 Welcome back to my YouTube channel guys. Today I thought it would be fun to talk about what it's really like in winter in New Zealand. Being that I'm from the Midwest in the U.S. I am used to cold temperatures and I thought today I'd take a little bit of time to compare what it's like living in winter in New Zealand compared to what it used to be like for me in the States. So you're not going to want to miss this video so subscribe below. Here we go. This video is sponsored by Skillshare. Skillshare.com is a wonderful online community where creatives can get together and learn from each other. So check it out. Skillshare.com. Winter in New Zealand. Let's talk about it. Now I don't spend a lot of July's which is the middle of winter in New Zealand. I generally try to go back to the U.S. in July because that is a wonderful time of year to be in the Midwest but you know due to traveling restrictions and COVID I have not been able to get back so I have been stuck in New Zealand during the winter but let's talk about what winter is like. Is it quite different than it is in the Midwest U.S.? Definitely. There are a lot of things different. Okay before we get talking into the differences between the winters in New Zealand and the Midwest of the U.S. let's talk about what the temperature actually is in July in New Zealand. So New Zealand has three main cities Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch so let's just start there. Obviously there are farther so Auckland is in the North Island and it's farther north and there's also many cities north of there which are going to be warmer but on average Auckland is about 11 degrees Celsius or 54 degrees Fahrenheit on average in July. Now if you go farther down the North Island you get to the bottom tip is Wellington where I live and the average temperature is 9 degrees Celsius and 48 degrees Fahrenheit but that it doesn't account for all the wind. It's a very windy area and so the wind can make it much colder but that's the average temperature in July. Now if you head down to the South Island and this is probably more of the northern part of the South Island is Christchurch and that average temperature is about 6 degrees Celsius 43 degrees Fahrenheit and so you can kind of see that it's not really that bad. If you're from the Midwest like I am when we are used to freezing we are used to way below zero we are used to just like you guys don't even understand how cold it is in the winter in the Midwest and then I'm not even from Canada so like it's even colder in Canada so that's an idea of temperatures. Obviously if you go farther south down to Immacargale it gets a bit colder Queenstown and then when you're dealing with snow then that's different too if you're living in the mountains and so you know that kind of affects your daily life and your driving and your shoveling and that sort of thing but generally where I'm from in Wellington it is not really too bad in terms of like how cold it gets. It definitely rains more in the winter time and the wind you know depending on if it's a windy day so it can be kind of feel a bit dreary which is what the winters feel like in Wisconsin for me they feel really dreary but it feels dreary from like December sometimes November depending on the kind of year you have all the way until like March it feels really dreary so it's a really long time to be living without a lot of sun and a lot of green. One thing that's great about New Zealand is that the green doesn't go away the bush the greenery it's you know it just doesn't get cold enough for everything has to die and everything has to fall. Now obviously different parts of the country that varies you know like in the South Island you know trees will lose their leaves depending on the type of tree and and that sort of thing but like in general my experience living in Wellington compared to the U.S. so much nicer in the winter. One of the reasons why I think it seems not so bad in the winter in New Zealand obviously it's warmer like if my average temperature is in the 40s in Wellington is a way warmer than what it is in Wisconsin where it could be like the wind shield could be like 15 below which is like so cold you guys like so cold let me just describe so cold so like you go out to your car there is so much snow that you then have to shovel everything but because it snowed like 10 o'clock at night and now it's 6 a.m. in the morning it is like solid ice so trying to shovel that is quite hard and sometimes impossible so you can't get your car out so this is now what you want to be doing at 6 o'clock in the morning you have to have your face covered your hands covered if they're not it's just like it feels like it like hurts it hurts and then you know I've had to scrape some frost off of my car here in New Zealand even this week but like like that the frost so like we have like I don't even have special equipment I think I use a tennis racket I did use a tennis racket and then but we have scrapers in the U.S. and the scrapers are nice and sometimes they come with a nice glove and and you and it's it's work it is a solid ice on your windshield and then you have to run your car for probably like 20 minutes just to get it to warm up and to start to defrost the the windows and it's just it's a whole thing and then it's so cold and you're just like trying to get out and then you're getting the car and you're like so cold so yeah really different it's really miserable in the winters in the midwest and so every year that I live there I was like why in the world do I live here like I hate it like you love it because you have community there your family is there your friends are there you know so you love it but then as soon as I hit winter be like why do I live here not sure but one thing that makes it so much better being in New Zealand in the winter is that you will have glorious days there you could go through like a week or two of solid rain sometimes some sleep but everything melts right away and but it's you have a beautiful day like today we're having a beautiful day here I just took a video I'll show it of what it looks like from my window where I'm working right now it's just a stunner of a day as they would say here what do they call it a cracker of a day it feels weird even coming out not used to that word yet but that's what they'd say here it's like cracker of a day in Wellington and they always say that you can't be Wellington on a good day so it's beautiful so I think that that just makes winter more bearable for me like I instead of going like four or five months without any nice days or any nice sun and just dreary and everything's brown and there's there's no leaves on the trees and nothing's growing that it just does affect you okay but here when every once in a while I have a stunner of a day or a cracker of a day sorry um it's just not anything I would ever say in the U.S. but um it just makes it bearable like we can go out and we can walk around and we can be in t-shirts and it's pretty warm and it's nice and it just the sun's out and it just makes you happier I'm sure there's all this science behind all that and that's not the point of this but it just really makes it bearable so in the winters in Wellington anyway you'll have really nice sunny days every once in a while and it really makes it bearable I cannot continue this video without bringing up the fact that the biggest problem with winter in New Zealand is the fact that people live cold indoors that's the best way for me to say it is a shock to an American and probably to other people from other countries that are cold like Canada to come here and realize how cold people live indoors so they're getting so much better with the way that they're building houses and their insulation and their double glazed windows and central heating but I'm telling you for years and years they just lived cold inside so like my first rental house was really cold and it was like I'm turning everything on yet I'm not warm and yeah that was an experience that you just don't live warm like people are always wearing lots of clothes like it's just normal to like put on lots of layers in the bedrooms you have electric blankets on all the beds it's like not survivable depending on how chilly your house is to not have electric blanket because it is it is not sometimes the house isn't insulated it's not built well and to the point where it's like just as cold outside as it is inside it's not really a whole lot different and so just imagine that and imagine sleeping in that so it's like imagine sleeping in like 40 degrees and like it's just never really really warm and so that's really the difference when you first come here like okay like when I go to work it's cold when I go you know to different you're just expecting to be cold like things just are not heated because heat is very expensive electric heat gas heat everything's really expensive because you know we're on a big island basically so it is cold and so if you are traveling here or moving here just know that people just their level of expectation in terms of living cold is different they are they are used to I don't know they're happy with but they're used to living cold and they just really don't know any different so if you're in New Zealand or and you think boy she's wimpy like what is she talking about well it's because you don't know any different so like we are freezing cold temperatures in the Midwest in Canada and you know Minnesota whatever but we don't live cold inside it's always 72 degrees Fahrenheit inside you know like if you go to work it's warm if you go to the stores it's warm if you're just traveling around it's warm here it's not you don't know some places will be really warm because it'll be like one room with like a heat pump coming in it's like really warm like my son he's wearing shorts to school because it's so hot in the classroom but then when it's outside you know and so that's the other problem is that when I moved here the first time the houses are like you're used to heating like one room and like it's hard to function in a house being in one room like you have to go in and cook dinner or a meal you have to go in and do laundry you got to go clean up something and you're not real motivated because it's really cold out there and so you would tend to stay in like one room or two rooms of the house that have most of the heat and so unless you're in a house that has central heat i the last two houses i've rented i've insisted on central heating because i just it just makes it way more bearable in the winter and especially since i've been here all winter it's been great but you know i've adjusted a little bit anyway but in the first house that we were in we had oh it was cold it was like an older built house and it didn't have very good insulation and the windows like didn't close all the way and so it was just cold and it was on top of a hill and whoo i remember cooking breakfast at like 6 30 in the morning because i had little kids i had my winter coat on my winter hat on i had gloves on and i'm cooking because it's cold so the other room had a fireplace which was really nice and nice and warm in there but like it wasn't even though some heat was coming in it just wasn't that warm so some rooms were electric heat some rooms were gas heat some you know and then it was always cold upstairs where all the bedrooms were so we got everybody electric blankets and one other thing that i have never seen until i came to new zealand were these hot water bottles uh we found those in the closet in the house that we were renting and i was like what the heck is that it's like this big rubber water bottle that you fill with hot water and you put it in your covers and it heats up your bed and it works great i actually really like it i just had never seen it until i came to new zealand and i love them but and my kids loved them and they would request them and it's like a whole tour of them to do at night just so you know um but it's it's great and they're really cool but it's like a little nerve wracking the first time you try it because you think like i'm putting like this huge amount of water in my bed i just you know don't want any to leak out you know and you're kind of like it's like a little bit mental to put water in your bed but got used to it love those use those um often when we had those and so those are another great resource but it's just not something that i've ever seen until i had come here uh you know maybe at my grandmother's house like something that they used to use in the old farmhouse but like yeah hot water bottles in the bed Skillshare is exactly how it sounds it is a platform where creatives come together and just in community can share skills with each other i personally love this platform because now i've 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so go check out skillshare.com so in the winter there's fun winter sports in new zealand especially uh in the mountains for skiing and snowboarding are a big thing here and just beautiful i had the pleasure of going uh to the queen's town wanaka area and when skiing there last july and it was stunning it was so beautiful like even if you don't love love skiing like just being on the mountain and doing some skiing is so amazing it's just so beautiful and so i highly recommend checking out those places if you are heading down to queen's town click the link in my description as i have went to queen's town recently and a lot of businesses have provided um my community discounts on places to stay activities to do especially if it's like a crappy day and you can't go skiing looking for something else to do go get stretched out of the yoga studio lots of fun things for families and kids so check out the link in my my bio and you can do some fun things if you are in the queen's town wanaka area which i know a lot of people travel this time of year but anyway just so many fun things they have ice skating um you know but it's like you can still do like some people even go in the water like i know friends that have been surfing last weekend but they got the full you know wetsuit on hat part and the feet part and it you know keeps them warm and then as norther the farther north you go you could do a lot more just kind of normal not wintery type things but there's always school holidays in the middle of winter or in july generally so the kids have two weeks off and so what do they do like it's it's really popular there's like indoor pools here some have slides some just have big pools with like big blow-up things that you can do and so there's a lot of like you can still swim indoors uh in the winter uh that's a big activity that my kids always like to do and then there's just all the little different indoor things that you can do go bowling you know but it's still warm enough we can go mini golfing so it's great because it's like it's a little bit colder but it doesn't keep you from doing just a ton of things so um yeah and it gets dark at 5 30 so it kind of slows your life down a little bit where you could have break because it's not light out and so you know it limits what you can do anyway outside and so there's a lot of different options to do indoors in the winter okay well i feel like i can keep talking about winter forever but i think that that's the gist of it but i thought i'd share a personal story as we end today uh yeah so when i like i said i moved here the first time had a great house but like was freezing in the winter time and i didn't know really how to deal with it because we had like a fireplace in one room which kept that wrong but like i'm freezing in the kitchen and just had electric heat and then just like various heating you know it's kind of patchy and then the windows never closed and it was windy and shaky and it was crazy but like yeah so i lived cold and i just thought i was doing something wrong so if you are new here or you're coming here and you're like maybe i'm doing something wrong you're not people just live cold here and so i learned and i adjusted but even to the point where i had electrician come over like is this working because i feel like i'm paying for heat but yeah i'm not warm and so he was like no everything's working i think it's just you know cold and like i just want to make sure i was using it right because i'm just you know everything's kind of new but um i did get a call from my here's a personal story i did get a call from my electric company who called me ahead of me getting my bill and said hey we just want to give you a heads up that you're getting a pretty large bill this month and i was like oh this is not good if they're calling you to tell you it's gonna be big it's gonna be big and i had no idea because i didn't know you know like when you're not used to having to adjust uh you know like it's not unlimited you know like it was an adjustment when we first came here because we're used to unlimited internet and then it wasn't unlimited you know in 2013 when we came um and so like learning how to limit and like we just didn't know how to do that very well and so yeah my first electric bill was $1,200 i was like i gotta get a job i can't afford to live here i mean it was outrageous they let me pay it off you know and yeah that was a little bit of a shock so yep not turning it on anymore understanding that i don't do that and so learning that kind of situation so just be warned that depending on your house you could be living cold if you're in New Zealand or you're traveling or you're doing an Airbnb it might not be warm maybe ask about the heating options but like yeah so that was my story $1,200 they were very nice about it and let me pay it off over time but yeah it was a bit of a shock and like when you're learning to move here and you're wondering if you can afford it and you're going through different seasons it was definitely a bit stressful but just know that that it is expensive and that you can do a budgeting program with your electric company as well um if that makes things easier but yeah so that's me in New Zealand in the winter well i hope you enjoyed the video today guys please comment below share your winter stories what it's been like for you living here in the winter whether you're a New Zealander or you're a visitor or you have just moved here from a different country share your stories below i would love to hear them and also i just want to highlight that i do have an American recipe book coming out using New Zealand ingredients so if you are living in New Zealand and you want to know