Good visitors, I couldn't make this stuff up.
Indeed, we are so glad you're here we've already forgotten to "abstain for the game". Rest assured our largest telecom company swears they want you to have sex, now. Really.
Kiwis are so much more than Sonny Bill Williams without a shirt. Significantly more. That's why the rest of us keep our shirts on. Indeed, we have depth and nuance I'm sure you never dreamed existed in this fair land. Try choosing the false answer:
A. One of our greatest national treasures is a pair of yodelling lesbian country-singing twins. From Huntly.
B. Winston Peters is a brand of Scotch. All foreigners should feel free to go up to any bar and order: "I'll have Winston Peters straight up." That alone should guarantee an interesting evening, depending on the bar.
C. On the morning of Will & Kate's royal wedding, as usual National Radio started its 9am hour with that day's birdcall, from the "king shag".
Sorry, trick question, they're all true.
Sure, we have our issues, like any country - the tragic price of adidas jerseys online or that 54 per cent of our menfolk look like Sam Neill at different decades and answer only to Trev, Kev or Murray.
In fact, we send our best Murrays off to our consulate in New York to manage folk-comedy duos, hoping they'll bring back leggy blondes to breed out the assets-sale gene.
Indeed, that's how I came to these shores.
Like any fine laconic "Nu Zilunder", my future bloke's opening line inquired if I fancied coming back to Godzone to widen the gene pool. Swept off my feet like a waterfront reveller in a Fuller's ferry first crush, I replied: "Sweet as, Sam Neill circa 1974." I'd always wanted to see Iceland.
My fate was sealed.
I was asked what I thought of the place four times before I left baggage claim, breaking a new world record formerly held by John Cleese in Palmerston North.
Here I remain, in this lush land that defines patriotism with strange verbal tics, like compulsively inserting two words, "highly regarded" before "troops" if you're about to say something honest.
And yet. For those like me, who have consciously chosen to call this country home, we know something you may never have the luck to discover in your short stay; we have won the golden ticket.
Years ago, when I first stepped off the plane, we travelled straight from the airport up the Coromandel Peninsula. A good hour before dusk, we stopped atop a hill. We looked out to an inlet enveloped by saturated greens with the blue sea beyond, all bathed in an utter clarity of golden light I had never seen before.
It was years before I had any fear that Orcs would bound over the far hills to enact their own real life laws. It was long before we leapt into nearly a decade of what New Zealand still doesn't see are not "other people's wars".
It has taken me a long time to realise that New Zealand's highest prize is something we have never lost; The expectation that we will do the right thing - for our own in Christchurch, on the world stage, even making good if you were stuck on a train that didn't get you to the game on time. A young country is entitled to the innocence of that ambition.
If you never stray further than your hotel room and the cities of your stadiums, no matter how good the rugby is, you will have wasted your money. It is the land that seduces you first, and then very quietly, when you hadn't noticed, the people of this wondrous place, who wish you: "Haere Mai."
- www.traceybarnett.co.nz
or Twitter@TraceyBarnett
