Sad, Really

Occasionally, the news programs here will pick up a piece from ABC news or one of the other US news outlets. Yesterday I caught the end of a piece about Hannah Montana concert tickets and a man who was trying to give his 2 away, since his daughter was sick and unable to attend. The piece talked about how getting tickets for a family of four would set you back $5,000 on E-bay. It showed a clip of several young girls (8 or 10 years old, I'd guess) arriving to the concert in a stretch Hummer limo.

The man finally found someone to give his tickets to: a couple of young girls whose mother was out of work on disability. Happy ending.

As this was during the morning show, the two talking heads on the couch did their usual banter about how sweet this was. Then they turned to the news anchor, who had a different take:

"No, that's a single good deed in an otherwise sick culture."

I wonder about the degree to which the American lifestyle has ceased to be the envy of the world and is now despised by the world. What must the rest of the world think when it sees the excesses of $5,000 tickets for a children's concert or shows like 'The Simple Life,' or 'My Super Sweet Sixteen,' or 'The Real Housewives of Orange County'? Even more importantly, what does it think about the American audiences for these shows?

Egalitarianism

One of the things you see overseas is how tax money not directed toward maintaining an obscenely huge military can be better spent.

On Friday night, Debi and I took the boys to QE II Park, which is one of the nine leisure and recreation facilities we have here in Chch. They are owned and operated by the City Council.
It's hard to imagine many communities in the US where you could spend tax dollars to build a public health club & water park. Of course I have seen public pools in the US, but nothing on this scale. QE II has an Olympic size lap pool, a wave pool, 2 children's pools, a lazy river ride, and a diving well.

For the a mere $8.50 we spent a couple of hours playing in the indoor pools/water park. We didn't get tickets for the five state-of-the-art hydroslides this time, but if we had it would have bumped the price up to $32.50.

A working class family could spend the day there for about 3 hour's worth of minimum-wage labor. But if they were earning only minimum wage, which is $11.25 here in NZ, they'd qualify for a Community Services Card, which could reduce the price even more.

Before we left the US, we went to Country Springs Water Park. It was a nice place, though a little smaller than QEII. A Friday evening there will set you back $100 for a family of four. That's about half a work week at minimum wage. An evening at the hotel and two days in the water park is an easy $200.

I often hear NZ described as 'egalitarian.' Sometimes this is a bad thing, but it also manifests itself in ways that are rather easy to miss. In the US, many people would ask, 'What does it matter if poor people can go to the water slides in NZ but not in the US?' (And, frankly, would ask lots of worse things about poor people.) Egalitarianism here seems to mean, at least in part, that everyone should have access to family-oriented activities.

Now, to be fair, they're not giving away free trips to Disney for anyone who wants them. But, on the other hand, if you want to spend the evening splashing around in the pool with your kids--or going to the beach, the playground, the parks--then go ahead. Beside the modest entry fee to the pool, you don't find user or entrance fees, and I've yet to encounter any place outside the immediate city center where you have to pay to park.

Here the outdoors are still free. Having things to do with the kids doesn't mean having to be middle class. 'Public' here doesn't mean 'substandard.' At the pool, the park, the beach, I see a mix of all classes (and races).

This isn't just a government issue, either. The Community Services Card that I mentioned can also be used for discounts at many businesses, such as banks and power companies. Some movie theaters, too, offer discount tickets to Card holders.

Happy (Belated) Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there. It's hard to believe we've been here 4 months already, and even harder to believe that Christmas is right around the corner.

NZ doesn't have anything like Thanksgiving, so this week was just like any other here. The stores are all gearing up for Christmas--in fact, with no Halloween, they've been rolling out their Christmas stuff since mid-October. Tonight is 'Christmas in the Park' here. If the promotional material is correct, 1 out of 4 people in the city will be there. I'm not sure if we will.

We didn't do anything special for Thanksgiving. Debi and I have been battling colds for about 2 weeks now, as have the boys. Of course, since it's spring and there are all sorts of exotic allergens in the air, it's hard to tell what is cold-related and what is allergies. Either way, neither of us has been in the mood to plan or execute a Thanksgiving feast.

Turkeys are available here. However, like their cousin the chicken, they come at a premium price. You won't find birds the size of a Yugo for $.69 per pound here. The turkeys I've seen sell for $40-$60 (or more) and are about the size of US roasting chickens. Poultry is sold by size, which means that you could pay the same price for two birds a pound or so different in weight and it is impossible to say exactly how much a given bird weighs. I'd estimate the turkeys in the range of 6-12 pounds, making them as expensive as beef fillets, racks of lamb, or monk fish. And all the turkeys I've seen are frozen. Perhaps when Christmas comes the butchers will have fresh.

Buying a turkey would be fairly pointless, since I've yet to find cranberries. I'm hoping that they'll magically appear in the week before Christmas, since we do get some American produce here (grapes, nectarines, peaches, and some pears).

The local sweet potatoes, called kumara, are terrific. They are milder than the sweet potatoes or yams in the States, which is good. They aren't stringy either, so mashed they are similar in texture and taste to a mixture of sweet and white potatoes. (Something Dixie got me started doing, thanks to a dish she had at Pascale's.

Finding suitable bread for stuffing wouldn't be any problem. Bread is one of the few things I can find in the grocery store in as many varieties as I would find in the US. They sell cheap white here, too. Of course, there's no Bell's Seasoning, which is too bad since I've always thought the smell of Bell's is the smell of Thanksgiving. Forget the roasting turkey--when those spices hit the butter, onions, and celery, Thanksgiving has begun! (BTW, it would be a bad, bad, bad idea to send me any. NZ has pretty strict rules about importing dried or live plant materials, which includes spices, and violations result in a $200 fine.) If I wanted to I could probably fashion some for myself, since there's a wonderful Indian grocery a couple of blocks from here that has just about every spice you could want either whole or ground, and I'm sure I could find a recipe on google.

The one accompaniment that would not be difficult to find would be the wine. The greatest challenge would be picking among the dozens of pinot gris, pinot noirs, savignon blancs, and Gewürztraminers available--there's a real embarrassment of riches on that front.

Maybe I'll just skip all that other stuff and have some wine.

More about shopping in NZ

Go into any grocery or general merchandise store an you're likely to find a lot of familiar brands.  Palmolive dish soap, Dove beauty products, Glad Wrap ... the list goes on and on.  What's notable, however, is just which brands you'll find compared to which you won't.  

Why Palmolive, but not Dawn? Dove makes sense, since it's probably the best-known brand. But, on the other hand, that's pretty much the only American brand of soap and lotion that you'll find.  There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to which are available.

Other types of products just aren't available.  There's nothing like Lysol, and liquid laundry soap is essentially non-existent. 

The issue isn't that the products I can get back in the States aren't common; I expect that.  In fact, I'm surprised by how many I can find here.  The point is that there isn't any discernable pattern to what is here. 

Another thing that makes shopping here in NZ different is the range of prices.  In the US, comparison shopping on a day-to-day basis isn't really all that worthwhile.  Most items are going to be pretty near to the same price no matter where you buy them.  Wal-Mart vs. Target, Home Depot vs. Lowes, Best Buy vs. Circuit City, unless something is on special, chances are the same item is going to be the same price at either place.

In NZ, it's an entirely different issue.  Prices can differ by 200-300% on some common items. No one place seems to be consistently cheaper, either, so comparison shopping is really important--as is stocking up when things are on sale.

The Silly Season

We're still having a bit of adjusting to the whole spring-summer in November to March thing here. It's like long-term jet lag or something. Maybe it's 'hemisphere lag.'

The other weekend when we are at Ferrymead Heritage Village and they had a handbill posted for their 'All American Fourth of July' featuring everything red, white, and blue. My brain was thinking, 'oh, that's coming up--we should go' and I found myself trying to figure out if it was 3, 4, or 5 weeks away.

Seeing the flurry of election results last week had the same effect on me. My brain couldn't wrap itself around the idea that people would be voting now.

All the Christmas stuff in the stores around here isn't helping. I've never lived anyplace where the holiday season meant anything other than hunkering down in the hope of outlasting the cold weather. I wonder if anyone raised in the Northern Hemisphere (north of Miami, anyway)ever really gets used to it.

Yesterday's economic post--info, not whinging

I intended the post about economic issues to provide a little insight into the expat experience. If we were back in the US right now, we'd be confronting similar economic dilemmas. Buying a house in the US is probably fraught with the same more peril than here in NZ. A couple of foreclosures on your street, or a few dozen in your community, mean evaporating equity and declining value. Debi and I first moved to the Seacoast area not long after Pease AFB closed and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard went through massive layoffs. I knew people who lived in the Berwicks who couldn't sell their houses for anywhere near what they still owed on their mortgages.

Among our fellow recent expats, most of whom are from the UK, currency exchange rates are something of a spectator sport. Many of them follow the day-to-day fluctuations of their home currency as closely as they follow their favorite teams from back home. If the dollar were the Red Sox or the Patriots, things would certainly be different!

Bad Currency News & Random Economic Musings

During the time that we've been here the US dollar has taken a pounding by the Kiwi dollar. It's been a rollercoaster, with the US dollar buying $1.50 as a high and buying $1.20 as a low. It's been in the $1.30 range for a couple of weeks now, but slowly sliding down from the $1.35 it bought in mid-October.

This could be much worse news for us, since the Kiwi dollar hit an all-time high against most major currencies in July. It, like the US dollar, has been falling since, but not at the same rate of devaluation that has plagued the US dollar.

On a day-to-day basis, this isn't earth-shatteringly bad. Debi is paid in US currency, but because it's every two weeks, there's some built in dollar cost averaging. We also haven't seen the wild upswing in gas prices that people in the US are facing. Gas here has gone up about 6%, but other prices have remained pretty constant. In the US, the average gas prices are up by about 9% in the past month alone.

Long-term, though, this presents a serious problem. It's hard to think about brining over a big chunk of money to use as a down payment on a house. During the time that we've been here, a hypothetical $50,ooo US would have yielded as much as $75,000 NZ or as little as $60,000 NZ. That's a fairly wide swing in a short time. If one goes back even further, when I first starting thinking about this move, the $1 US was equal to about $1.75 NZ--and that was low, because for most of 2000, 2001, and 2002, the US dollar was worth more than 2 Kiwi dollars.

This is only compounded by the fact that real estate prices here in NZ are relatively high (though comparable or perhaps even a bit cheaper than what we left behind in the Seacoast region of NH) and are possibly on the edge of a US-style bubble. Added to that, a 'good deal' on a mortgage here is just shy of 9% and adjustable after 5 years. (They don't seem to do 30-year fixed-rate mortgages here.)

I don't know what all this means besides that I need to stay away from XE and FxHistory.

Another small observation

Each afternoon when I go to pick up Evan at school, I see something I've not seen before.

The bell rings to mark the end of the school day and ... nothing happens.

There aren't cries of joy, or kids rushing out the doors. Eventually, classroom by classroom, the kids start to emerge as the *teacher* dismisses them. Sometimes it begins a minute after the bell, but I've seen some classes held for 5 minutes or longer. It's really quite a thing to see.

Usually, about 2 dozen or so parents are waiting on the school grounds for the kids. I've yet to hear a single one complain, either, that their kids aren't being let out the moment the bell rings. There doesn't seem to be any rush.

Finally, some new pics

Well, okay, thanks to my ISP, they're actually kind of old pics, but they're new to you.

Here they are!