Five Things I Didn't Expect to be Different
I knew there would be a lot of differences moving to another country: plug and voltage configuration, the ring on the phone, the metric system. There have been some serious surprises, though. Some good, some bad, but always entertaining.
Soda Stream.
Oh bubbly water, how I love thee! I was so excited to get my beloved and overworked Soda Stream out of the container. I knew I could get CO2 cartridges in New Zealand, and I was thrilled because I hate lugging bottles or cans of water from the grocery store.
After picking up some new cartridges from Harvey Norman, I undid the back of my device and screwed in the new cylinder. Or at least I tried. As it turns out, the threading on the US and NZ cartridges is different and don’t work on each other’s Soda Streams. Why, or why? Needless to say, I ended up getting a new Soda Stream, though I’ve heard there are converters if you want to go that route.
Laundry Settings
Notice anything weird about the laundry settings on our washer? The settings are strange. There’s no “whites” wash. I find this totally confounding. What do I do if I want to wash and bleach my husband’s stinky Hane’s undershirts with yellow-stained pits?
This is made even more difficult by the soap dispenser. There’s no place to put bleach. There are only compartments for the pretreatment, laundry detergent, and fabric softener. According to my washer manual, I’m supposed to put bleach in the detergent compartment with the soap, but my experience has been that this doesn’t make a dent in making whites whiter.
Toaster Ovens
In the US, we had this exact same Breville Smart Oven Pro, and we loved it. We purchased the exact same New Zealand model even before we left our AirBnb. The first time we fired up this bad boy, we discovered a wonderful, new setting that may be the greatest thing ever (I’m resisting to say “since sliced bread” here…) A crumpet setting! Y’all, this may be the best setting ever invented for a toaster oven and is one change I’m happy to embrace.
Visual Voicemail
I’ve now been with both of the “big” carriers in New Zealand: Spark and Vodaphone. Neither provide’s visual voicemail to their subscribers. When someone leaves me a voicemail, I get a text message that asks me to dial a number (I’m on Vodaphone right now, and the number is 707) to take me to my message. I have no idea who left the message or how long the message is. I don’t have the option to delete the message without listening to it. It never dawned on me that I wouldn’t be able to see a list of my missed messages and listen to them, ignore them, or delete them at will. I suppose its a good thing I rarely get voicemails because this would be extremely annoying if I had to put up with it regularly.
Colgate Toothpaste
Now this might be a critique of all toothpaste. I really can’t say for sure because the only New Zealand tube I’ve tried was a very generic looking tube of Colgate. In the States, I used Arm & Hammer, but that’s not readily available here. I thought Colgate would surely be the same as Colgate in the US, but it is not. It is significantly less spicy and the nice, minty aftertaste is short lived. It also has some bitter undertones in New Zealand that I don’t really care for. Needless to say, I’ve now got a stockpile of about 10 tubes of Arm & Hammer in my hall closet.
