I'm off!
Heya all,
I've finally left Oz, and I'm sitting in Christchurch which is (from a weather perspective) strangely reminiscent of Canberra Autumn. Yeah! Apparently it's been raingin here more than it should and no doubt global warming is to blame.
NZ cities are similar enough to Oz that you forget that it's different and are merely made vaguely uneasy by the differences. For example, the shopping trolleys are all wrong. They're wider and shallower than our beloved Australian trolleys. Now, I would have thought that for a country with considerably less flat space than Melbourne that trolleys would have been one opportunity New Zealanders would have embrace to save space. A narrower, deeper trolley is more maneouverable and takes up lesss room than its stocky counterpart, but no, this golden opportunity has been passed up. In a nod to the rampant consumerism sweeping the developed world, New Zealand supermarkets don't have baskets, which encourage a restrained approach to the purchasing of cat food. Instead, consumers are encourage to go nuts and buy as much go-kat as their monumental trolleys will permit.
At least, all of this is true of pak-n-save, whose guady colours beckoned seductively to me from afar.
Anyway, I'd better go. Soon I'll do something interesting and you won't have to read about trolleys, even if they are strange.
Have fun,
John
