The culture that is New Zealand

A short - as in non book-length - travelogue through New Zealand by Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies.  Delightful, thoughtful, funny, and in my opinion, dead-on accurate, it is absolutely worth reading.  Go check it out!

[A]cross the world, every large English-speaking country has a nearby, smaller and slightly nicer English-speaking population, like a little brother that people can feel good about when the bigger version has pissed them off. So America has Canada, Britain has Ireland and Australia has New Zealand.

The landscape has an extraordinary …generous quality to it. The desert in Jordan carried the constant fear of death to the unwary, and the fertility of Sri Lanka also had a sinister quality to it, as if something was going to start growing on you if you sat still for too long. And Australia, even in the temperate zones, is such an extraordinary collection of poisonous and hazarodus things (one episode of Peppa Pig has been banned by the ABC, as it involves Peppa learning that Friendly Mr Spider is nothing to be scared of, a message which is wholly inappropriate to teach Australian kids). But New Zealand – the countryside seems to be acting as if it is trying to kill you by throwing fruit at you.