 Hey, welcome back to my YouTube channel guys. Today I thought I would do a little bit of a different video where I answer all of your questions. Now I get so many questions and I thought, you know what, I just need to do a video that answers my most common questions. And so I'm going to start off with the easier questions and then we'll kind of get into some of the hard ones that you guys keep asking me. And if so, it's a good way and one quick video I can summarize a lot of your questions for you. So you're not going to want to miss it. Definitely stay tuned. Subscribe below. Here we go. This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is a great all-in-one platform to get your business online quickly. Okay, so the first question that I'm always asked is does your family like it here? Do your kids like it here? And because they all, you guys all know what I think about it. And what does the rest of your family think? Now some of them are a bit camera shy or not interested in being on my YouTube channel. And I understand that as teenagers. So no pressure with that, but they all love it here. They, when we move back, so if you don't know our story, we moved here, we lived here for two years, we moved back to the States for two years. And now we've been back for almost four, no three years, a little over three years. So they all love it here. Most of us did not want to move home the first time. There's just some personal reasons why we needed to. And so, yeah, they all love it here. And you know, some of my younger ones kept saying, why are we leaving? You know, like everybody has always left it here. So New Zealand will always be have a very special place in all of our hearts here for the Hulbert family. Okay, second question. How is it to drive on the other side of the road? I cannot even tell you, I get the asses question 10,000 times. And so to be honest with you, it was the area where I was most nervous about driving on the left side, because, you know, driving in general can be dangerous, cars can be dangerous, and I'm not interested in getting in accident. And there are very windy roads here. But I have to tell you, if I'm going to be completely honest, it was way easier than I had anticipated. Way easier. And I think I can attribute that almost solely to two things. The roundabouts. The roundabouts make it very easy because the traffic doesn't stop. There's a nice flow of traffic. You can always look, you know, the one way, you know, it just seems logical. It just works in my mind. And so I think that made it easier. And possible people drive pretty slow here compared to, you know, the Chicago region that I'm from. And so, you know, nobody's trying to get past you and beep, beep, beep, you know, and there's not like huge highways. There's not four lane highways here. There isn't tons of traffic. And so all of that helps. And so if you are coming to New Zealand or moving here or visiting here, don't be nervous about driving on the left side of the road. It really wasn't a big deal. Another thing that I get asked all the time, do you miss a winter type Christmas? And I thought this was relevant because this is coming up. And that is a great question. So this is my honest answer. So now I have lived in New Zealand for five years. And I would say that it's exciting to be in warm weather destination at Christmas because it's unusual like in the beginning. So I would say I really enjoyed it in the beginning. But now I would love to have a winter Christmas. I would love it to be dark. I would love to be able to hang lights. I would love to just be like warm and cozy with snow and all of that. So to be honest, like right now, I would love to have a winter Christmas because here it's summer. And so it doesn't get dark until later. And so like lights don't really make sense. People don't go all crazy with decorations. It's just a totally different feel. So it's, you know, when you're when I've been here for multiple years and I'm not going through dreadful winters where you're just dying to get to summer, having an idea of Christmas and summer sounds great. But when it's pretty nice all year, you know, you just kind of miss your traditional Christmas and what you kind of grew up with. So another question. What foods do you miss the most? That's probably my number one most asked question. What foods do I miss the most? For me, I would have to say number one is Mexican food. I don't know what you're making here. That's not Mexican food. I know you've heard me say this before. But that's the number one food that I miss from the States and like the price of the Mexican food, like a 59 cent taco as opposed to a $10 taco. Like how good can it be? It just kind of, it's crazy on your brain. I should do a video. I will do a video for you guys on pricing. It took me years to adjust to the price of certain things here. So we're living on an island essentially. And so things are expensive. But sometimes, you know, like it's sometimes it's just really hard to pay for pay more for things when you're used to them like a certain price. So like 59 cent tacos sometimes on taco Tuesday, they're 25 cents, $10. It's a hard adjustment. You definitely hit that, do I really want this kind of mode? So I definitely miss that. I definitely miss Chicago style deep dish pizza. And I just miss really good pizza, to be honest, like you can get it here, but it's not common. So yeah, I miss really good pizza and Mexican would be my two foods that I miss. Okay, and another question that I get asked all the time is, when is Christie coming? And if you don't know who Christie is, we have like our own show now, the Tara Christie show, and we just zoom together and we record our conversation. I'll put a link above to our playlist. And you can check us out. But like, when is she coming? I know. Now, guys, here's the reality is she is scared to get on a plane. I got a lot of overcome. Her husband just had a really bad biking accident, actually. So, and then, you know, money is always a thing. And being able to get in the country is always a thing, but have no fear. So any of the videos that I do with Christie, I thought that money gets allocated into an account for her to come here. So I'm working on it, guys. She needs to come here and like, what will we do if we if she came here? Oh, yeah, we will be traveling the country, videotaping would be amazing. Just videotaping her reaction to everything would be funny. We'll definitely have to do some meet and greets and that sort of thing with Christie. So that's the plan. Some of you have asked for like, go fund me or other like, and I might do that. I might do that with our, I might do that our Patreon account or something with our show. And if you guys really wanted to come or if there's whatever, you know, guarantee 100% we'll go to that. Like, I'm all on board for Christie to come over here and any number of her family. I don't know about you, but I have been putting off creating my website until I found my solution with Squarespace. You guys are going to love this product. They have so many beautiful templates to choose from. You just pick your template, and then you go in and just add the details of your business. And literally within one day, I was able to get my website up and running. Another feature that I love on Squarespace is that they have this social sharing where my community can just go right out into my YouTube channel, my TikTok channel, which is where most of my content exists. And so it's really nice that I can connect directly from Squarespace. Other features that Squarespace offers that are really great is their, the fact that you can collect donations, you can do email campaigns from it, it's just overall really great. I personally also love the analytics. I always like to know what's going on behind the scenes who's really reaching me on my webpage. And that's just such a nice feature as well. I highly recommend that you check out Squarespace. Take some time today to go to squarespace.com and check out your free trial. And then when you're ready to purchase your website or your domain, you get 10% off with the link below. Another question that I get asked all of the time is, can you explain the grades in school and how it works? And so sure I can do that. So in New Zealand, you have primary school, which would be the same as elementary school. So primary school in New Zealand is years one through six. In the U.S., it's called elementary school and it's grades one through five. Then you go to intermediate, which is year seven and eight here in New Zealand. And in the U.S., it's six, seven and eight. It would be middle school or junior high. Yeah, junior high. I'm starting to forget. And then in the U.S., high school is grade nine through 12. And in New Zealand, it is years nine through 13. So it's longer. I could explain it to you all, but we have year round school essentially here. They have six weeks off over the summer. Then they have two weeks every eight to 10 weeks. So it's great. It's, it's, I like the process here better because it's three months off in the summer. It's too long. It's so nice to have two weeks. So they have term one to break, two week break, term two, two week break. This is in New Zealand, term three, two week break and term four, two week break. And so, and then you have, or term four, then you have a six week break. And that's how it works. So you have like three extra times that you can travel in a year, which it just, when you have kids in the States, you tend to do all your traveling in the summer. And so when you live there, like, this is the experience. When you're living in the U.S., you pack in the summer. And maybe it's also because I'm from the Midwest and it's the only time of year that's warm. So that doesn't help. But yeah, it's the only time of year that's warm. And so you just pack it in. It's almost like an extra pressure and stress. We got to get everything in. We got to go camping. We got to do this. We got to do this in the summertime. So, and you're still working. So, like, the kids are off, but you're working. And I like the process here in New Zealand better, to be honest. Okay, now I have requested you guys to ask some questions and they started to get deep from off, directly off of the YouTube. All of these came off YouTube. But this why I asked specifically what questions would you like me to answer. And oh, that's a good question. How does church differ in New Zealand compared to the U.S.? And I would say it is quite different. We have a church family. We go to church here. We were active in our church at home. So I think I can speak in the Christian church anyway. Just basically, I go to a Baptist church here, but basically e-free, non-denominational type church. And yeah, it's, I would say the depth is different. I think that the level of theology that people know is different here in New Zealand. Like, it's not as deep. They don't, that's just been my experience. And I'm sure every church is different. And, you know, there's a variety of anything. But in general, like, you find Americans very serious about their faith. Whereas, like, it's an important thing in New Zealand, but I don't, the level of seriousness is not the same. The level of it changing your life maybe isn't the same. But yeah, but just, I don't know, people are great here in New Zealand as well. But yeah, I would just definitely say the church, yeah, it's not quite the same. It almost feels like it's more in, you know, in kind of growing up mode, and it just hasn't reached that maturity. You know, it's, it's a pretty, it hasn't reached, like, a full maturity. I don't know. There's plenty of immature churches in the, in the US. But, and they do, and there's lots of schools at our Catholic or whatever. But yeah, that's just been my personal experience. Don't be like, judge me on that. But like, that's just what I think. We were, I guess, in a pretty traditional, serious kind of church. And yeah, I was just kind of surprised when I came here. I was just understanding, I guess, maybe like how much you're taught when you're a kid is different. Yeah, like you, like, we really know our Bible. And I was like, I, it's kind of normal even for our kids and youth group to not bring a Bible, you know, like, it's, I don't know, it's definitely different. So I'll leave it with that. That's definitely different. Okay. Next question. What interactions have you had with the Māori culture personally? And how do you feel, feel about its influence in New Zealand? Great question. That was a huge eye opener. And I do a lot of consulting with Americans that are either moving here or coming here for work temporarily. And we talk a lot about Māori culture in New Zealand because it's very, it's, it's, it is the culture, right? It's very much penetrated through culture, through government, through work. You know, you have to stay at Kanakia before every meeting. You, you know, there's so many things like for me in education, I have to use it and all of my emails and my communication with students. And it's amazing. Like for me coming from a country where Native Americans, like, like, you know, you haven't even given them a second thought. I'm just being honest with you. Like you haven't given them a second thought. And, you know, and you, and you hear the, when you're in history, I remember when I'm in history as a kid and the feeling like, Oh, that's awful. You know, kind of what the British did or what, you know, the first colonists did when I came here to the Native Americans, but you just don't really know any different. And so when I came to New Zealand and you see, like, integrated in government, the language is getting reintroduced, kids learn it in school, the kapa haka is learned in school, like it's just, it's just integrated into all of society here comparatively. Now, I know there's some people think that, Oh, I could have been better. And of course, I'm not here to have arguments about the treaty and whatnot. But like comparatively, it doesn't even compare like basically the way that Americans have treated Native Americans, it has horrible. We've not only, we've literally given them like the worst part of the land in the US, we allow them to run casinos. I mean, it's eye-opening when you come to New Zealand, you see what it could be, what it could be where you could respect the culture of the people of the land, totally different. And just amazing here in New Zealand. It was a real eye-opener and like, holy cow, we are really bad at in the States. And they just keep getting better at it here. Like, I just feel like it's more and more integrated. In terms of what I've done. Well, you can check out, I did a boil up on my YouTube channel. I did have a hanging, but I think it was just a boiled one. So I gotta get one that's really in the earth. I've been to a Mariah a couple times. I've done training through Mariahs. I've done Terrio classes. Let's see, I've done a lot. Like, I feel like I've done a lot. To me, everything is new. I know that my kids know a lot. My kids take Terrio classes in school and it's great. And so, yeah, I feel like I've done a lot. Of course, I can always do more. I feel like I would really like to hang out on a Mariah, but I don't know. I don't know if I'm allowed. I always kind of feel like, what can and can't I do? That's what I would like to know. So comment below, what could I do? Because I feel like we would get along really good, basically. And so yeah, so it's been really good. I've learned a lot about the history. I've read the books, I've been to all the museums, I've seen the history, I understand what's going on. And yeah, so we're not there. It's not perfect yet, but boy, you guys have made way more headway than the US. Okay, one last question. Let's see. Okay, so many questions about politics. Do I talk about politics? They were like, what? Help us understand US politics. That is a question that I get all the time. And it's a fair one because you guys are looking in on it and you don't understand what it's like to be there. You don't understand the values of living there and politics. Yeah, it's getting more integrated into everything. It's affecting families and it's affecting you. It's not just like, what do you do for a living? It's also what political party are you associated with? And then that's getting very confusing in terms of church wise as well. I don't know. Like it's crazy looking and I understand it differently. I think then people that are just looking in on it, it's just there's just a lot of voices not being heard. People are the news, none of the news you can trust. And so like nobody knows what's going on. And so then that's how crazy conspiracy theories come up and trying to figure it out and trying to grapple with things and not wanting to be taken advantage of. And so it's pulling out a lot of bad qualities, I think, in people. And it's just the problem is that the two parties have just, they're just getting farther and farther apart. And like where you have to be either one or the other. You can't just agree with some of the policies over here and some of the politics. You have to jump where you like it. It's getting further and the divide is just getting greater and greater. And I think what is the solution? I don't know. I personally think that we need more than two parties. And I think that's where we start. And that's how I voted recently is we need to have more than two parties. And we need to start bridging that divide and being okay with people. Okay, like I believe in these policies over here. And I just don't think it needs to be so extreme. But that's my take on US politics. I could probably go farther and farther, but I won't. But if you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer those below. So I hope you enjoyed the show today. It's a little bit of a different turn. If you have questions that you want me to answer and you like this type of video, comment below, let me know because I can always make more of these. I'm always happy to share what my thoughts are. I will always be honest with you and straightforward. And I'm happy to give you any information that you would like to know. And again, it's just my opinion and my thoughts. It isn't, you know, and if you are thinking about moving here or you want to know specific information, you're really into it, you can book appointment with me at KiwiAmericans.com, my website. I have people, I have appointments every week, people wanting to ask questions and that sort of thing. And so you can book appointments with me through that. If you just wanted some more customized discussion with me, I'm happy to talk with you. But anyway, and I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this video and make sure that you click the link below to get 10% off a website or domain through Squarespace. Comment below, let me know what you think. I'll see you guys next week. Subscribe. See ya.