Welcome to Enzed, where left is right!

This is the account of all the things uniquely New Zealand that I have observed. Now I know that some of these things are found in other countries, but not America. Of course the first thing is that the toilet flushes in the opposite direction. I am here to tell you all that this really is the case! It is so weird to see the water start to spin and think, wait a second!
But wait, that’s not all folks! Not only does the toilet flush in the opposite direction, you also have choices when you flush! I am not joking you. There are two buttons on the top of every toilet that lets you choose if you want to do a half-flush or a full-flush! Supposedly this is for when you are going number one or number two, but it is seriously the weirdest thing you have seen in your life! I remember when I first saw a toilet here I was worried that one was the flush down button and one was the up button, and no one ever wants the toilet to come back up! Being the proper American that I am, I always chose the right button, which happens to be the full-flush. Which is also probably why it took three weeks for me to figure it out!
As most of you probably know cars drive on the left side of the road in this country. What many of you may not know is that I don’t know how to drive a manual transmission. Because my family lives so far outside of town they have a wee little car for students to drive on rainy days. When my kiwi-dad found out that I didn’t know how to drive a stick he was determined to teach me (mostly because he didn’t want to have to drive me everywhere!). So I’m sure you can all imagine me sitting in a very small car on a little dirt road with the prospect of driving. I will now quote my exact words as I prepared to turn the car on for the first time, “I am sitting on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road, driving a stick shift. This has PROBLEM written all over it!” Oh yeah, and did I mention that the stick shift was on the left? I had about a thirty-minute lesson before Mark (my kiwi-dad) decided it would be easier to drive me everywhere. That is the last time I have gotten into a car on the driver’s side!
Another thing New Zealanders have done to mess with their American visitors is change the place of the door handles. Instead of door handles being waist high they are actually up to about your chin. So when I first got here I was constantly grabbing at air when I tried to open the doors, and actually ran into a few of them as well! Eventually I got used to it though and started reaching up to open the door. Well my family apparently likes to mess with me. Because, when I moved into the smaller room after my roommate moved out I discovered that the only door in the entire house that has lower handles is the one that goes into my room! So of course I have rewired my brain to open doors higher up, and every morning when I am still half-asleep and not thinking I reach up to open my door and run headlong into it instead! No wonder I am starting to become a morning person, there are painful consequences if you don’t wake up fully conscious!
Finally, there are two things that I am convinced America does better. Actually there are lots of things, but two that are absolutely no question. The first is line-drying your clothes. Now I know that there are still people that do this in America, but my family has never line-dried anything. It is great for your clothes because they last longer and never shrink, but can I tell you that I will never underestimate the luxuriousness of fabric softener again! One of the things I am looking forward to coming home most is having soft, warm, and deliciously smelling clothes from the dryer. Long live mechanically drying clothes! The next thing is having only one tap on sinks. You know how in the old days there was always a hot tap and a cold tap, but they were always hooked to the same pipe so you could adjust the two of them to eventually find warm or luke-warm? We have perfected this process even more by reducing the sinks down to only one tap in almost all houses. Now you just have to turn the knob until the water comes out just right. Well, lets just say that New Zealand isn’t a little behind the times, they are in the last century behind the times! Now you may think I am joking about this, but I swear that every word is true. They have TWO taps and TWO pipes for the water to come out of. You have a hot pipe and cold pipe. Which means when you are washing your face you have the options of scalding hot, or freezing cold. When you are washing your hands you can either burn them off or freeze them off. It is seriously the most annoying and idiotic system I have ever seen in my entire life. LONG LIVE WARM WATER!