They come with the house you live it. Sometimes you might not find any whiteware in the house you shift into, but you can guarantee there will be some shitty old curtains hanging there!! Since single glassed windows are most common here and you are simply encouraged to put on an extra jersey, woollen hat, gloves, hot water bottle and maybe crawl into bed if it gets a bit nippy, why not have very thick and ugly curtains to keep the heat from escaping through the windows? When I tell people here that my mum used to change curtains with the season: Easter, Christmas and Summer curtains, they thought that we must be millionaires or maybe just very obsessive. The NZ curtains are THICK and heavy and VERY EXPENSIVE. In Sweden, we have triple glassed windows so the curtains are purely a decoration feature.
Recycling: All cities have different recycling system, some have none. In Chch we have a green bin in which we put everything recyclable. There are only specific types of plastic which can be recycled, which often frustrates me. Food scraps usually end up in the general rubbish since there is no communal composting system. New Zealand is certainly moving in the right direction but it is a but slow to change people's behaviours around here. The green bin gets picked up once a week by a truck with some poor guys standing inside it sorting all the different random stuff that people believe is recycleble. We have some very thick neighbours that keep on insisting that stuff like the vacuum cleaner bag with many months worth of dust can be reused!
Bed sales: People are obsessed with their beds. Maybe it's because their houses are so cold that they have to stay in bed most the time over winter when the sun is not heating the house? I have never heard so many bed ads on the radio as in NZ. The beds are enormous! No wonder they need such large houses to fit their beds into.
Vegemite/Marmite: A few years ago I would have said "Same shit, different name". Now, I have to admit that I have refined my taste enough to firstly start liking the spread and secondly distinguishing that I prefer Marmite. For tourists coming to NZ, the kiwis often try to play a trick and insist that it is a chocolate spread and that a think layer on your toast will be delicious. After the first bite into the very savory and weird yeasty compound, the guinea pig will most likely not touch the shit for another few years before the trauma settles into subconscious. I have reached that stage. I can now eat Marmite, although a tiny layer is only practised, and I actually like it. Hallelujah! Can I become a kiwi citizen now?
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