Yikes, I did not realize it has been a month since I posted anything! That is clearly testament to how quickly the time is flying for me. Since then, well I have made a rather impromptu trip home for some time with family (So great, we really need to make family reunions happen a bit more often!), performed in two recitals, added several new gigs to my busy music schedule, and gotten a visa to stay here until September 2015. And yesterday it was a lovely spring day so I cleaned out our garden plot and planted flower seeds around the borders so it looks pretty when it is time to put vegatables in. I will post pictures when there is something other than freshly over-turned dirt to see. So I have had lots on my calendar :)
But anyway, all of that is not actually what I planned to write about today. I thought that I would share an amusing mingling of cultures that I experienced yesterday.
Yesterday I had brunch plans with a fellow pianist who became a good friend during Phantom of the Opera. We had been wanting to have a catch-up for awhile but we both have busy teaching and accompanying schedules so pinning down a date and time can be difficult. However, it is currently school holidays for two weeks in between terms 3 and 4, so it seemed a good time to meet up. We could not settle on a coffee shop that would not be crazy busy on a Saturday mid-day so I offered to play hostess. I decided to put American food on the menu and set about making biscuits and gravy, as I was assuming the chances of her having tasted it before were quite slim.
Biscuits as Americans know them, and gravy as something you'd want to have at breakfast on your biscuits are both food items which Kiwis are likely to have never encountered. They do have gravy here, but not white gravy, and certainly not sausage gravy with lots of cracked pepper. It is easy to find the brown gravy you would expect on your turkey and stuffing at Thanksgiving, but they generally refer to is as just sauce. Gravy is not made with sausage here because they generally only have sausage in the form of links. You can find ground pork but it lacks the flavor of sausage so you have to add your own. Unless you want to finely chop the links and have chunks. I have tried both options in making gravy. Not sure which I prefer yet :)
Biscuits is a whole other topic of discussion, and one which set us on a funny conversation about food and names while we were dining yesterday. In NZ if someone offers you a biscuit, they are offering you something sweet, such as a Tim Tam or a chocolate chip cookie or an Oreo. While we refer to these items as cookies, kiwis generally would not be sure what you mean. What we call biscuits would be called a scone here. Most scones in NZ are a combination of a biscuit and a muffin and are generally savory, meaning they are have ham and cheese in them, or spinach and feta. Date scones are quite popular, and are usually the "sweet" option.
As a general rule, things are not so terribly different between NZ and the US. I did not experience the culture shock of new customs, new food, new language like when I went to Japan, or to a lesser extent, Austria. But even after 15 months, there are still things nearly every day that make me smile, even if it is just a vocabulary thing. There have been many interesting discussions at work that started because of something simple that was said by me and interpreted differently by a kiwi, or that I heard and did not understand, and so on and so forth. These experiences are educational but also fun. I find it terribly amusing to watch the reaction to asking a Kiwi if they have ever tried biscuits and gravy, because you can bet that if they do not know what you are referring to, they are probably picturing a chocolate chip cookie with brown sauce on it :)
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