Three Degrees of Separation

We love our new hometown, Queenstown. It's a tiny town of about 10,000 and when one throws in all of the surrounding small towns, you might get 20,000. It's the type of place where the orthodontist only has office hours one day a week because he lives 150km away. We had been here for over three months before we saw our first traffic light. We had to drive six hours to see it, to the big metropolis of Christchurch.

Christchurch is the largest city on the South Island and the third largest in the nation. We drove up there to do some heavy shopping - to buy a vehicle, some furniture and horse riding equipment. Sure, we could have done this shopping in Queenstown, but the prices and selection in Christchurch are better.

But even in the "big city," we continued to be reminded of how small our new world is. On our first stop, the Nissan dealer, we learned that our salesman had sold an SUV to the previous owners of our house and that he had even been in our house. Then at the first furniture store that we went to, our salesman turned out to be the brother of our closest neighbors here in Queenstown. You know that idea of six degrees of separation? Well, we're convinced that it reduces to only two or three degrees of separation down here in New Zealand. We live in a small town in a small country.

It's a big change from the US and from the big cities that we've lived in there. But Queenstown is remarkably cosmopolitan and sophisticated for its small size. We're part of a large minority of emigrants here and it seems that most of the Kiwis we meet have spent quite a bit of time overseas. It makes for a very diverse and interesting community.

Hasbro, the makers of the Monopoly board game, have discovered Queenstown too. They included it in a shortlist of 68 great cities of the world from which they want the public to choose 20 to be properties in their "first global Monopoly," the Here and Now: The World Edition. Voting goes through the end of the month but right now Queenstown is running #18. Something in us is rooting for our little town to slip out of the top 20 in order to keep too many people from learning about this small town we love.