A cup of green tea

A cup of green tea cost four New Zealand dollars. I handed over a twenty-dollar note and waited for the change.
The plane from San Francisco is due in Auckland at ten minutes past five in the morning, but was half-an-hour early. So here I was in town having deposited my luggage, but with a lot of time to kill. This coffee bar was one of the few that were open so early.
The man behind the counter put a ten-dollar note in my hand, plus a one-dollar coin. I stared at the money through overtired eyes, then at him. “Four dollars,” I said.
He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. “Oh,” he said suddenly, as though just remembering something, and produced another five dollars from the till. There was no apology.
It is only the second time anyone has tried to cheat me in New Zealand and sad to say, it was by non-native New Zealanders on both occasions, both in Auckland and at the same chain of coffee bars. This has never been a crime-free society, but in my previous experience, such behaviour was unthinkable here.
This is the country where when I phoned the Auckland-dwelling cousin of a Stockholm colleague to convey his regards, I was passed after a chat, to her husband, who asked me where I was staying. I told him.
“You’re not!” he stated emphatically. “You’re staying here!” And despite my protestations, within an hour they had come to collect me. I’d never met them before.
This is the country where, when we once turned up in Invercargill in the evening with our then three-year-old son and couldn’t find anywhere to stay, the chairman of the local motel-owners’ association, whom I had turned to as a last resort, assured me everywhere was full.
“We have a three-year-old child with us,” I said. “So what do we do?”
“You come round here,” he replied. “There’s no room in our motel, but we have a spare room in our house. We have a young child too.”
He later asked where we were going after Invercargill. We told him we’d really like to go to Stewart Island for a few days, whereupon he arranged it for us.
When we got back he had a room for us in the motel. This time we told him we were aiming to go next to Queenstown.
“My wife’s parents have a bach (holiday home) in Queenstown,” he said. “You can stay there. There’s no one in it at the moment.” They gave us bedding to take with us.
This is the country where, much more recently, I booked a bed-and-breakfast weekend in a small township about an hour’s train ride from Wellington, was met at the station by the host, fed afternoon tea by his wife, shown round the area, introduced to a number of people, taken to the biannual fair in a neighbouring town the next day, and given lunch the day after that before being taken back to the station.
Five days later my erstwhile host phoned me in Wellington and asked what I was doing that weekend. Surprised, I explained I was busy the next day, a Saturday, but had made no plans for the Sunday.
“I’ll come and pick you up,” he said. Which he did.
This is the country where I met some friends from Sweden who were on a cruise ship that called in at Wellington and who decided to take a taxi into town. When we got there, they gave the driver a tip - which he refused to take. (I had told them that normally you didn’t tip people here.)
I could go on. So it is doubly sad when someone from another background in the country’s biggest city, which has about one-in-three of the entire New Zealand population, tries to cheat me out of a few dollars.
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PS But incidently, the taxi driver I mentioned wasn’t a native Kiwi either.