Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Chill out: it's a party, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I always found Ozzie sledging to be the good natured variety. Even in small rural towns, from crusty old truck drivers who had an actual bona fide reason to dislike me. But perhaps I didn't draw the dark side out. I've had much worse from NZers.
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I find accents hard to pick out abroad, including the kiwi. You lose the reference point, and it's comparably hard to achieving perfect pitch in music. If you get a tuning fork, someone with the same accent talking next to them, you'll spot it straight away. But doing it raw, after your ears have been hearing foreign sounds even for only a few days is much more difficult.
Also, just guessing people's accents for fun doesn't really help, unless you actually ask them afterwards. You could just be wrong and not know it. There's quite a range for some accents - the country Ozzie drawl is totally different to the fancy accent of a privately schooled Australian, which can sound almost English. Ozzies will slip back and forth between this one, if they can, depending on the other Ozzies they are with. There are also some differences between the states. Similarly a rural kiwi accent is a lot different to a posh one here. And anyone traveling usually alters their accent somewhat to make it clearer for locals. I think I'd rather pick the difference between a Thai and a Malaysian accent, some of the time, at least the tonal cues are consistent.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Sacha,
80 million?
No, the 1.2 million that they say were born in Ireland and are living abroad, which gives 18.8% comparing apples with apples. 80 million is 13 times the population of Ireland. It's an interesting number, sure, but you get that when you count everyone with any descent from your country for 3 generations as your own. Still impressive, even then, to increase a population 13-fold in only 2 generations.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Sacha,
Yes, their stats are fun. Roughly the same as NZs, but they do seem to have spread out a lot more.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to recordari,
Particularly if you are going to have a shipping container in the first place. Might as well fill it, right?
I'd still caveat that with leaving out the car or motorbike. I thought that way, but regretted it. There was a lot of unnecessary pissing around with a vehicle, where just selling it in one place and buying another in the other can be done in a matter of days.
Btw, your email seems to be broken. I wanted to apologize for earlier tone.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Bart Janssen,
A little research here, the 1 million Kiwis abroad is probably inflated - it seems more likely to be around 600,000. So 15% of the population. The number of Thais abroad turned out to be somewhat easier to find. Roughly 6 million Thais out of 70, so about 8.6%. Brits, highest estimate 6 million abroad out of 61 million so around 10%. Australians, a very surprising 1,000,000 out of 21 million, so only 4.8%. Americans weren't so easily answered but I'll go with the high side of 6.6 million, out of 307 million gives 2.1%.
Germany, a popular contender, had data that I didn't even want to read, their guesses on overseas population are deeply Godwinned since they were used to justify several of the invasions in WW2.
So all up, NZ's still looking good as a major contender for one of the most traveled nations in the world. But any other data to the contrary are welcome. I expect that James Butler's guess that Pacific nations might be right up there is right, just as a numbers game.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Actually, I think you'd be very surprised how many have travelled and how many have been to New Zealand
Surprise me with some numbers. I'm searching myself, but these are hard figures to come by.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Simon Grigg,
The entire population of the South Island could fit into Auckland - it's still the same country. I'm not sure how that makes it an argument??
Yup, and they're very different to Aucklanders in a lot of ways. There can be culture shock in attempting to fit in here, if you come from somewhere rural, very much like foreign culture shock.
Granted, it's not as extreme as landing in Cambodia and trying to fit in, but I don't really see how saying Australia is not a foreign country really works. You could say most of the same things about traveling to the UK or the USA, too. Where do you draw the line of foreign? I draw it at the actual border.
Furthermore, what are you comparing it to? How many Thais have extensive travel experience, as a proportion of their population? For it to be anything remotely like NZ they would need to have somewhere around 17 million people abroad constantly. Even if they were just over in Laos, that would count. For Americans, it would need to be around 60 million. I would count Canada. For Chinese, around 400 million.
Lots of New Zealanders of certain demographics have travelled. There are very many who have not.
Yup, but when you put actual numbers around it, how does it look?
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Simon Grigg,
See, I don't think that is completely true.
There are plenty of homebodies, of course. Travel is incredibly expensive for NZers. Which is what makes it such an amazing stat that over 1 million of us are abroad. As I recall that puts us at the top for proportion of nationals overseas. How do you account for that? Ah, that's right, you said Australia is not abroad. I beg to differ. It is like NZ, but it is also quite different. The entire population of NZ could fit into either Sydney or Melbourne. That makes it qualitatively different, IMHO.
As for the difficulty ex-ex-pats have fitting back in, I often wonder if this isn't mixing up cause and effect. Perhaps people became ex-pats because they found something in their own country difficult to relate to, and this isn't likely to go away by going abroad.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to recordari,
I have met Jolisa. I stand by my comment.
That's all you had to say dude, and there's no need to tap your nose about it. I didn't know, now I do. What's the big secret?
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