! Was this our vehicle? He made no comment on that, but started loading our luggage into the rear of the dingy, disheveled old van whose particular scent I might kindly describe as being evocative of a cat brothel.

Hopefully this was not our vehicle. E snapped EV6’s child seat into place and we confirmed that all of our bags were intact. Then, we set out for a short drive through the airport to the rental agency lot.

“Perhaps,” the driver mused, “you might just like to keep the van to drive home? All of your things (he said this very pointedly) fit into it so well. I could drop by your flat with your car tomorrow.”

To which we of course replied, “Um, well, we respect the rights of feline sex workers as long as they are doing the work by their own free will, but perhaps you should hold on to their mobile home and we could possibly have the actual car we rented? If for no reason other than needing to figure out how to snap EV6’s seat into it.

“And also on account of the smell.”
[Read more…] about left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)