Kiwi Hospitality

“Kiwi Hospitality is the process of showing respect and care for guests in our home. Most Kiwis embody this without even realising it, welcoming strangers and warmly inviting them to share New Zealand with us.”

Mid way through drafting this blog, I thought I’d see what the internet had to say about “Kiwi Hospitality” and Mr Google came up with the above.  It struck a chord with me – I didn’t know the easy going, warm hospitality that I’d grown up experiencing is how NZ is portrayed to a global audience.  After about 24 years living away from NZ, I’ve been pleased and sometimes entertained to re-discover all over again Kiwi Hospitality in Aotearoa New Zealand.

I believe that understanding the cultures around you is vital to getting the most out of any overseas travel, but most of all, for expat life.  In my different expat locations, I used a brilliant series of books called “Culture Shock” each time I moved countries, particularly Singapore and UAE.  Maybe I should check out the NZ one to make sure I still understand the culture after so much time away!  But getting reacquainted with Kiwi Hospitality, right here in Aotearoa, has been an enjoyable part of re-becoming Kiwi.  Here’s a link to one of my favourite blogs from earlier in the year;

https://ripeningnicely.com/2020/12/18/re-becoming-kiwi/

Not long after arriving in Dubai I threw a house party and, true to the range of expats calling Dubai home, I had a really diverse range of guests.  I’d greet each guest, show them where the food and drink were, and let everyone get on with mingling.  Perfectly normal, right?  As you’d expect, the antipodean ones had no problem helping themselves to the laid out drinks and food and pretty much looking after themselves.  But other cultures with, I guess, more rigid ideas of hospitality, just couldn’t help themselves – they needed me, the host, to bring them a fresh drink as they finished their old one.  It jarred me in the beginning, but after a little while I just came to accept it as cultural differences in hospitality expectations.

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Outside of my family, our first real experience of Kiwi Hospitality on this trip was being picked up from MIQ from our ex-Oman buddies and treated like family in their home, despite having only recently returned to NZ themselves.  We were pretty on edge after our escape from India, and it was wonderful being made to feel so much at home in theirs.

Near the beginning of our first road trip in Cyril we dropped in to see some Kiwi friends that I used to mountain bike and rock climb with in Dubai.  They’d saved hard in Dubai and returned home to NZ a few years ago after buying a kiwifruit orchard.  We spent three great days catching up with them and their two adorable boys in the green, green greenness of the kiwifruit capital of the world – a complete contrast to the lives we all led in Dubai, where we never seemed to have enough time to properly catch up with anyone.  The best way I could think of it was that we were visiting them “in their natural habitat”.   As we left, we drove in silence at first, mulling over the lovely stay, trying to get to grips with the heartfelt, natural generosity we’d experienced.  Not only while we were there, but we left with bags of citrus fruit, a loaf of freshly baked bread, even a bunch of flowers cut fresh from the garden!

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It’s impossible to record every act of generosity here, but time and time again we’ve been pleasantly surprised by friends sharing their homes, mountain bikes, cars, homemade vegan cheese and other delectable delights, but most of all, heartfelt and generous friendship.

I’ve always felt a bit self-conscious accepting hospitality from others.  Considering that here in NZ we feel limited in what tangible things we can offer in return, that feeling has returned.  But then I remind myself that in our previous life we had been more than generous – whether it was getting the first round in, having people to stay, or inviting people into our personal escape of an afternoon or weekend sailing, I always felt that we shared our lifestyle generously.  At least for the year or so before heading off on our sailing adventure, we could offer a genuine invitation for people to join us on Aroha somewhere warm in SE Asia.  It felt like an invitation with real value, and of course those offers are still there, whenever we resume that part of our adventure.

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I’ve always found it pretty easy to get on with people if you have something in common.  Enjoying and, sometimes, suffering together on a tramp.  Mountain biking.  Sustainability.  Motor homing.  On our travels we have been fortunate to meet people who share some or all of these interests.  But it is also great to find out more about them, we’ve met some really cool people with interesting backgrounds or current interests and hobbies.  It’s been brilliant finding out about people who have lived very different lives from us.  We have met some people on our travels around the country that we’ve got on really well with and have subsequently been invited to their homes.  We value the friendship as well as the luxuries such as a shower that you can run for longer than 30 seconds (without fear of “using all the water”!), washing machines and WIFI – all greatly appreciated when you live in a campervan with much more limited resources.  In fact, a couple of months back we dropped by some campervanning friends in their Christchurch home, and “would you like a shower and put a load of laundry on” came before “would you like a beer?”!!   We did a quick sniff test of ourselves and it wasn’t because we were the great unwashed, but a genuine appreciation of what our needs would be with our life on the road!

We also enjoy bonding through pets.  Clearly, our current lifestyle isn’t too conducive to have our own, so we “borrow” others’!  I noticed a funny pattern when meeting people with dogs – I often engage with the dog before and more than with the owner!  Often, I find myself wallowing on the ground with the dog/s, while Helen’s having an adult conversation with the owner.  Sometimes with a mumbled apology about maybe me being half dog.

As I type, we are back in Taupo enjoying looking after our friend’s lovely house and uber-affectionate cat while they’re away up north.  Especially as winter has come around, we appreciate the convenience of occasionally living in a house and the ease of which we can keep up the hobbies we want to do on a regular basis.  Helen is making great progress on the ukulele, I was missing my saxophone so much I hired a clarinet (I’m loving the smooth sound!), and I’m working on my long-term ambition to learn to draw animals and people.  When we’re living in Cyril it takes a bit of effort fitting everything in, especially practicing music!  For my clarinet, I usually sit in “the library” (our nickname for the passenger seat, because that’s where we keep the maps and guidebooks…) and Helen dons her noise cancelling headphones!  For sketching, I discovered a cool website called Quick Poses where you can select a set of timed images from your chosen topic – faces, silhouettes, hands, animals, etc.  Choosing a short time per image (I prefer three or five minutes) forces you to work fast, quickly getting the key information on the page.  I much prefer sketching from real life, but a database of photos is a pretty quick way to learn when you don’t have willing and patient models!  I’m really pleased with my progress, but I’ve still some work to do.  What continues to surprise me is how observant you need to be to sketch well – I find drawing faces particularly delicate – the accuracy of even small lines, like eyebrows or the corner of a mouth can change the character completely.  Maybe there’s a metaphor for life there!

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We have said often that being back in NZ was not part of the plan, but as we navigate new directions that our life is taking us, it is rewarding reflecting on the many things that we are gaining as a result.  It is all too easy to look at things we have lost or are missing out on, but so much better to appreciate the things we are gaining, and Kiwi Hospitality has been one of those that we truly appreciate.

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