Two Americans emigrate to New Zealand from Colorado,
USA.
We talk about
our life in Nelson, New Zealand.
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In October we were on holiday for more than a week, some of which we blogged about. We'd planned to spend the last weekend of November in Christchurch and we'd also recently booked to visit Wellington for five days over Christmas. As it was, it was going to be a quick end to the year.
And then Don's parents called in early November. They said they were spending the last two weeks of November in Waikiki and asked us if we'd have time to join them in Hawaii for a long weekend around Thanksgiving time.
Uhhh, yeah. That could be arranged.
So in the midst of all our other end of year travels, we bought tickets to make our way to Honolulu for what turned out to be three days.
After a 70 minute flight to Auckland and a further 8 hour flight direct to Honolulu, we joined Joe and Deanna for a whirlwind few days of shopping, walking, dining, talking, and lots of catching up. There was a wee bit of Haagen Daz and Ben and Jerry's eating as well.
Even though we have beaches here in Nelson, we decided to bring our swimsuits anyway because the waves are generally bigger in Hawaii. We got out for a brief early morning swim at the beach just down from our hotel and the water was lovely and warm!
The three days felt like longer, but no sooner had we gotten to Hawaii than we turned around to make the exact same day long trip back. And in two days we were due for a weekend in Christchurch, oy!!
Working in November and December was pretty lackadaisical for us both. Let's not dwell on it.
Christmas has come and gone and we had a great, relaxing time in an apartment in the centre of Wellington where we did some shopping, opened presents, walked a lot, took some photos, watched some movies, and did basically not too much.
Of course one of the main reasons we go to Wellington, apart from it being our favourite New Zealand city, is that it 
has Wholly Bagels, a bagel chain with five Wellington stores. Yum. After all this time going there, I finally learned this time that the chain was started by an American from New York!
If you like bagels and you want to move to Nelson, forget about it. We've even tried to find proper bagels in Auckland and Christchurch, but most people forget the boiling part of the process, I think. The bagels are pretty average. Not Wholly Bagels!
We had one every day except for Christmas and even brought back a baker's dozen to freeze and parse out when we have a fit. Good news though, one of the owners is interested in moving to Nelson - I did my best to entice him!
The city was nicely decorated and, in the centre of town on the waterfront, this cool Christmas tree sits in a city park. The local phone company sponsors several phone booths that surround it that are labelled 'Santa Line' so that kids can ring up Santa from the tree.
They place lots of bean bags under the tree for people to come sit underneath it. I think those bean bags would be kinda dirty, and I didn't really want to take part, but they sure were packed on Christmas eve!
That white light you see between the tree and the phone booth isn't the north star, although it looks a bit eerie! It is actually a crescent moon that didn't come into focus in the picture.
Have a look at the tree from underneath it, to the right.
The local department store decorates its store windows each year with mechanical displays, the kind that you likely see in other department stores around the big cities of the world. 
The displays are very cool, but darn tough to photograph. See left. Shame you can see my reflection in the window, but at least the reflection looks thin, right?!
We headed to Te Papa to see what was on - if you're in Wellington I highly recommend you make time to visit this incredible national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand.
Inside we got our first chance to see the colossal squid in person. Perhaps you heard of this find by fishermen in the Antarctic. Eeeew, it was gross. It is 4.5 metres long and pretty darn disgusting. It doesn't look as awful in the preservation tanks as it did on the video that captured it's initial finding. I didn't realise that squids had hooks!! Like monsterous hooks on their tentacles and a single monster fang as big as my fist that sucks in the food. Blech.
These two pictures sit side by side but don't really demonstrate the length, particularly because they were taken at different angles. Still, it's as good as we could do! Google 'colossal squid' and you'll pull up a number of images and links that you can see more pictures. Or go to Te Papa's dedicated squid site.
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The eye is located sorta in the middle where the body diagrams show the elongated 'head' is, and the big thing on the left is the fin type thing it uses to swim - it moves in waves to propel the beast along. Unfortunately the largest part, where the eye is located, seems to be all mushed up and in our pictures above it is the bit in the middle that we didn't photograph real well. There looks to have been lots of poking and prodding, as several bits were sewn up after dissection.
Apparently they originally thought the squid was about 9 metres long, and they were hoping it was male because no one has ever seen a male colossal squid. But no, 4.5 metres and female - you can tell for yourself from the museum video where they reach inside, somewhere, and pull out a bunch of eggs. Ick.
We spent some big bucks, $20 each, to see Avatar in 3D in the big city - Nelson's movie theatre suffices, but it's pretty darn small and uncomfortable in some seats, so it was a real treat to see a movie in a big, grand theatre just like the olden days. The movie was AWESOME, the 3D makes it super cool, that's what going to the movies should be like. Everyone should make the effort to see it in the theatre, DVD won't do it justice.
Walking around the city on Christmas day gave us
lots of good shots to take with no people to get in the way! There were many interesting buildings to take photos of, we always like to see the Beehive, the government building, cuz it's kinda ugly and cool at the same time.
The railway station was open on Christmas day and was one of the busier spots with people, trains and taxis driving by. It has this cute directional sign sitting out front.
When we came home we went to visit our neighbour (who we don't know) who won a contest for the best decorated house for Christmas. He has coordinated a light show with music. Read more at the Nelson Mail article. Before Christmas we noticed there was a traffic jam for several nights down below us (where this house is located) and we figured it was something to do with Christmas lights, but award winning!! It's like we're all famous now.
Happy new year to you all.
Our city council (and, disclaimer, my employer) has a pretty cool programme going. The Council wants to make Nelson the the solar centre of New Zealand by encouraging use of solar power.
The scheme - here they use the word scheme to mean a programme, so don't get caught up in negative connotations of the word - gives residents the chance to install a solar hot water system now and pay back the installation cost as part of their rates over ten years, or earlier if they wish. Rates are the equivalent of property taxes, but they aren't attached to a mortgage payment here. They are paid directly to the city on an annual (or more frequent, if chosen) basis. In addition, each installation is also eligible for a $1,000 subsidy from central Government as well.
People don't need to meet any income threshold to qualify. Our Council is seeking as many people as possible who are interested, but they only have a limited number of spots each year for the rates financing programme (500). Still, they have hooked up with suppliers in the area to provide reduced prices to people who choose not to use the financing plan for whatever reason and want to pay outright. The main goal is really to have as many solar hot water heating installations as possible.
Now I'll sound like a real Council employee, but I think these benefits in bullet point are pretty interesting:
The annual quality of life index published by International Living magazine has just come out and NZ has moved up 4 spaces from #9 to #5. The magazine evaluates each country in 9 categories: Cost of Living, Culture and Leisure, Economy, Environment, Freedom, Health, Infrastructure, Safety and Risk, and Climate.
The top 5 are France (81.8 total score), Australia (81.45), Switzerland (81.2), Germany (81.05), and NZ (79.15). Check out the summary of the top 10 (more details scoring criteria included on the page as well). and the detailed list of all countries for 2010.
I was extremely surprised to see Australia at #2. (It helps not to have a category for deadly creatures.) A bit curious is how they got 3 more points than NZ in the climate catagory considering their terrible drought situation and extremely high tempertures.
Anyway, NZ really falls behind in the infrastructure score (10% of total). The other countries in the top 5 all have infrastrucutre scores over 90 - NZ is 70. Amazing considering NZ is only 3 total points from France's weighted average of 82. So 2 of those points are just due to perceived lack of infrastructure (which I can understand since the roading network here is subpar and not sure there are more than a couple trains in the country).
The 2009 report specifically pointed to the difficulty in immigrating and the 12 hr flight to US as negative points for NZ. Personally I point to the lack of good mexican food and Ben & Jerry's ice cream.
If interested in the results from 2009, they can also be viewed: summary of 2009 and full detail of 2009.
For those of you in the US (#7), I'm sure you are wondering what Bill O'Reilly has to say about this well here's the clip to him and his lacky discussing it - it's a must see.
I have been all over this country in my few short years here, more places than many of the kiwis we meet, in fact. What is completely consistent across Aotearoa is that kiwis are the friendliest people I've come across in all my travels around the world.
You would think, since they are so accommodating and kind, that customer service would be spectacular everywhere you go. I'm afraid it isn't the case. Oddly, even contradictorily given how keen people are, I find the customer service here generally lacking. Yes, there are issues everywhere you live, no country or people are universally great or poor at delivering exceptional service. I'm just surprised, given how so very friendly and laid back kiwis are, they fall so short in this area.
I could give you a list of things I've come across to indicate my point, but that would be boring. Fights with retail store managers, promising and not delivering, rude behaviour, lack of respect shown to the customer, and always without fail asking you to call back if the person at a business you are trying to reach is unavailable, rather than taking a message. I find that one particularly grating! On the complete other spectrum, whenever I visit a few specific shops, I am nearly harrassed by multiple retail employees approaching me every 30 seconds asking me 'how can I help' when I never even asked for any help. Super irritating!! So rarely do you find the desired balance.
There are definitely stores and staff that deliver exceptional service in Nelson, and those are the shops I frequent. They are few. My friends and I often discuss bad service experiences and we all know where NOT to shop. In Nelson, this can become an issue because there aren't too many stores to choose from should one not deliver on expectations. But then, I tend to shop outside of Nelson for many things anyway. And I've established a list of shops or restaurants I visit when I travel too, some just because they have great service.
I occasionally think I receive bad service because I have an accent, people often assume with an accent that you're a visitor and I've heard comments about Americans being generally rude, so it crosses my mind from time to time. It can't be, however, because perhaps the worst case of customer service I've heard of since I moved to the country happened to a kiwi, my friend Annie.
Annie shopped in town for her wedding dress. She went to many stores in town, but found a gorgeous floor length gold dress at a known dress shop. They didn't have her size, so the shopkeeper ordered it in. Annie paid a deposit and waited. And waited and waited. For something like six weeks until it was about three weeks before the wedding. She went into the shop to find out what was going on. Finally, the dress had arrived. Annie asked to see it, but the shopkeeper said it wasn't there. Annie wondered aloud, why on earth not? You said it was here! The shopkeeper had to admit that the dress was at the dry cleaners. And why is that? Annie said. It needed a spruce up after its travels. Annie, her suspicions aroused, insisted that the dress be made available to her the next day.
Stay tuned for Part 2 and hear what happened to Annie.
Last blog entry (above) I started a story about customer service featuring my friend, Annie, and her wedding dress. Here's the stunning conclusion.
The next day she went into the shop and was shown the dress. The shopkeeper told her that the courier who delivered the dress had accidentally at one point somehow dropped the package, backed over it with the truck tire, and created an oil smudge on the back of the dress. When Annie saw the dress, the oil smudge must have been enormous because a large mark was still visible even after the dry cleaning. No apology from the shopkeeper. Annie asked what options the shopkeeper could offer, because her wedding was three weeks away. The shopkeeper said she could remove fabric from the back of the dress where the smudge was and create a bustle. She could offer a $50 reduction on the dress, but no more because she had to recoup the cost of her dry cleaning bill to get the dress cleaned. And no apology.
Annie, clever girl, told the shopkeeper she'd think about it overnight. She pondered her options for only a few moments after walking out the door (stewing all the way on the walk back to work), went straight back to her office, did a google search, found the manufacturer, located a shop in Auckland - where she was going to be for work the following week - and hatched a plan. The next day she returned to the terrible shopkeeper and requested her deposit back. The shopkeeper said it wasn't refundable, particularly because she had spent money to dry clean the dress and she wasn't sure if the courier company would refund her expenses for their error. But Annie knew her rights by law and insisted on the refund. She got her money back and hasn't been back to that shop.
The following week she waltzed into the Auckland shop where, hanging on a rack right in front, the dress in her size called out to her. And that shopkeeper told Annie she'd make spaghetti straps on the spot for her out of excess fabric she had in the shop, at no cost.
[Annie, sorry if I got some details out of order, you know how my poorly my memory works!]
Needless to say, Annie told quite a few people this story. No one who knows Annie or has heard it has gone back to that Nelson shop. Just today, in fact, I attempted to dissuade a co-worker from patronising the place, more than a year after the fact.
This story is only one instance of poor customer service, but as I said already my friends and I seem to find many instances. But Nelson needs to get cracking right away on improving its customer service. In 2011, the third most watched international sporting event is coming to Nelson - Rugby World Cup. When those international guests come to town, no matter where from, the red carpet needs to be rolled out and our country, New Zealand, needs to find a way to integrate super duper superior customer service into its way of life.
Nelson is hosting two games and three teams: Italy, a European team likely to be either Georgia or Russa, and the USA team. It's a really big deal to our town, and to the country. Nelson is only one of 13 cities with matches for RWC. We expect to welcome visitors from all over the world, probably not in quantities different to the summer months, but definitely a new group of visitors who will stay in our region for a length of time following their teams. Potentially, lots of Americans, who follow their rugby team (based in Denver for pete's sake! I never knew), will be combing through our town and our shops and serious changes need to be made to cater to them.
I've recommended that the local chamber try to get stores to change their operating hours because Americans are used to shops being open at all times and on all days. Sundays can be dreary in town because not every shop is open (and I can sympathise with the desire for a day off, believe me!). By the time I leave the office just past 5pm, I barely have 30 minutes to run into a retailer in town before she closes down for the night at 5.30pm - 5.30??? Just crazy!
There's a lot that can be done and should be done, hopefully Nelson uses RWC as a catalyst for change, not just a one-off change to suit this one event. Every company could use its own RWC event to spark them a bit, in my opinion. After all, the one thing everyone takes note of in any business is its customer service.
