Cultural Insights – Latin America

First impressions about New Zealand
Cultural differences between New Zealand and Latin America
Thing to improve to accommodate Latin Americans

Your first Impressions about New Zealand

I Loved the nature

My first impression was like, yeah, it’s not as cold as it looks in the pictures. Clean country, safe, people are very friendly. Very relaxed culture, kind of way of life like most of South Americans. We are like that. Very chilled.

A struggle at the beginning speaking English in here. I came with, I learned English back home. But yeah the accent from New Zealanders way was quite hard. It’s just something that you have to get used to. You know some vowels, how do you pronounce them.

What about cultural differences?

When you know more about other cultures you get yourself like more open-minded and you can see like there is not only one way of doing things

In Colombia, if you go to a bar for example, and you buy wine, they will give you snacks, so you don’t need to buy those. And in some ways it will be good because if you eat and you drink you don’t get so drunk. For example timing with the South Americans. When you say I’ll pick you up at 8:00, for us that means around 8:00. It might be between 8:00 and 8:30. And we in Mexico, we always give a kiss like to the people and here it’s more like a little bit cold in that part.

We like to hug, we like to touch to fill the contact. And here you have to show more like respect or just I don’t know. You can if I tried in here at the beginning when I came just because I was used to go and give you a hug. And everyone was looking at you like what are you doing mate, and yeah.

So I miss that we are close to each other that we kiss and then we smile. If we are far far away from each other, we just wave hands. I don’t know we are more informal

One thing to improve upon?

Kiwis tend to speak very fast. I don’t know why. So maybe that could be the only think I would recommend. You know for customers especially if they are from abroad. Trying to speak a bit slower and that will be it.

That sometimes that find more places that show the stuff in Spanish. Usually I find that no one, no one cares about the Spanish in here. You can see stuff translated in Chinese or in some other language, but not in Spanish. Never I could find anything in Spanish.

It’s a good feeling when people try to speak Spanish, even though it’s just like an ‘ola’ or something. When everyone know that I’m from Mexico they, it’s nice that they try. Ah the food, yes it means a lot the food. It is, I understand because it’s hard to get here the ingredients. You can get Indian. You can be a Chinese, but you cannot get Latin food. So yeah, I think the thing I miss the most.

We need to be careful about the weather because in Colombia, the forecast is quite predictable. But here we can’t predict, so be careful about floods.

If you are working in the tourism industry just be patient with people from abroad. They don’t understand. They might be here just for one day. They might be tired from a cruise ship or a plane or something or driving. So you know just be patient and just show how cool Kiwis are. I think that’s my advice