Things that I can’t get my head around:
1] NZ claims a 99% literacy rate. I know it’s a small country, but how do they do that??
2] The bays and wharfs DO NOT SMELL LIKE FISH. How is this possible?
3] Wellington boasts of having more restaurants/cafes per head than Manhattan, and evidently the number crunching stacks up. I think that’s one thing that is really apparent here, that although it is not a large city – all that it offers is really kind of shocking. And the café culture is almost out of control – and I happen to like cafés.
4] Everyone wears black! – but not necessarily in the Goth way. How did I not know this before???
5] Why can't Sonya find any dill pickles???? They just do them here. Go figure. Also, no pickled banana peppers - in fact, no one knows what they are.
6] People are not pretentious, even on the campuses, and seem rather approachable. In fact, Parliament is only a minute walk away from where we live, and no one seems to mind when we walk through the parking lot to go grocery shopping.
7] People are hearty here. I mean, young kids throw themselves into freezing water and parents seem to encourage the behavior.
What makes more sense to me now than it did several weeks ago is the saying: Look right or die! [when you’re crossing the street]
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2 comments:
Stop trying to contort your head!
I didn't know Manhattan had a large per capita cafe statistic - perhaps Wellington is comparing itself to the wrong worldwide city?
After a week of silence, I wonder if you're still alive?
We've achieved a 99% literacy rate by fiddling the statistics, if you use the same low standard for every other country in the world then New Zealand is first equal with 22 other countries and only .2% ahead of America. All in all with that standard of literacy, 46 nations have literacy rates between 98.1 and 99.9 percent. If we look at adult literacy skills, New Zealand ranks seventh, 13th and twelfth out of seventeen OECD countries in terms of prose, document and quantitative literacy respectively. If banana peppers are what I think they are, try asking for pepperoncini or Tuscan peppers instead, depending on how long you can order banana pepper seeds at gstuff.co.nz.
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