Adventures of a Washashore in KiwiLand
Me realizing I’ve already been here a month, which means I only have two months left:
Me remembering that I’m submitting a visa application in 6 weeks, which automatically grants me an interim visa to stay here until the first visa is approved:
Me remembering that I’m submitting a visa application in 6 weeks:
When a New Zealander is referring to a “Kiwi,” they mean a fellow New Zealander.
When a Kiwi is referring to a kiwi as in the fruit, they say “kiwifruit.”
When a Kiwi is referring to a kiwi as in the bird, they say “kiwi bird.”
In the United States, we call someone from New Zealand a Kiwi, we call the fruit a kiwi, and we call the bird a kiwi. Just a generic, all-encompassing “kiwi.” It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a human being, a fruit, or a bird: y’all are kiwis to us.
This explains the slight pause in conversation when I’m taking to a Kiwi and say something like “When’s kiwi season?”, “Where do you get the most delicious kiwis in town?”, or “Have you ever seen a kiwi? I understand they’re nocturnal, so you probably only see them out at night, right?”.
I’ve come to the realization that “kiwifruit” is to “American cheese” as “Kiwi” is to “American.” So it would be like a New Zealander coming to the States and asking “Who serves the best American around here?”, or “I reckon this sandwich would be good with an American melted on top, eh?”.
I am now overcompensating for my cultural missteps by going “Hi, hello, excuse me, are you sold out of kiwiFRUIT, kiwi THE FRUIT? Or was I just not seeing them? ‘Them’ being KIWI the FRUIT?”.
I’m totally nailing this cultural immersion thing. 👍🏼
Okay; as thrilling and informative as that mayonnaise post was, I am now going to post about something slightly more important: today I started my Partner of a New Zealander Work Visa application (for anyone who needs a refresher, here is my visa timeline).
I have no major or exciting news to report about it; I just spent a long time entering a lot of basic information and uploaded a few documents (including my passport and the “police check,” aka FBI rap sheet). But because one of the reasons I started this blog was to document my entire visa journey, I’m going to document my entire visa journey. Who knows; maybe someday someone who is on a similar path will stumble across my blog and find it helpful.
I was relieved to discover that Immigration New Zealand has the sort of applications that you can tackle in bits and pieces and save as you go, rather than having to complete them in one fell swoop. You have to create a RealMe account (RealMe is a government authentication and identity verification service), which I did a while back so I honestly can’t remember what that entailed but I don’t think it was anything harrowing or I would remember it. Anyway, once you create your account, you just choose which visa you’re applying for and you’re off.
I tend to get a bit anxious when I have to fill out important forms, so you can imagine how stressed out I am about this one, considering how much hangs in the balance. I am honestly going to need hours upon hours to check my work before I submit it. I can’t tell you the number of times already that I’ve made sure that I spelled my name with one L and not two…..H-I-L-A-R-Y. H i l a r y. *squints at screen, puts on reading glasses* OK, one L. Phew. Wait….is that a second L?? The anxiety is real. 😰
The application is 10 pages in total (well; 9 pages and then you sign the 10th page). There’s a lot packed into those 9 pages, and I already have a number of questions, so I just used my fancy c. 1992 burner phone I bought (more on that in a future post) to call Immigration NZ for clarification. FYI, if you are in New Zealand and need to contact Immigration about your not-yet-submitted visa application, it’s a little confusing to find the correct, working phone number. The correct phone number to call is 09-914-4100. Choose option 3 and then option 2. It will ask you to enter your client ID; if you don’t have one yet, just stay on the line. Heads up: their hold music is abysmal.
After about five minutes of being on hold, an absolutely lovely woman from Immigration came on the line and could not have been kinder and more good-natured about my questions. She didn’t know the exact answers offhand to several of them and asked to place me on a brief pause while she double checked. I said she could take her time and she said “Oh, I shan’t be doing that, our hold music is quite awful and I don’t want you to have to stay on the line more than is necessary.” 😂
Here are the questions I had, with her responses in bold:
When it asks for my employment history, how far back are we talking? Past three years? Five? Ten? As far back as you can remember.
When it asks how long I plan to stay in NZ total, it gives me the options of 6 months or less, 6-12 months, 12-24 months, or 24+ months. My goal is to be able to stay forever, but I’m currently here on a visitor visa which expires April 1st. Which option should I put? 24+ months.
I think I am required to get a general medical exam and a chest x-ray but I want to double check that. Because I plan to stay more than 12 months, I am required to have both done. However, if I can’t get appointments before I need to submit my visa application, I can upload proof that I have appointments booked. Once I’ve been to the appointments and have the results, I call Immigration and they will walk me through how to link them to my application. UPDATE (March 2024): You are also required to have bloodwork done.
Under the section where I am asked to upload all of my documents, what do they mean by an “identification card”? Would that be my MA driver’s license? This is not one of the required fields, so I can choose to leave it blank, or I can upload some form of ID (it sounds like they may possibly be interested in seeing my Social Security Number, so I’ll upload that).
I also wanted to know how many people I can/should put down when the form asks me to put “Names and address of any friends, relatives, or contacts you have in New Zealand.” I posted this question to two different Facebook groups I’m in, Americans Coming to Aotearoa and Moving to New Zealand: Immigration Support; the general consensus was to put down three different contacts. They apparently ask for this information in the event that you go off grid and need to be tracked down. Otherwise, the friends/family you put down shouldn’t be contacted by Immigration.
I am going to submit my application in mid-March, once Stewart and I have established a paper trail of proof of our partnership…my name added to the lease, one of the utilities in my name, joint bank account. I’m glad I’m starting early.
Just for extra measure, I am also going to apply for my New Zealand driver’s license in the next few weeks. I can legally drive on my U.S. license for one year here, but there’s nothing saying I can’t get it now, and the more solid evidence I have that I live here, the better. I have to go to one of the VTNZ (“Vehicle Testing New Zealand”) locations that provides the overseas license conversion service, the nearest of which is 2.5 hours away in Hamilton (there are a number of locations in Auckland, which is also 2.5 hours away, but I’m not ready to drive myself around NZ’s largest city). Because I have had a full U.S. driver’s licence for more than two years, I can apply for and convert to a New Zealand licence without any written or road test. I just have to fill out a simple two-page form and bring in some supporting documents. It will cost me $144.60 NZD (roughly $88 USD) to convert my license, and yes, I’ll be able to keep my U.S. license. And yes, I promise I will post about my car soon!
I am celebrating the conclusion of my first day of working on my work visa (work visa work?) with a glass of my favorite (so far) NZ wine. Highly, highly recommended if you folks back home can find it!
Thanks for coming along with me on this journey.
H-I-L-A-R-Y ❤️
This may be the least interesting thing I ever post, but a lot of you were eager for me to blog about food and since I don’t cook and generally have little to no interest in food, this is the best I can do.
So I went into the grocery store to buy mayonnaise the other day. I know; hold on to your seats. This sounds like the beginning of an epic story.
But seriously, I went to the store to buy mayo the other day and I couldn’t find it. I looked next to the mustard and ketchup, because that’s where mayonnaise is, because all of those things go together. But not in New Zealand, apparently.
I literally looked everywhere in the store for mayonnaise before asking an employee for help. He directed me to the……
…salad dressings. (I apparently had not “literally looked everywhere in the store,” but why would mayonnaise be next to salad dressings).
And then there’s the slogan: “Bring Out the Best.” I grew up with the tv ad jingle for Hellman’s mayonnaise, which went “Bring Out the Hellmaaaaaaan’s, Bring Out the Best!“. Was Best Foods ripping off Hellman’s with not only identical labels, but identical slogans? The nerve of them. The absolute nerve.
That’s how I ended up down the internet rabbit hole of mayonnaise (that’s also how I just ended up writing the worst sentence I’ve ever come up with). I googled Hellman’s vs. Best Foods and found out that they were two separate brands: Hellman’s was started in 1913 in NYC by Kingdom of Prussia-born Richard Hellman; Best Foods was started sometime in the 1920s by California-based Postum Foods who seemed to be capitalizing off the wild success of Hellman’s.
In August of 1927, Postum Foods–later renamed Best Foods–bought Hellman’s. The products are nearly identical, though some claim that Best Foods is “tangier.” Because everyone west of the Rockies knew the mayo as “Best Foods” and everyone east of the Rockies knew it as “Hellman’s,” they decided to keep both brand names. In 2000, both brands were sold to the British company Unilever. To quote Wikipedia: “The Hellmann’s brand is sold in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; Latin America; Europe; Australia; the Middle East; Canada; India, and Pakistan. The Best Foods brand is sold in the United States west of the Rocky Mountains; East Asia; Southeast Asia; Australia, and New Zealand.” (Yes, according to Wikipedia, Australia carries both brands. Aussie friends, please confirm or debunk this).
So there you go: the United States is culinarily-divided by two identical yet differently-named brands of mayonnaise and New Zealand grocery stores stock mayonnaise next to the salad dressings.
UPDATE. My wonderful friend Leah, a Kiwi living in Australia, immediately went to the nearest grocery store just to resolve the Best Foods-and/or-Hellman’s situation in Oz. She sent me this photo confirming that both brands indeed exist, side by side, on Aussie shelves. She added: “Did I go to the supermarket just for this photo? Yes. Did I then have to find something to buy just so I didn’t feel naughty or like I shoplifted? Also yes. 
”
You’re a champion, Leah!
I just put 51.96 liters–13.73 gallons–of gas in my car. It cost me $148.45 NZD, which is $92.65 USD. Yep; gas here is $6.75 USD per gallon.
The price of petrol (gas) in New Zealand right now is $2.917 NZD per liter, which translates to $6.75 USD per gallon. Yeah, I know. Yikes.
I’ll do the math backwards for my Kiwi friends: if you were paying what I was paying for gas back home, which is currently $3.264 USD/gallon, you’d be paying $1.38 NZD/liter. So if YOU had just put 51.96 liters of petrol in your car in the States, you would have paid $71.70 NZD…..as opposed to $148.45 NZD.
From my 23 minutes of heavy internet research, it seems that gas is so expensive here in NZ for several reasons. About 50% per liter of petrol is taxes, the biggest of which is the “fuel excise duty” that goes towards building and maintaining New Zealand’s land transport network. Then there’s the roughly 35% per liter for production and shipping costs. Then there is the war in Ukriane, with Russia and Saudia Arabia having both implemented oil production and supply cuts. Then there’s the fact that New Zealand’s tourist industry is finally on the rise again after years of pandemic lockdown and way more people are driving around.
Contrary to urban legend and campfire ghost stories, not everything in New Zealand is insanely expensive (I’ll be writing a lot about this). Gas, however, is insanely expensive. But at the end of the day, the “screaming Shelley Duvall locked in the bathroom” moments at the petrol pump are a small price to pay for living in such an extraordinary country.
PS: Yes; I have a car! And thank god it’s a car that’s good on gas. More on my car in a future post.
PPS: Math is not my forte. Even though these USD<–>NZD and gallons<–>liters conversions took me the better part of the afternoon to work out and I will literally cry if I’ve posted incorrect math, please let me know if I’m wrong!
I hate cooking to begin with. May god have mercy.
While I was doing the dishes the other day, I was admiring the beautiful rose from our garden that we’d put in an empty jar of Barker’s sundried tomato and olive chutney.
As I was rinsing off the plates, I idly read the label, which gave suggested uses for their (by the way, delicious) chutney.
Mix with cream for a pasta sauce: yum! Blend with olive oil for a salad dressing: brilliant! Use on an antipasto platter: great idea! Excellent base for pizza (yassss!) as well as an excellent base for…………..
MOUSETRAPS?! They’re actually suggesting–on the label, no less–that their excellent chutney is perfect to use on a mouse trap? That’s just about the most unappetizing suggestion I could possibly think of. My dream of using it as the base for a pizza immediately went out the kitchen window.
I took the jar over to Stu so that he, too, could experience the horror that was the marketing fail of the Barker’s chutney company.
I did not get the reaction I was expecting. There was a brief pause while he tried to figure out why the idea of using chutney on a mouse trap was so disgusting, and then went “Oh! Do you not have mousetrap sandwiches in the States?”.
No; no we do not.*
According to Google, “mousetraps” were originally a British thing but have since been mostly commandeered by Kiwis. To make a traditional mousetrap, you take two slices of sourdough bread and lather them up with Vegemite, butter, and cheddar cheese and then grill or press it. It’s like a grilled cheese gone horrible awry.
Things like this happen constantly in my new New Zealand life. Just this morning, I told Stu I was going to lie out in the sun in the back yard this afternoon and he said “You should use the squabs off the porch!”
Squabs………squabs…….you can figure this out, Hilary.
I did not figure it out.
Squabs are cushions used to give a softer feel to chairs, usually outdoor ones like patio furniture.
And mousetraps are dubious-sounding sandwiches which, according to Barker’s, are very tasty with their sundried tomato and olive chutney.
*Let me amend this: when I say “We do not have mousetrap sandwiches in the States,” what I’m really saying is “I, personally, as someone who grew up in Massachusetts, have never heard of a mousetrap sandwich.” Whenever someone here asks if we have ______ in the States, I always, every single time, say “Well, *I’ve* never heard of it, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have it.” Because the United States is huge and kinda feels like it’s a bunch of different countries under one name. So I do realize I may get a few comments saying that someone grew up in Kansas and that mousetrap sandwiches are a staple of the American Midwest. When asked a question about the U.S., I always clarify that I am not speaking for all of us.
I have a lot of penpals, one of whom is Monty, who is three. I just got a beautiful handmade card from Monty in the mail. The letter starts off with him telling me with great assuredness that he knows where New Zealand is because he’s seen it on a map. BUT—-and this is very important—-he does NOT know if they have stickers in New Zealand. He enclosed some for us in case we do not have access to them here.
Dear Monty,
They DO have stickers in New Zealand!! In fact, I just wrote you a return letter and enclosed a few NZ stickers for you. I’m sending you stickers of the famous New Zealand silver fern, a tui (“too-ee”) bird, and a pōhutukawa blossom. Tuis have a wonderful call, and pōhutukawas are called the “New Zealand Christmas Tree” because they produce beautiful red blossoms around Christmastime.
Thanks for the letter, Monty! I can’t wait for my next one!
Love,
Your friend Hilary
Stewart gave me something very special upon my return to New Zealand: a pounamu necklace.
I first heard about pounamu necklaces in a New Zealand guidebook that my friend and I were pouring over in late 2019 in preparation for our month-long trip the following March. The guidebook’s very brief explanation was that “pounamu” (a te reo Māori word, pronounced “pu-na-mu”) necklaces are almost always carved from nephrite jade, occasionally referred to as “greenstone.” You see them everywhere around NZ, from cheap knockoffs in tourist shops to real handcrafted ones made in an artist’s studio.
The thing I love so much about them is that you cannot buy yourself a pounamu necklace. You must be given one.
A pounamu is a significant gift to receive, as they are considered precious and therefore aren’t gifted lightly (and they can also be expensive). You may be given one to mark a special occasion–a friend of mine received one when they left their job of many years–or you may have the honor/honour of being the recipient of a pounamu because, for example, you have finally made it back to New Zealand after having been away for so long. ☺️
Real pounamu necklaces are hand-carved, one of a kind works of art. Jade has long played a significant role in Māori culture and is considered a taonga (treasure). Some of the traditional pounamu shapes are hei matau (fish hook), a pikorua (twist), a koru (spiral shape representing an unfolding silver fern), a whale’s tail, or a simple circle.
The necklace Stu gave me was made by an artist in Kūaotunu, a tiny little town about 20 minutes north of Whitianga. My pounamu is shaped like a toki, a Māori woodcutting tool similar to an axe. It represents courage, determination, success, and bravery, all of which I will need in spades on my journey towards becoming a permanent resident of this incredible country.
I made it! (I actually made it four days ago but we spent two days in Auckland and then I had to get settled). Anyway: I made it!
Stewart and I spent two days in Auckland when I flew in. January 1st & 2nd are public holidays here, and lots of businesses close for the whole week to allow for employee vacations (“holidays”), so there were a number of places that weren’t open. But the upside is that we had the city to ourselves, and spent our time exploring on foot.
One event of note that I have to share is when were walking across a bridge at the harbor (“harbour”) when a loud alarm sounded, which Stu said sounded like a fire alarm. He suggested we should stay put in case they needed to evacuate a building (it sounded like a fire alarm) and I of course wanted to stay put to watch the drama. And then after a few seconds a voice came over the loudspeaker and said “GET. OFF. THE. BRIDGE.” We looked around and realized everyone else had gotten off the bridge, apparently having read the BIG SIGNS saying that the bridge raises up to allow boats out. Oops. 😬
I haven’t gotten out and about much yet, so I don’t have any of those “😍” New Zealand photos to post, but I do have some pictures of the absolutely charming little garden at the back of the absolutely charming little house we’re renting.
I met one of our next door neighbors yesterday when I spotted her tuxedo cat through the fence (I’m obsessed with tuxedo cats) and ran over and proceeded to “psstpsst!” it and lure it over so that I could take its picture, and suddenly this nice woman poked her head around the corner of her house and went “Oh! Hello!”. Great way to make a new friend, by stalking their cat through the fence. Anyway, both Mars and her owner are lovely. The former is a little shy, but I’ll make her love me if it’s the last thing I do.
