Not missing America (sorry American amigos)

We're about 3 months into our New Zealand experiment now, and it's going just swimmingly. I speak for us both when I say that there has not been even a moment of homesickness yet.

It probably helps that the news from America is absolute insanity. I'm talking about the health care "debate" going on over there. I have to ask, WTF is going on in America? We read that people are bringing guns to townhall meetings. GUNS!! People are comparing Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. That doesn't even make sense. Sarah Palin and death panels and 'socialised medicine'... it's all so absurd. So completely absurd.

And while we're on the subject, let me tell you - we have national health care here. It's not as bad as the insurance companies would have you believe. Really!

The health care uproar is just part of the craziness emanating from America. We just saw an advert on TV for a show about Americans teaching their kids how to fire guns. I just saw footage of American kids firing machine guns under the guidance of their misguided parents. One kid was squealing "die! die!" with a very frightening level of glee. This is the kind of thing that makes Kiwis shake their heads and say, "only in America..."

It's true that from a distance, America kind of look like a place filled with gun-crazed lunatics. This sheds a little light on something that happened to us during a visit here two years ago. We were chatting with a bus driver and told him we were visiting from Arizona. His response, "do you have guns at home?"

We are also not missing American "bigger is better" excess. Portions in restaurants are smaller here. You get an amount of food that will sate without overstuffing. We have not seen a single Big Gulp soda. (Who needs a 2-litre soda in a cup!? No one needs that.) And people drive small cars here. There are very few SUVs or pickup trucks - called "utes," short for "utility." People who drive utes need them to haul stuff around. Most people drive little cars. This is probably because gasoline is too expensive to drive bigger cars. That's right: gas is priced to reflect that it's a nonrenewable resource that should not be wasted. In Phoenix, we used to spend a lot of time booing Hummers. No more. We've only seen 1 Hummer since we got here. We booed it.

I was thinking that I should mention some things that we don't like to make this post more balanced, but I can't think of anything right now...

Life is good for us in New Zealand.