Time....

Since moving to Wellington I've made comments throughout numerous posts that "things are different in New Zealand". While I still believe this statement to be true I'm having trouble embracing the Kiwi concept of time. We've noticed that people are never in a hurry and because of this it is not uncommon for them to be late arriving at class, work, the office, meetings, etc. Along these lines no one seems to notice or care that others are strolling in late. Even the hours that businesses keep are still surprising to us, that is most places open late, close early and may not be open on the weekends. Or places have hours posted but randomly are closed for no apparent reason. When we first arrived I thought, "This will be good for us - a slower pace - we can take time to relax because we hardly ever do that". After two years I've realized that our workaholic tendencies are deeply ingrained in us and this "whatever" attitude others have is more of an annoyance than encouragement to take some time away from work. This has been emphasized as the holidays have just passed. Check that, most Kiwis are still vacationing or at least are not yet back to work. I was listening to the radio the other day while working in the lab and the DJ mentioned that at that point 57% of Kiwis were back to work. I thought to myself, "Only 57%!". Then the DJ went on to suggest that this seemed like a high number. What?! We've seen plenty of places closing before Christmas and they are still closed. But it gets better. Some places will remain closed until the end of January or February. I'm at a complete loss for understanding this. Sure places in the US close for Christmas and some for New Year's but then they reopen after being closed for a few days, never weeks or months. I've chatted with some of my Kiwi colleagues about these differences but to them this is completely normal (and expected, no, demanded) because in NZ it is customary for people to get four weeks of paid leave each year. FOUR weeks!!! I'm convinced NZ is some sort of fantasy land. So for people like Tim and I who are used to working all the time (we are still unaccustomed to only having one job each) we just don't get this mentality. We decided to get back into work after our time in Europe at the end of September. That's when I started my current experiment and I will complete it in a couple weeks. Too anxious to see any more time go by I couldn't justify putting it off until after the holidays. And I'm glad that I didn't - it's been a tremendous amount of work and stress, all during the holiday season, but I'm glad to see it coming to completion and knowing that I have collected a large chunk of my thesis data! All that to say that I don't think we know how to take time off and therefore this concept of Kiwi time is bewildering to us.

Walking home from the grocery store today we saw this absolutely perfect example of "how things are different here". Not only did they close early to go to the beach but they won't reopen until Tuesday.