Today is Good Friday. Holidays here are like the '60's and '70's when there was respect for religious holidays. The stores are closed, except of course, for the petrol stations. But then most of the stores in our town are closed on Saturdays and Sundays. You can get take-aways every day and I think the garden centers [ok, hardware stores that sell flowers] are open on Saturdays, but even they close up on Sundays.
But the strangest thing is that there are no adverts on tv on holidays. I suppose there would be some fun in trying to track down the reasoning behind it, since NZ is not particularly politically vocal about being Christian. I mean, I bet Jesus wouldn't care if there were ads on tv. And, it really screws up the scheduling, that's for sure.
And, of course, the kids are out of school and working folks have a long weekend, so there are lots of family movies on, which I wouldn't mind, except that they are not exactly the newest movies available. I do try to keep in mind that this is a very small country with a very small budget for tv entertainment. The government runs two of the four basic free channels, I believe Australia owns the third and I'm pretty sure Canada owns the fourth one.
Heck, speaking of movies--we have gone through the whole video store [yes, the one in Stratford]. The movies considered 'New Releases' and 'Recent Releases' are pathetically dated, withe the 'Recent' ones mostly movies that I rented for a buck before I got here.
And, then there's cable--which doesn't seem particularly worth the money. That's why I stopped watching tv all together for a couple of years before I left here. I had cable at one point, but out of over 50 channels, there wasn't much on to my liking when I wanted to watch.
Maybe I'm just spoiled, having come from America. *sigh*
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