We flip the light switch up and naturally you guys flip it down to light up the house.
When you write the day's date you put the day first instead of the month so our date of the Twin Towers going down in New York is 9/11 and yours comes out 11/9. Man, that's just weird.
But this is my favourite difference: In America we "root" for the home team. In NZ you "root" between the sheets. You can imagine the excitement of the young men on rugby teams visiting the US when cheerleaders bounce up and squeal: "Hey guys, we're here to 'root' for you."
Reality shows just aren't your thing. Remember Sally and Jaime Ridge when you tried to do a Kardashian reality show knock-off? What happened? Absolutely nothing, zero, zip, nada, big flop.
In America it's all about your ego. We have celebrities of every description with egos so big they have to charter buses to carry them around. They call them entourages. The entourage is made up of a group of people each charged with carrying a bit of their ego. They're an intimate group of totally open and honest friends (hangers-on) who exclaim such endearments as: "You the greatest" and "Looking good baby, looking good."
It's called sucking up and Americans are great at it. You guys aren't. Earthy is what you guys are.
Look at it this way: Americans shot at and symbolically killed British royalty more than 200 years ago then morphed into a mob of crass, vulgar, loud and overly rich pilgrims with no sense of ceremony.
You guys, on the other hand, live in a country where royalty is not only alive and well, but is honoured and cherished. I don't see a fake posse following singer Lorde or NBA player Steven Adams around sucking up to them. It just wouldn't work with them.
Your talented people keep it real and honest, which is a blessing and refreshing. Don't believe me? Just take a look at Jada and Will Smith's kids (Willow, 14, and Jaden 16). They just did one of the most asinine interviews imaginable. They started by saying they were reading quantum physics and ancient texts. Jaden then went on: "We don't think a lot of the music out there is that cool. So we make our own music." Willow then added: "That's what I do with novels, there's no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing."
It went downhill from there.
New Zealand is a country which seems at first glance to be simple and straightforward. But underneath that polite, reserved exterior there lies a stubborn, perverse, un-American little outpost.
New Zealand is not a smaller, cuter, stranger, quieter version of the United States of America. The Bachelor America? Yes. The Bachelor NZ? Yeah - nah.
• John Dybvig is an American living in Auckland.
