After returning a little over two weeks ago I am still impressed with something just about every day. The novelty of everyone I deal with being well-informed, helpful and supremely friendly will surely wear off one day, but hopefully not any day soon. That most people I talk to are clever and nice about it is a further refreshing bonus.

I'm so pleased with almost every encounter that I sometimes quite forget I'm going broke fast, and have to now settle down and slave away like a mindless automaton for the next half year.
There are many little habits of life for people here that bespeak an underlying sense of thoughtfulness and even benevolence, I just have to list a couple here:

Little things like the city centre of Christchurch, where every fast food outlet is within 40 metres of each other, many as neighbours. Inconsequential? Hardly.
Burger King is right next door to McDonalds, possibly creating a weak spot in the fabric of reality sufficiently dense and greasy enough to allow the coming of the antichrist, but I'm willing to forgive them just this once, and directly across the road is the city's only KFC. Almost next door to KFC is Subway, and the two souvlaki joints, both independent Greek takeaways, each sit a shop away from these franchises. Having the Big Two global burger chains on the same block is a marketing catastrophe in most places, as far as managementdom is concerned anyway, but there it just makes sense to people.

It's supremely easy for mere consumers, if they fancy stuffing some styrofoam flavoured almost-foods down their gullets, which is not to say I am very good at avoiding its oleaginous charms I have to admit. The point is though that everything is together for convenience, and there is no petty squabbling or competitive worry about siting your grease gfactory too near their grease factory. And for consuming mortals, you just pick your favourite Styro-Mealⓒ, you pays your money and you takes your heart disease, nice and simple.

The useful purpose of this, of course, is that by avoiding just one section of just one street in the city centre, citizens can avoid even noticing any fast food outlet while spending a whole day shopping, working, or just hanging out there. And nowhere else for almost a mile in any direction are there any primary-coloured backlit signs to be seen promoting American fast-food chains, and there is certainly something to be said for that.

Apart from one or two smallish clothing stores and a dozen little buildings hosting camera shops, print/copy places, skateboard stores etcetera, everything in that little segment is devoted to selling food, none of it very good for people, although it is all very convenient. Likewise the 24-hour store next to Burger King which, among much else, will sell you alcohol 24 hours a day, and doesn't resort to the annoying hatch-based dispensing habit so beloved of petrol stations and amateur drug dealers.

That place also vends a variety of hot food of its own, and while it is of course about as healthy and nutricious as a Happy Meal (such delights are available as wedges, deep fried spring rolls, the curious Australian delight of a square of lasagna that has been likewise deep fried in batter, which is every bit as weird as it sounds, and even whacking great shanks of lamb in thick gravy, available to anyone with $7.50 and a large appettite at any time of day or night) it is very nice to have the alternative, and at least the lamb shank is unarguably real food.

Various other outlets for the big two burger `restaurants` (the moniker is a gross breach of the trade descriptions act, it's always seemed to me) exist around the city, obviously, because it's never enough to have only three Maccie Ds a KFC and a funeral home within toddling distance of a creche, but they have remained somehow less conspicuous than in other places, and they are all in semi-industrial areas surrounded by a protective perimeter of carpark; perhaps to give more thoughtful children time to turn back should they find themselves aimlessly following their noses.

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Still on the the food, and yes, I know I recently complained about this sort of obsessing but while going to new places for short periods it is of little importance, it's a big thing for me now I'm here for the long haul and in a country that's similar to my own fair Blighty, so less poking of the culture and prodding of the locals is really needed.
And anyway, with the benefit of useable kitchens I spend far too much money on the stuff, even though I'm actually pretty good in what I do eat, by my standards anyway.
It's got to be confessed here that I've eaten carbonara five times in three days now because I'm trying to get my recipe right (thicker cream, hotter plates, find pancetta rather than use bacon; that's my current tweak list) although now I think I might give it a rest for a week, after all those semi-raw eggs I'm a bit carbonara'ed out.

In Christchurch and Nelson there are a good range of restaurants (Korean, Japanese and Indian seems favourites, a few exclusively French-speaking french-ordering-or-you-can't-eat-here places as well, in typically arrogant style ;) ) and an exceedingly large number of Fish & Chips shops, `hot bread` bakeries and the ubiquitous pie ovens that are seen in every convenience store. The one thing almost missing are international pizza franchises, with almost no Domino's branches and very few Pizza Huts, for the simple reasons that smaller chains or individual stores do it better here than they can. It is a fantastic thing indeed to have real Italian-style pizza available where normally all one could get would be bland Dominos, and the biggest national chain here not only does good, real, thin crust discs of Italio goodness with fresh and tasty toppings, but is also the winner of the name game being titled Hell Pizza - in fact when you call them their system message begins with "Welcome to Hell" in suitably grim and forboding tones delivered by some gravelly-voiced Shakespearian type actor. Again, NZ has pulled off a little coup without anyone really noticing that other places have to put up with something inferior.

Still on food, it has to be noted that meat and fish, normally the part of the meal we feel we have to skimp on, is very cheap indeed, at least compared to the UK. I have here a blade steak, organic in origin and weighing about 200g, with a price tag of just $3.75 where I believe it would cost at least £3.75 in the UK - more than two and a half times as much. Meat from butchers as well is staggeringly cheap; for ten bucks - that's £4 - I walked away from one next door to the hostel in ChristChurch with something well over half a kilogram of lean steak mince and a massive chicken fillet, itself about the same size as what I was paying £3 for in one of the cheapest (and nastiest) cities in the UK; and that was several years ago too, well before Brown got his pudgy little hands on the premiership ( I recall I actually visited John Prescott's house during that period, spoke to his wife for half an hour and politely attempted to switch her gas and electricity supplier for her, such was my shameful business at the time).
And it's all free range, most of it organic, and it actually tastes like real meat again - I was so surprised when started eating meat here I almost ripped my shirt into a loincloth and began painting stick-buffalo on the walls.

And yet I think in this country they would rather either not keep or keep pigs, if you follow me; they don't seem to have much pork on the shelves or even in the sausages (maybe 80% of sausages on the shelves are beef, and of the pork ones they usually have beef in, anyway) and there seems to be a strange fondness for the snuffling critters, because every hostel I've been in has a scrap food bin for the benefit of some local pig or other. I don't know if there's a national collection service and one big pig farm somewhere near Wellington, or whether a shady porcine mafia exerts pressure on local humans to provide for selected pigs of prestige and influence in every town, but more likely than both of these is that some people, somewhere, and just about everywhere, like to keep pigs and they like to keep them around.
It is rather a lot more fun to imagine them in pinstripes and fedoras, toting Chicago Typewriters and

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Of course there are more things to life in New Zealand than just eating. We are also allowed to drink in this country too, neatly avoiding a 100% national fatality rate and severe shortage of two-leggers to take care of all those sheep, and one little place in Christchurch says a lot about the people and the culture; a bar called The Stock Exchange where patrons can literally play the stock market every time they buy a pint.

The bar serves selected drinks, slightly different from other bars in the area but it still does everything you could want, and as the value of these drinks changes as dictated by the ebbing and flowing of the stock market (or rather, the value of the companies that produce the drinks changed during the day just gone, or the value changes on the US market, or some other contrivance to allow for the fact that the markets in NZ are closed most of the time the bar is open. The manager assures me it is real and tied to each day's trading, but I was far too drunk each time I left to recall the specifics of it now) the price of the drinks also changes in the bar. Prices fluctuate for every drink in the bar all at once for a minute or so, and those figures are then frozen for a block of three minutes to allow for ordering, whether the computer system behind it then dips back into the markets in `real time` or whether it pauses the data then jumps back into it could obviously allow for an awful lot of mileage from really very little information and for minimal variation in prices, or on the other hand, allow for anyone who was paying attention during the daytime to possibly clean up in the evening.

It is a cool little distraction from the tedium of the bar - and often the tedium of your fellow drunks - and one that can, if you are both careful and lucky (either being plausible but the both together deeply unlikely while drunk ;) ) provide the means for a decent and cheap night out.
It may well all be a gimmick - by the true definition of the word it is exactly that whether tied to the markets or not, gimmicks aren't negative after all - but it works, and is a delightfully different way to teach your liver a firm lesson.

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The bus stations here don't look like bus stations - they call 'em exchanges to begin with, and they look and feel more like the very nicest of modern railway stations thanks to their clean indoor environment, multi-levelled carpeted concourses and rows of cashier windows. Being a New Zealand bus station of course, the people staffing those windows are friendly and helpful and go to the trouble of explaining all the stuff they know that might help, rather than bark out the same tiny few words and sentences to every person they speak to, every day, possibly for all of their lives...
I would imagine the average Kiwi ticket seller is a lot happier than the average Brit ticketeer, and certainly more interesting to talk to.

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If we were to be base and common about it all, we might turn our appraising eye to the sex trade in this country, although it wouldn't take much oscillation of the peepers because it's visible just about everywhere. This is a good thing, and not just because I'm a guy and genetically required to justify it ;)

Every town I've been to has quite visible strip clubs, rather than having them tucked away in odd corners and semi-industrial districts they sit on the high streets next to bars, shops and restaurants. There are also a few of them, as in a few more than I realised most towns and cities must have as in Christchurch I recall certainly three, perhaps four places on different streets around the town centre alone, one of them quite memorably next to an upmarket coffee shop and almost directly facing the biggest department store in the city across the road.

This is not a thing the Kiwis seem at all ashamed about and they also seem positively tripping over themselves to establish and lingerie shops, and in fact now I remember walking the half-mile to Hoyt's cinema a few times, there were at least, at least half a dozen shops I passed on the way purveying a wide and all-embracing (perhaps quite literally in some cases) swathe of things made from PVC and leather and rubber and various other wipe-clean surfaces. Beyond that I can say nothing, out of qualms.

Perhaps best of all, for cynical bastards like me, is that the red light district in Christchurch runs along one of the streets that encloses cathedral square - which contains the city's cathedral, as strange as that seems - meaning that while the catholic church in New Zealand can ostensibly fight a doorstep battle it is also conveniently, happily, quite within skulking range of the enemy's stronghold :D

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And there are numerous other little things that delight such as the smallest coin circulating is the 10-cent piece, rather than having any 5c, 2c or 1c coins cluttering up purses and wallets. All shops use Swedish rounding to calculate totals, even though prices are of course marked as $13.99 whatever the cashier will always ask for fourteen dollars, it all works out about even in the end and with no fiddling penny and tuppence nonsense.

Yesterday, I had a call back from a job agency I had left a message with, merely to say that they couldn't help me as they are government-funded to help people with disabilities only, but wanted to let me know which other agencies I could approach, and essentially just wish me luck! Talk about bloody nice folk.

It is certainly good to be back here.