BS

Why NOT To Move To New Zealand

Friday, June 20th, 2008 | Life

Well as you probably noticed I am no longer living in New Zealand. I was given a 12 month holiday visa and I only choose to use 2 months of it. Pissed away a ton of money on the return trip flight too (1 way from NZ to PHX = $1000 USD and that was after a lot of looking).

Ok, so you want to live in New Zealand… That’s cool… I will tell you if it will or will not work for you.

First: How hardcore of an internet user are you? I mean do you watch a ton of movies online and download all your favorite TV Shows from the net commercial free? If so then New Zealand hates you.

Don’t believe me? There is no competition on most things in New Zealand. No cellphone competition, no internet competition. Sure there are other internet providers but all of them have the same backbone. That backbone isn’t very fast and charges a LOT for bandwidth, so all the companies push on that cost to their customers.

I was able to get the “MAXIMUM ULTRA-FAST SPEED” of 3 megs (haha, ultra-fast my ass). However when I paid for that 3 meg connection they capped the downloads at 6 gigabytes. Then anything I downloaded beyond this automatically charged me for a 3 gigabyte data block. Basically even with me trying to use less internet than I normally would it cost me $150 a month extra in just bandwidth charges.

Then the bandwidth monster further ate holes in my wallet. I signed up for a Vodaphone contract, (there are only 2 cellphone providers in NZ and that’s the one 95% of everybody uses… again no competition), and being a smartass I wanted to use my iPhone.

So I unlocked my iPhone and slapped the newest software on it, and walah. I had something that virtually nobody in New Zealand had.

Well fat lot of good that did me. Seems my iphone was set to auto-check my email every so many minutes, and when it does that vodaphone’s network charges me 10c just for accessing the internet, and then it costs $10 a megabyte for bandwidth. No, that number was not a joke, and no there was not any option for unlimited internet usage.

So after a month of having my email checked now and then by my phone and also pulling up Google Maps (100% necessicary in Auckland) to find your way around, I spent $250 on my phone bill (and that was only 30 mins of talk time). Seems that I had to pay $150 for 15 megabytes of bandwidth and then a shitload of fees (least of which is 12.5% GST for everything).

Ok, so perhaps I am not a typically internet case. I run a website that’s all about burning the shit out of your bandwidth… because you can.

So lets look at other things. How about importing goods. Surely a friendly island nation has lots of trade agreements with other countries to bring goods in. I mean it’s needed since you can’t produce everything you need right?

Well it seems that kiwi’s don’t know what they are missing and have learned to live with the small amount of crap they have. However the rest of the world moves there and then goes broke importing goods. It costs over $500 USD to import 50lbs of stuff from America. Then once it gets here customs goes through it and assesses GST (Goods and Services Tax), which is always 12.5% of the value of the items.

So if the items were honestly reported, or insured by the party who sent them you will have to pay a ransom fee. I myself had to pay $125 just to get a motherboard and processor that my friend had been kind enough to reship to me.

Ok, so if you are rich and don’t need any faster of an internet connection than 3 megabytes (supposedly in Christchurch there is a nice expensive 10 megabyte connection, though there wasn’t in Auckland…), then maybe you really would like living in New Zealand.

I mean it’s gorgeous and well… the women there are really easy to pick up once you get the hang of it. It’s also a great place to eat Pizza and Asian food. I mean you need to really like Asian food because every single place that we have a mexican food place; they have an Asian food place.

Be warned though, they have taken all of our American phrases and “cleaned them up” to remove the “potty mouth” aspect of it and make them more politically correct.

Example 1) Sweet Ass !!! (USA) | Sweet As ! (NZ) [Um... Sweet As what???? lame]
Example 2) Assume makes an ass out of u and me! (USA) | It’s just bad to assume. (NZ) [FYI: Saying this phrase in the American way seems to offend some people in NZ because it's so Trite and Vulgar]

There is also virtually no instant food except for pies. Now this is cool for people who like to cook, but if you are lazy (if you are an American, it’s not a far stretch) then you will need to like Asian food since it’s the only thing available for takeout in most areas.

Ok, so you are rich, you love Asian food, are thrilled at the possibility of easy loose women, think that Americans are too vulgar, you like adventure and don’t need high speed internet. Well then New Zealand IS for you.

My recommendation is to pack REALLY light and then live in the hostels, moving from place to place. I went to a hostel in Rarotonga and it was fantastic (and only $17 a day). Basically I had instant friends.

The way I went is I packed up my projection tv / ps3 etc.. and took them to New Zealand and then I moved in to a house with other people (where I was overpaying rent). In retrospect, the next time I travel no matter how long I plan to be gone I will not bring expensive toys like that so I can better move from place to place and meet other people faster.

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