Well, we’ve been here for one week now. Seven days ago, we were in Indianapolis and the temperature was 20°. Now we’re in Auckland and the temperature is 20°—but in Celsius!

What were our first impressions?

  • The smell of the air. After we landed and got through passport control & customs, we parked the kids near an airport exit door while we sorted out rental cars; and the summer breeze rolling in smelled clean and slightly sweet. Outside the airport! And it smells great all over the city.
  • The streets are really narrow. Coming from Indianapolis, we’re used to wide, flat roads, and driving on the left side of them. Around here the roads are hilly, often lined with stone walls, fences, or garden hedges, and you drive on the right. It’s a bit hard to get used to. One week in, I (David) think I’m only just starting to get there.

  • A fantastic Tibouchina, just a block or two away.

    There’s nature everywhere. Tropical birds outside our windows in the morning. Foliage in every possible place. The bugs and birds are louder than the cars on the roads. In fairness, Auckland is in a rainforest.

  • Everyone here is always apologizing for the transit and the weather. Everyone we’ve talked to says both are awful; but our bar is really low. It seems like there are a lot of buses and bike lanes wherever we look—and people using them, too!—and the weather has been idyllic: today it was about 24°C (76°F), and the sun was admittedly kind of harsh. But this is the peak of summmer; it only gets cooler from here. And when we left Indy, it was -10°C.
  • The trash situation is absolutely unreal. New Zealand is working on getting rid of single-use plastics (our Chinese food was delivered in a thin linen bag, for instance); and as a result, there’s essentially no litter. One week in, I’ve seen a grand total of one piece of trash on the road or sidewalks: a single Powerade bottle.
  • The food tastes different. This is both good and bad: corn syrup is almost unheard-of (cane sugar in sodas, for instance), and the eggs and dairy are super fresh. We had some incredible Filipino food for lunch today (and we haven’t yet had any bad Chinese or Korean food). On the other hand, the chicken nuggets and corn dogs tasted strange, and as feared, there’s almost no Mexican food.
  • People drive the speed limit here. Almost without fail. People just don’t speed. When the speed limit is 80 kph, people will be traveling 70-81kph, maybe getting up to 84 to pass. Driving in New Zealand is a much more calm experience than it would be to try and navigate those narrow streets at highway speeds.
  • Malls! And people use them! It’s nothing like Abu Dhabi, of course. But we’ve been to three shopping malls, including some with grocery stores as anchors, and they seem to have no empty storefronts and lots of shoppers. By contrast, our hometown mall, Circle Centre, closed on the day we skipped.

  • It’s beautiful, but it’s also a blind corner on a blind hill.

    It’s hard to navigate. I’m not sure if this is a map problem or an Auckland problem, but Google’s maps appear to be out of date and its directions are likewise kind of hit-or-miss. It has repeatedly asked me to turn right in places where right turns are prohibited, make U-turns on streets that are far too narrow for such a thing, and make split-second lane merges on the motorway. Coming from a planned, gridded, flat-as-a-pancake city, this is huge culture shock.

  • People are very kind. We were promised a familiar sort of Midwest-style personality to the people around here, and wow was that right! Everyone we’ve talked to (from the passport control rep, to the taxi driver, to servers at restaurants, to our neighbors neighbours, to random passers-by) have been unfailingly kind to us, even when we’re being particularly clueless foreigners. (And there’s no tipping here, so it’s not like they’re just trying to butter us up!) We’ve seen this in the way they are willing to chat with us, to help us understand cultural differences, to tell us about the city or even just about their life; and to help in bigger ways, too.

Quick story about that last one: yesterday, in a bit of an emergency situation, Natalie’s mom was driving down the motorway (the New Zealand equivalent of a freeway) when she got a pretty nasty flat. And while waiting for me to arrive with the other rental car, a pair of random strangers on bikes happened to be riding by, saw their trouble, and helped change a tire tyre—on the shoulder of the motorway!

It felt like Indiana in a really comfortable and friendly way. And this far from home, that little familiar feeling is very welcome.