Originally Posted by
DMS
Despite your own plans for leaving, would you recommend New Zealand? I'm not asking for the PC response of "different strokes for different folks" but your honest opinion.
DMS, you make excellent observations, ones that a lot of potential immigrants don't ask themselves before making such a huge change. Your concerns are very valid. Coming from someone who lived in Washington, D.C., then Salt Lake City, UT to move to New Zealand was very different...in good ways and not good ways. It's hard to get a straight answer with PC responses, so I'll give you our experience as former East Coasters of the USA.
We got tired of the traffic, smog, politics and rat race in America so New Zealand looked like such a fantastic place to detox. It was and has been great! A great adventure! After 5 years, you do realize that the country is very small and we missed the benefits of N. America (I mentioned a lot of them in my first post). When we first cameto New Zealand, we were a bit disenfranchised with America, to be honest. Now, five years later, America doesn't look that bad. Sure it has it's problems, every country does. The USA's big cities are rat races, but there are also nice smaller cities and suburbs that don't have the same issues but with better housing, income, convenience and travel opportunities than we found NZ had. I think before we moved to NZ we were exploring smaller cities in the Pacific Northwest and in hindsight, we would have been just happy as can be there. But we wanted a dramatic adventure, so we thought NZ would be it. And it was!
I do wonder if we would have had a different experience living in Auckland vs. Tauranga. I think we would have really enjoyed it too but the housing is too expensive. But then, we didn't move to NZ for the city, we moved for the scenery and to get out of the city. Honestly, we would recommend it for a short period of time for anyone wanting to get a lifestyle change and to detox. It is so beautiful and there are so many treasures scenery-wise that it took us 5 yrs to see most of it (and I truly mean we traveled, camped and explored nearly every place possible). Long term, we don't know if we could recommend it. We found the isolation, expense and the "too laid back" culture and lack of culture to be stiffling for long term life. After five years of exploring, we've felt we've "been there, done that" and are ready to go to a larger area like British Columbia that isn't so isolated but still has many of the characteristics we love about New Zealand.
I would definitely recommend it for single or married folks without kids for a few years. With kids? Not so much. We've seen and heard a lot from families who struggle being so far away from lifelong friends, brothers, sisters, cousins, parents, grandparents, and so forth. These people are the ones that you spend your holidays with, the ones that know you and love you no matter what, and understand you like no other. For us, it made us too sad to think that these amazing people really wouldn't know our kids very well. We want our family and extended family's influence on their lives. Perhaps it's our love of genealogy speaking here
My suggestion? First, remember that while the USA and Canada or the UK aren't perfect, it's not like you're fleeing a war torn, dictatorship, third world country. America isn't really THAT bad where you feel you have to move to a small island country to escape it. We think that New Zealand is a fantastic place to visit for a period of time but permanently it doesn't have the staying power and advantages that N. America does. Like we've said before, life is already complicated enough so why add all of the complications of immigrant life to the mix. NZ is less complicated in some ways, more complicated in other ways. The narrow/lack of forward thinking, welfare state, PC Maori mentality did our head in and we wanted to scream! We struggled with this a lot, as did all our American friends. I'm afraid to mention anything further on this to be honest as it is such a divisive subject in NZ culture
Other times, we didn't let those things annoy us and the people and scenery are so nice that it has made up for it. Sometimes it is so beautiful here that you almost get emotional and wonder how it could be that gorgeous! Again, pros and cons of both.
We didn't read a lot of the "leaving NZ" forums when making our decision because we didn't want to hear the negatives because we felt we are resilient, traveled people who could probably live anywhere and make it work if we had to. We learned things by our own experience and over the years came to the same conclusions that the leaving NZ forum posts made. The only difference is that we don't want to come off as bitter ... just more realistic. It has been an adventure of a lifetime and we have been happy throughout the five years here. It's just time to move on and use this as a wonderful chapter in our life, which made us appreciate the life we had in N. America and has made me so thankful for my homeland of Canada.
Just one edit: If you have $4000k per month in disposable income, sounds like you have a great life in the USA.
Okay ... is this non-PC enough for you?