Well, I used to live in New Zealand, and here are some of my conclusions regarding the country. Bear in mind I was in the South Island and never made it to the north.
(1) Central heating is virtually unknown in New Zealand. Everyone heats their homes with actual wood fires. On a winter's evening, you can see a sort of haze over the town. It's like a Victorian London smog except far thinner because there are fewer people.
(2) No shops open on Sunday. Or Saturday. Ever. Anywhere.
(3) New Zealand is blessed with some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and some of the ugliest towns. The national parks are fabulous and amazing. The parts where people actually live take bad taste to extremes. For example, New Zealand towns have a habit of erecting enormous fibreglass models of their main export. There is a huge trout in the middle of Gore and a huge pile of fruit outside Cromwell. Alexandra is the nastiest - it has a sort of clock dial on the hills outside town. It looks like the Hollywood sign, but infinitely tackier. Civic planning appears not to have happened in New Zealand. People build what and where they like.
(4) You can build a house out of pretty much anything you like in New Zealand. Corrugated iron is the usual roofing material and is often used for walls as well.In fact, the official New Zealand building code consists of rules like "It must not fall down", and in theory as long as you conform to the code you can build it. Unhappily, there are certain "accepted solutions" to the code that you must comply with. Legally speaking it's a very peculiar situation. Some houses are made of straw. Seriously.
(5) New Zealanders adore the British royal family. Not only do all magazines appear to have Prince William on the cover, they actually celebrate something called "Queen's Birthday Weekend". That was a bit of a surprise.
(6) New Zealanders really take rugby seriously. I don't think I ever saw a newspaper, national or local, that didn't have rugby on the front page. Barbaric!
(7) Dunedin is one of the worst places in the world to drive, because (in a rare example of Kiwi town planning) they simply transposed the roadmap of Edinburgh to a totally different area. This explains why Dunedin has the steepest street in the world. Parking there is an experience in itself.
(8) Local government in the South Island is run pretty much along the lines of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century. They are quite literally cowboys and if the particular hicks on your local council don't like you (for example, because you are a single woman running a small business) you're in trouble.
(9) Kiwis are insanely patriotic and genuinely believe that they live in the best country in the world. In fact it is a pretty nice place, as long as you don't mind the absence of central heating and weekend shopping, you manage to conform to the social mores of the local council even if they are stuck in the 1950s, and you are able to close your eyes to the hideous urban ugliness and get away to the national parks. And, of course, if you like rugby.
