So far, we've seen a lot of similarity to Canada on our travels in New Zealand. The landscape is fairly similar. You get a few plains areas, a lot of hilly and mountainous regions, and really, the best to way describe New Zealand is to squish all of the provinces into an area smaller than Alberta.

Traffic circles are prevalent here and there are whole towns that don't have a single traffic light and just plenty of traffic circles to handle the flow. Many people in North America view the traffic circle, or roundabout, as a hazardous invention of the Commonwealth and one that doesn't make sense. I say one thing to my North American bretheren, traffic circles work well and we don't know shit about driving back home. I don't know how many times in Edmonton I would wait for minutes to get through a 4-way stop, our answer to the roundabout. I haven't waited more than 30 seconds to get through a roundabout here, and this can be during rushhour traffic in Wellington.

Another thing, people here don't tend to speed. Especially on Alberta highways, we'll open up the throttle and get to our destination as fast as we can. This is indicative of the mentality of North American's in general. We're always in a hurry. We can't do this fast enough. Overtime is normal for many of us, especially those of us in the Engineering and IT fields. While in a coffee shop, I saw an article that said how Australians and New Zealanders didn't know what overtime felt like anymore. For the most part, the country simply didn't do it. They put so much emphasis on work-life balance that the pace of life itself has slowed down. When people pass me on the highway, they do it just fast enough to get past me and then they come back to the speed limit. They're just not that anxious to get to the next intersection 8 seconds faster. We could learn a thing or two from the rest of the world and slow down just a bit.

One thing of note is the level of service here. Especially with cafe's that make use of trays to collect your food, I've gotten used to the idea of making sure I put my garbage in the trash can, the recycling into the recycling can, and the tray in its proper position atop both of the bins. You don't find these facilities here. The reason is, people in the service industry actually clean up after you. With exception to the North American fast food chains like Subway, KFC, Burger King and McDonalds, your stuff just gets cleaned up, and quickly. It was odd at first and I'm afraid all this pampering at the fish and chips places is going to give me an inflated ego before we fly home.

We have in our culture images of the American Cowboy. We know this man, he lives in Alberta's foothills and on its ranches. Here, he is known as the Southern Man. He's very much like us Canadian's in that our ideal woman drinks beer (Speight's in the case of the Kiwi), four wheel drive in the winter is for wimps, and the idea that our nation is built on the sweat and blood of our people. However, the Southern Man has a distinct advantage over us, in that he knows what real beer tastes like. I still can't believe people think Molson Canadian is a great beer.

Fast food here tastes better. Jenny and I went to KFC, and if you've heard Jenny's views on KFC, you know that they are borne out of an hour of vomiting and cursing Colonel Sanders. I managed to talk her into going to KFC, promising her that it will be a wholly different experience than ours at home, and indeed it is. It wasn't caked in 5mm of batter, and swimming in so much grease that you could see through the box by the time you got to your table. In fact, it reminded me of my own beloved chicken place, Mary Brown's. Those newfie's sure can do chicken. Pop is also better here. Rather than refined sugar, it seems nearly every pop I've had here has been made with cane sugar. Not only does it taste better, it's slightly healthier too. Mountain Dew has caffeine here. The ingredients list on a bottle of pop is a total of 6 items long. Count the number of ingredients on a can of Coke in Canada. Let me know when you hit double digits.