 Differences between New Zealand and the U.S. Are there differences? Yes. There are a lot of differences. So you're going to love this video today. I'm going to overview some of the differences. This will be part one and you will want to watch part two next week because there are so many. I had to make two videos. So make sure that you subscribe below and hit the bell because you're not going to want to miss part two. Here we go. Okay, the first difference between U.S. and New Zealand is the flavor hokey pokey. It is a honeycomb toffee that they either make as toffee but they also put this flavor in desserts. So a very common thing is to have hokey pokey ice cream. There's also hokey pokey chocolate here in New Zealand and in the U.S. I've never seen this flavor but in the U.S. we do have the hokey pokey dance. It may be in New Zealand, not sure, but in the U.S. we have the hokey pokey dance. You put your right arm in, you put your right arm out, put your right arm in and shake it all about. You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. Hey, that's what it's all about. Yes, you got a little singing out of me today. Another difference between the U.S. and New Zealand is where they drive. In New Zealand, you drive on the left side of the road and driving is generally just also very different. People drive slow here in my opinion compared to the U.S. while I'm from the Chicago area. So I'm used to very fast drivers but they drive slow here because there are a lot of curvy roads. Like they didn't just drive, they didn't create tunnels through mountains. You're actually going up and around the mountains. So yeah, so lots of curvy roads. So that's why people drive slowly. They also let everybody in. So when you're driving and there's someone that wants to come in, you've got to let them in in New Zealand and like people will wait in line. So like if you're getting in line and you're going to, everybody's taking a left and you want to take a left, you have to wait in the line. Like, you know, not in the U.S. we just kind of go up and you got to push yourself in, push yourself in aggressiveness. They don't do that here. They all wait their turn. They're very into following the queue whereas in the U.S. very common to drive all over the speed limit at least like 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. We also drive on the right side of the road and there are a couple different road rules. For example, in the U.S. you can turn right on red and there are some states where there's even different rules. But here you can't, you just have to wait. Like here it would be take a left on red, but you can't do that. I'm frustrated sometimes. But yeah, so drive much faster in the U.S. But there's also a lot of flat, long, distant driving that's happening. But you also just drive faster. Like you just, you generally don't get a ticket if you're 5 to 10 miles per hour over the speed. We're in New Zealand. It is the speed limit. The speed limit is the speed limit. So I've gotten tickets that are just a couple kilometers over the speed limit because the speed limit means the speed limit. Whereas when you're a U.S. driver you're used to going 5 to 10 over and not having any penalty. So that's an adjustment. Driving in New Zealand is very different than the U.S. Another difference between the U.S. and New Zealand is tea. There is a lot of talk about tea in New Zealand. There's morning tea. There's afternoon tea. There's dinner is called tea. So if somebody invites you over in the evening says, hey you want to come for tea, they mean dinner. Not just tea. And so it can get very confusing because you just not used to talking about so much tea when you are in the States. And it doesn't always mean that you just drink tea. You can drink coffee too. It's just more of a hot drink. And so it's just very common in New Zealand. But in the U.S. when you talk about tea it's more like spill the tea girl. Tell me what's going on. No. But also the U.S. has ice tea is very common. Sweet tea is very common which I don't see much of those in New Zealand. You can get them of course but it's not as common. So people just drink generally only hot tea. So there's a lot of tea in New Zealand. In New Zealand they do not refrigerate eggs. Eggs are not refrigerated in New Zealand. And there's lots of places that they're not refrigerated. So why do they refrigerate them in the U.S.? So I looked into this and apparently once you've refrigerated an egg it has to remain refrigerated. So they start refrigerating eggs in the U.S. because they just it's just for higher safety reasons than you need to continue. So when you buy because when you buy eggs in the U.S. you have to buy them from the refrigerated section and then you have to keep them refrigerated. But eggs in New Zealand are not refrigerated. They are just sitting on the shelf for you to grab and it took me a while the first time I went to look for eggs to find them because I'm looking at all the refrigerated section and it's just sitting on the shelf down a random aisle. Eggs are not refrigerated. Eggs are not refrigerated. Children are much safer in New Zealand compared to the U.S. for example children can bike to school, scooter to school, walk to school without being supervised. Guys it's true like you you can literally your kid can just walk on the door and scooter to school and you don't need to take them as long as they're older like I wouldn't do that until they're four-year-old or something but it's amazing. Kids can just get around. My kids can come home from school and they can figure out their route. They can take a bus. They can even take a public bus. They can do all different ways of getting home whereas in the U.S. don't do that. Don't have your kids walk home from school, bike, scooter, whatever. It's not safe. The safety for children in the U.S. is not the same. So why is this? Well that's a whole another discussion but child safety is amazing here in New Zealand compared to the U.S. where like even sending your kids to school can be dangerous. In New Zealand they're full of dairies. Yes there are dairies on every corner here in New Zealand. What's a dairy? If you're American you don't know what a dairy is. A dairy is like a convenience store where you go to get your milk, your bread, your butter, whatever you run out of and they kind of have similar things at all dairies. Kind of it's just like your main convenience store and they have them almost everywhere all over the place here in New Zealand. But in the U.S. the only dairy is the queen of dairies dairy queen. Dairy queen is just a very popular ice cream place nationwide chain where they make the best soft serve ice cream. Everybody knows dairy queen. So when you think of it and when you're talking to an American and you say let's go to the dairy they're going to think the queen, the dairy queen, the ice cream. Like I'm going to go get ice cream. So good news at the dairies in New Zealand you can get ice cream but just know that they don't really exist or they don't really call them dairies. They call them convenience stores, gas stations, 7-elevens, that's what they're called. In New Zealand they're called dairies. Another big difference between New Zealand and the U.S. is there's no Amazon. There is no Amazon in New Zealand. Yes they have to buy things the old-fashioned way. They have to go to the store when they order stuff online. Things take weeks to come in the snail mail and deliver to their house because we live on an island and everything is either imported or exported here. So yes there's no Amazon. Whereas if you are in the U.S. if you're an American and you come to New Zealand this is one of the biggest adjustments is there's no Amazon because you have to understand New Zealanders out there. You have to understand you buy everything on Amazon. You buy your food, you buy all your toiletries, you buy anything and everything. You can wait until the last minute to buy a present because it gets delivered sometimes the same day but most everything on Amazon you can buy and you get the next day. So you can be like oh yes it's my sister's birthday. I got to get her something and it's okay if you didn't remember till the last minute. But Amazon for everything and it just has a huge variety and you can kind of find everything on Amazon. Now you can have Amazon shipped to New Zealand about 50% of the sellers on Amazon will ship to New Zealand so check that out but it can be a bit expensive although Amazon because they are the biggest retailer in the world have negotiated really good shipping fees and so they are more reasonable than I have found other places. So click on the link below and check out my Amazon store where you can buy some of my favorite things on Amazon and they all these items will ship to New Zealand so check it out because either items that you can get in New Zealand or items that I think are too expensive to get in New Zealand and it's really nice and you can get them on Amazon and generally the shipping only takes about two weeks to get here in New Zealand and sometimes it'll say it's going to take four weeks but generally it always comes way sooner than it even says so check out my Amazon store in the description below. Okay so that was part one of New Zealand compared to the US so make sure that you subscribe below because you're not going to want to miss next week where I talk about more things that are different between the US and New Zealand and there's a lot. See you next week.