In Pulp Fiction Jules and Vincent have this conversation as they drive along, in it Vincent says: 

It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just – it’s just there it’s a little different.

Living here in Dunedin I now totally get it… 

They speak English (at least mostly - Kiwi English has it’s quirks), there’s Subway and McDonalds and Burger King and KFC and Pizza Hut etc etc. Instead of Home Depot there is Mitre 10 (same colours, same basic branding), it goes on and on… but it’s all like looking at a picture in a news paper where they have blown the registration, it’s all a bit off. 

Take the bank machine for example: At home you go to the bank machine to make a deposit, you take an envelope from the holder in front of the machine and pop your money/cheque in and then move through the process.

Here the envelope gets given to you by the machine and you put a deposit slip into the envelope. Almost the same, but a bit different. 

The post office is also an odd experience: you can do mail through it, just like at home. But it’s also a state owned bank, and a place to pay all your bills. 

Food shopping remains one of the great sources of odd. Apart from food being insanely expensive here (our rough calculation is about 1.5 to 2 times the price of back home)  things are often just a little different.

Take “tomato sauce”, we couldn’t work out why our homemade pizza (store bought pizza shells) tasted so sweet and odd.. The issue was resolved when I discovered that tomato sauce is what North American’s call ketchup. 

I haven’t totally figured this out yet, but chocolate chip cookies that look like chocolate cookies elude me: the butter here seems greasier (the difference between grass fed vs grain fed?) so our cookies always sort of spread out and look more fried than baked. 

Skim milk is trim, diet coke tastes like crap where as Coke Zero is lovely. What we call chips are labeled both “crisps” and “chips”, you get all your take-out food (take-away) from either a Chinese person or a “Turkish” person (most of the “Turkish” people are actually selling variations on Lebanese food - my theory is that Turkish is Kiwi for “middle eastern”). This includes burgers and fries and fish and chips…

The oddest thing remains dog food. 

A story to explain why: 

Our first weekend here I went off to the local grocery store to get some food… I basically got lost because nothing was where I expected it to be (little differences again…). I kept walking past this case of food and thinking to myself “Wow New Zealanders sure love their baloney”. 

Finally I stopped to look at what it was. 

It was a great big roll of dog food. Huge. Gigantic. Horrifying. 

Sometimes the differences aren’t so little.