http://www.koti-kajaani.fi/verkkolehti/2010/01/20/koti-kajaani.pdf

Olen paininut viime päivät tunnon tuskissa, koska perheeseemme hankiittiin pitkin hampain uusi kapine: auto. Lontoossa pärjäsimme lähes kymmenen vuotta ilmanautoa, kiitos maanalaisen ja tehokkaan bussiliikenteen. Autottomuus ei ollut perheessämme mikään poliittinen päätös tai vihreä kannanotto vaan ihan käytännölllinen asia. Miksi hankkia jotain sellaista, jota ei tarvitse?

Tosin olin ihan tyytyväinen, ettemme saastuttaneet Lontoon keskustaa entisestään  autollamme –  meidän perheen hiilidioksidipäästöt olivat jo ihan tarpeeksi suuret useiden lentomatkojen takia.

Muutettuamme Uuteen-Seelantiin paikalliset tuttavamme patistivat hankkimaan auton. Kun kerroimme, ettei meillä ole ollut autoa vuosikausiin, he pitivät meitä varsin omituisina tyyppeinä. Kiiwien mielestä Aucklantissa ei yksinkertaisesti pärjää ilman omaa autoa. Tämän suuntaiset kommentit vaikuttivat lähinnä propagandalta ja päätimme jääräpäisesti todistaa kiiweille, että he ovat väärässä. Sukkuloimme kuukausia kaupungin keskustassa liikennöivällä vihreällä Linkki-bussilla niin kokouksissa, kaupassa kuin kylässäkin.

Mutta sitten iskikin tenkkapoo. Aucklanti on levällään kuin jokisen eväät ja kun isoimmat supermarketit ja huonekalukaupat ovat eri puolilla kaupunkia tai paremminkin kaupungin laitamilla, autotottomuudesta alkoi yht’äkkiä tulla ongelma. Kun lähdin ostamaan lapselleni koulupukua kaupungin laitamilla sijaitsevasta ostoskeskuksesta (ainut paikka josta kyseisiä koulupukuja) vakuutuin siitä, että tämä perhe tarvitsee auton. Ostostamatkaan tuhlaantui bussilla neljä tuntia – omalla autolla reissu olisi tehty alle tunnissa.

Kuten edellisestä voi päätellä, Aucklantissa bussiliikenne on kaikkea muuta kuin toimivaa varsinkin jos matkustaa vähänkään ydinkeskustan ulkopuolelle. Tämä selittää sen, että tässä maassa on 2,5 miljoonaa henkilöautoa ja neljä miljoonaa asukasta. Uusi-Seelanti on yksi maailman johtavista maista henkilöautojen yksityisomistuksen suhteen. Joidenkin tilastojen mukaan ainoastaan kaksi prosenttia kiiweistä matkustaa säännöllisesti bussilla ja noin prosentti junalla. Nämä luvut eivät ole mikään yllätys, koska julkinen liikenne ei toimi kuten sen maan suurimmassa kaupungissa pitäisi.

Autoilu laiskistaa ja pelkään, että perheemme liikuntamittari värähtää alaspäin kun meillä on pitkästä aikaa auto, jolla voi ajella ympäriinsä. Aucklantissa asuvalle tuttavalleni on käynyt juuri näin.

“Yksi päivä lähdin kylään, joka on 300 metrin päässä meiltä. Hyppäsin autoon ja ajoin sinne.  Vasta jälkeenpäin tajusin miten järjetöntä se oli”, kuvailee ilmiöitä suomalainen Ninni, joka on jo selvästi kiiwiläistynyt.

Pelottavaa, kuulostaa ihan Amerikalta.

Mitä tämä autoilu tietää maalle, joka on markkinoinut itseään vuosikaudet valtavalla maailmanlaajuisella vihreällä mainoskampanjalla, jossa korostetaan maan luonnon ainutlaatuisuutta ja puhtautta? “100 prosenttisesti puhdas Uusi-Seelanti”- kampanja on pyörinyt TV-ruuduissa maailmalla vuosia. Jotenkin lähempänä totuutta tuntuu olevan iskulause “100 prosenttisesti autoistettu Uuus-Seelanti”.

Spot the difference!

The design on the left is the “real thing” – Marimekko’s “poppy” design. The design on the right is not the ”real thing” – it is an “opium” design on sheets sold by the Kiwi company, Nood.

There are not many things we Finns are proud of, but I think the Finnish design company Marimekko might just fit the bill. (I think secretly we are also proud of infamous Matti Nykanen, the former ski jumping world champion who was recently featured in the Guardian in Britain)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/jan/07/matti-nykanen-ski-finland-olympics

We are born and bred with the Marimekko brand. In Finland family photo albums from 1960’s are full of pictures with kids wearing stripey or spotty Marimekko T-shirts. The company had its heyday in the 1960’s, but the brand has experienced a kind of mini boom in the past decade or so. Check out the corporate history here:

http://www.marimekko.fi/eng/marimekkocorporation/history/1960

Soon after our little family moved to Auckland, we bought a Marimekko designed “Fatboy” – a massive bean bag. While our furniture was (and still is) in the storage, at least this silly bean bag has given me some comfort as it reminds me of home. Not that I am that big fan of the “unikko” design pattern, but it is definitely Finnish!

So I was quite shocked to find out that Kiwi homeware company, Nood, is selling duvet sets which look very similar to Marimekko’s “unikko” design. The New Zealand company is currently running massive sales and its “opium” duvet set can be picked up for just 48 dollars (around 24 Euros). A real bargain.

http://www.nood.co.nz/p-619-opium-duvet-cover-set-prices-from.aspx

It is very interesting that  in English the Marimekko pattern is called“poppy” and Nood’s version is called “opium”. (It is common knowledge that poppies are used to make opium, but let’s not get side tracked). The pattern in the Nood’s sheets is strikingly similar to Marimekko design indeed. Check it yourself in these photos.

I am not claiming that the company is copying Marimekko design, just that they look strangely similar!  (I am making this statement just in case – you never know what company lawyers have in their sleeves!)

Should Finns declare a trade war on New Zealand?

Maybe we are so far away from any civilisation here in this little Pacific island country that nobody cares what is goes on here…

We are close to our first Christmas here in Kiwiland and as I write this, I’m melting: it is at least +24C outside and humid. I am going to build a gingerbread house with my daughter and some friends, but it is most likely going to be eaten by native cockroaches in a minute or two. But hey, no worries, mate!

Most people have deserted Auckland for  the beach and their bachs and are already enjoying barbies & bangers. They wear their newly purchased national costumes: togs and jandals. From time to time they pop inside the bach to get ice blocks. If it is an OK day they might even be tramping in the bush.

Kiwi Christmas is totally awesome dudes!

If you understand every word written above, you are on your way to become a proper Kiwi. I am still on a steep learning curve.

I am trying to enjoy this Christmas even though it will be hard work. Our vegetarian daughter has decided to eat meat on the Christmas Day (this happens only once in a year) and has requested lamb for the dinner. We agreed. What would fit better to our first Kiwi Christmas than leg of lamb washed down with a gold award winning  Pinot Noir, even if I am not the biggest fan of red wines. But at least it makes the whole Christmas episode more tolerable.

(By the way, lots of the NZ wines here have a “gold medal” and many times I wonder why? Lots of the white wines have too much sugar and therefore too much alcohol).

I sure am going to miss my little cottage and my family back in Finland, but at least I have Finnish chocolate and liquorice and that is a comforting factor. What could be a better Christmas treat than a fully melted bar of “Fazerin sininen” –  traditional Finnish chocolate.

Merry Christmas everybody! The picture here is of a New Zealand Christmas bush or Pohutukawa: it really sounds like pottukauha in Finnish – meaning something like soup spoon.

How to speak Kiwi:

bach = summer cottage

barbie = barbeque

banger = sausage

bush = forest

ice block = popsicle

jandals = sandals

Kiwi = New Zealander

togs = swimming costume

tramping = hiking

Before I moved here I had this 100 % pure image of New Zealand in my head: people walking around in their shiny Lycra shorts, pushing their bikes around in a picturesque landscape. Pretty soon I realised that there is something wrong with this image. At least if you live in Auckland.

To tell the truth, not that many cyclists hit the Auckland roads during the week. On weekends they come out in a full force and groups of them start endless pedalling up and down on the city’s challenging roads.

When I took my very old fashioned bike out for the first time and attacked my first hill, I felt like I was climbing the toughest mountain section of the Tour de France. I also felt like a lonely alien surrounded by the masses of four-wheel drivers around me.

Pushing a bike around Auckland is definitely not fashionable I can tell you. There is hardly anywhere to park your bike in the city centre. Lots of my friends here think that pedalling my bike around the city is a brave (foolhardy) thing to do. After seeing my biking gear, a shop keeper in Newmarket commented:

“You really are brave to take your bike out here. People drive like a crazy, be careful”.

My friends gave me a full list of reasons why I should avoid biking:

• Kiwis are very bad drivers and they cut you off
• Lots of people die and get injured while riding their bikes
• Drivers are not used to cyclists and they “do not notice them”
• Cars drive very fast in city centre
• Some rules of the road are different from UK

OK, I got that, but I was crazy enough to ride in the busy London streets where the buses regularly squish cyclists!

Just to put things in perspective, I had a look of some stats. According to the NZ government, by November the 12^th this year 334 people have lost their lives on Kiwi roads and of those 9 have been cyclists and 26 pedestrians. So it is actually more dangerous to walk in NZ than cycle! According to the stats there are about 1.3 million cyclists in this country, so the death toll is actually relatively low.

Again the stats between years 2005 and 2007 reveal that 33 people were killed while riding their bikes – around 2.5 percent of all fatalities on Kiwi roads were of cyclists.

Ideally any loss of life on roads should be avoided of course, but I guess that is not possible.

During the past month I have done fair amount of cruising on New Zealand websites. And if I am honest, they drive me mad – or a lot of them do. I think quite a few of Kiwi web designers have spent too much time in kakapo or kokopeka or whatever land.

Plenty of web designers would certainly benefit of some sort of usability studies: how to make their sites user friendly; make navigation structure easy and logical; make pages error free. Some pages don’t even have a simple ‘home’ button on the menu bar.

I am going to take a big risk here by nominating the worst websites in NZ. I still need a residency stamp for my passport, but here goes. The winner of the worst website in NZ competition is…

The Department of Internal Affairs. Congratulations! Their site is simply dreadful. Have a look - http://www.dia.govt.nz/diawebsite.nsf

The second prize goes to: the Ministry of Health. The navigation structure on the site is truely appalling: http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf

The third prize goes to Ebos, because if you land on their homepage you do not have a clue what they are on about: http://www.ebos.co.nz/

My fourth award goes to TVNZ, a broadcasting house which has managed to hide the icons for “watch” so well that you would not belive it is a TV company. They could learn something from Sky. Check them out at http://tvnz.co.nz/

And fifth place goes to… Karen Walker. OK, she is a fashion designer, but the flash technology used on the site makes it nearly totally non-functional: http://www.karenwalker.com/flash_yes.html

Please note, that I am not a web designer, I am merely a humble consumer who tailors ready made platforms to suit my needs. I also welcome criticism of my own websites! Feel free to comment:

http://myllyme.com

http://lontoocalling.com

The incident was widely covered in world media and also in the media of my native country, Finland. If you are a Kiwi, you should be proud, because you made a splash in Finnish news (and I guess worldwide) too.

The tsunami warning issued by New Zealand’s Civil Defence Ministry did  not escape journalists and at last New Zealand was on top of the news world – for a few seconds.

This tragedy made me realise two things. Firstly, that Kiwi’s will not make it to Finnish headlines (or world) media without a tragedy. Have a tsunami and you are famous!

Secondly I noticed that it’s business as usual for (us) journalists and the media are not changing after all. If there is a tragedy, there are bound to be good headlines.

Thirdly, I realised that I have still my journalistic genes inside me. If big enough catastrophe hits this country, I am the one to report of it. Online or offline.

Let me tell you a story. Today I had a quite an adventure. First I strolled through the Country Road and ended up at Huckleberry Farms. After that I made my way through the Pumpkin Patch to the French Market.

What a countryside tour that was! Just kidding. Actually I did my shopping in Auckland City centre, believe it or not.

‘Huckleberry Farms’ is an organic food chain, a la ‘Fresh & Wild’ in London; ‘Country Road’ is an Australian version of GAP and ‘Pumpkin Patch’ would be something like UK based Mini-Boden. The French Market, ‘La Cigale’, sounds something really posh, but in truth is an Auckland’s version of London Borough Market.

It’s great that Kiwi’s have more inspirational names for the food and clothing chains than we Europeans or Americans. ‘Huckleberry Farms’ as a brand is so much cooler than ‘Fresh Foods’. Don’t you agree? And wouldn’t you immediately associate the ‘Pumpkin Patch’ with kids clothing?

Similarly the Kiwi store ‘KikkiK’ appears to be a version of the Swedish home office company “Ordning & Reda”. It is hard to say which of the chains opened first, because their products are very similar. Scarily so. If I were the owner of one of the chains,  I would keep a close eye on the other one.

We Finnish people love everything Swedish (hope you understand the sarcasm here), we are of course big fans of IKEA, so once we noticed that our rented accommodation in Parnell does not have all the necessary bits and pieces, we decided to pay them a visit.  But guess what, they do not have one in Auckland. And to my huge disappointment there is no Japanese MUJI either.

According to old newspaper articles the Swedish company was not allowed to enter the shores of NZ because “it might be too popular” and might do damage to the environment.  You can read more here: http://nominister.blogspot.com/2008/03/no-ikea-for-auckland-and-no-hilton-for.html

Fair enough, but what is a Scandinavian person supposed to do in NZ without one?

PS. I have found the “John Lewis” of Auckland. Here they call it Smith & Caughey.

Firstly, it has single glazing which means that the heat escapes from house at supersonic speed and the cold creeps in even quicker. At least in winter.

I admit that London did not used to be very different in this respect. When I first moved to London, the windows in our lovely Victorian house were leaking so badly that the curtains were flapping in the living room like the flags in a pole.  But things did improve with the time: our last house had triple glazing, bless.

Secondly, we found fairly quickly that our Kiwi house does not have any insulation whatsoever: that is unheard of in my home country, Finland. In fairness I have to say that we need some insulation as  temperatures sometimes hit -30C. The lack of insulation here makes the wood expand and contract with horrific sound effects and you can only draw one conclusion:  Kiwi houses are not designed to be energy efficient in the same way as in Scandinavia.

I am already a big fan of Auckland’s “green” Link bus which is a handy way go around the city, but as many of  the locals have commented, you really need a car in Auckland. It is very spread out and distances between different areas are relatively long. However, all that driving around is causing problems.

Recent studies show that New Zealand emits around 0.3 per cent of global emissions, but has the 12th highest per capita emissions in the world. Without action, New Zealand’s emissions will increase by around 40% by 2030. In terms of relative environmental performance, New Zealand has the sixth largest per capita ecological footprint in the OECD.

Get a grip and some insulation, folks!

Here comes the correct answer to my first poll: according to the latest statistics there are around 34,2 million sheep in New Zealand which means that the sheep-human ratio is 7:1. Please cast your vote in the new poll!

This is day 6 of my “new life” in Auckland. So far I have been impressed by the friendliness of the Kiwi people -their no nonsense attitude and relaxed manner. It is very refreshing after London.

What I am not impressed with is the fact that our house does not have central heating. You don’t need it in the summer, but it is still winter here and the evenings and the mornings are bitterly cold. In the evening I walk around the house like a wounded soldier: covered in blankets and woollen socks.

What is interesting and has made me feel at home is that I am not the only immigrant here. On our first day I visited the local corner shop in Parnell and I met a Chinese guy who was managing the shop.

He had just finished his business degree in Auckland Uni, but had not gained his work permit yet and could not get “a proper job”.  He was complaining about the recession and how things are going wrong in this country.

I am very glad I met him: he made me realise that I am not the first (and won’t be the last) immigrant to this country and his complaints made me feel at home: what else did we do in London but moan about things?

On the way back from the shop I met a Canadian woman pushing her baby up the hill in a pram  and there are plenty of hills in Auckland. During this 10 minute walk she explained the big minuses of Auckland: the huge distance between the districts and the food prices. So I took the note. Surpisingly (or not) she did not mention any pluses.

Her comments made me wonder why on earth did she move here in the first place?

I am a newcomer and a visitor to this country at a moment and I better be careful what I am writing, because the NZ government could still kick me out. Until they stamp my passport and give me my residency, I better watch what I say…

Just kidding. After all there is a freedom of opinion, isn’t there?

PS. About 23 percent of New Zealand population has been born overseas. By year 2021 the precentage of people of “European origin”  will have grown to 63 percent of the total population of  just over 4 million

It is very strange to start a new life as an immigrant in a new country and a new city once again. I wonder how will I survive in this little metropolis after all the hustle and buzz of London.

There are bound to be weird things in my new home country. I have already been warned that kiwis walk to the corner shop with bare feet! It would not happen in Piccadilly Circus – if you do not take into account some fashionistas.

I also have been told that kiwis do not eat lot of chicken, which in England you eat more than enough. I wonder though what a diet of kumaras (sweet potato) and lamb will do to my digestive system.

I am pretty convinced that I will save lots of money in Auckland: the City does not have Harvey Nichols or Bond Street. I am not sure where the kiwi ladies buy their handbags though. Online perhaps? Or maybe they do they shopping in nearby cities. Tokyo is only 12 hours away. In kiwi terms, that is not that far.

I will try to keep you posted about Auckland and kiwi life on this blog, so just keep coming back - if you are interested, of course.