Things I love about New Zealand

My time in New Zealand is finally coming to an end, and I'll be heading home in April. Most of the time I've been here I've been looking forward to coming home, and maybe even looking for negatives. Which are, in fact, only two. The distance from my family and friends, and the lack of suburban pubs. I think this may have been partly to stop myself getting attached to the place. But I recently encountered a nice expression, which has been cause for concern. Boomerang Poms. For much of the 20th century there was actively encouraged immigration from the UK out to Australia, and many of those who arrived initially hated it, hence the term Whinging Poms. They went home, then realised what a winner they'd been onto, so returned to Aussie, becoming Boomerang Poms. I'm beginning to wonder if I might end up falling into this category.
Some things I love about NZ:
Gardens - even your average student flat has a big garden with plenty of room to relax and grow vegetables.
Climate - it gets cold here in winter, but it's almost always sunny. It is a bit excessively windy the whole blimin time though!
Big wide roads - with plenty of room for bikes to cycle past even the most rude and inobservant Fendalton mum's SUV car door.
Cabbage trees, tree ferns, flax and just all the other awesome plants they have both in the wild and in their gardens.
Awesome scenery. Obviously.
The open road - no motorways round here. The main roads are always single lane and have to contend with all of that pesky awesome scenery which makes for winding hilly crazy roads which are a lot of fun to drive (and not so much fun to be a passenger if you get car sick!). On the west coast they even have a couple of quite sizeable bridges which are shared with trains. Problem is that you can't tell if a train's coming until you've got onto the track, and guess who gets right of way?!
And what I love absolute best, and indeed what inspired today's blog - cicadas. Cicadas are just the best thing about summer. On a warm day every tree in Christchurch is alive with the sound of cicadas, which sound like grasshoppers with megaphones. In the UK I used to love the sound of light aircraft buzzing overhead - it was always the sound of a sunny Sunday. Here cicadas give the place a sunny Sunday feeling every day!

Overall, NZ is a great place to live. What would be really handy would be if we could lasso it, and pull it just off the coast of Spain. Seems reasonable huh?!