Accent grave `

Being from New Zealand, I’ve never considered myself to have an accent. I mean Americans do, the English, the French – well, most everyone has an accent – but people who have them never think of themselves as having one.

I received an e-mail from a friend of a friend from Canada visiting New Zealand – I loved it SO much I’m posting an except here.

Language
I never thought this would be a problem for us; in fact I thought we had a leg up on most people in this respect. But oh no, we’ve had our share of difficulties. One night early in our trip before we became fluent in Kiwi-speak, we spent about three minutes explaining to a waitress that
we needed more BREAD. Simple enough you would think; well think again. After a great deal of arm waving and raising of voices she finally exclaimed “Oh that’s more BRID you want!”. I should have anticipated the problem because I had noticed the day before an elocution-trained TV announcer saying “This is Winsday, the sivnth of Fibrary”. You get the picture - the letter e is almost
always pronounced as an I. Ixcillent! The trick is figuring out why the third e in this case does not become an I. There are many such ixceptions. But after a whole month we’ve gotten a pretty good handle on the local dialect and we get by most of the time without having to resort to shouting.

Distance/Time
All the trailheads have a sign with a time shown but never a distance. I don’t think kiwis realize how stupid this is. It takes a while to develop the conversion factor from kiwi walking time to walking time for other (regular) people. After considerable experimentation we’ve finally
got it figured out. For example on a recent walk which was marked as 4-6 hours here are the conversions:
Time for a kiwi walker* - 4 hours
Time for a very fit foreign walker - 6 hours
Time for a normal/average walker 2x4 = 8 hours
Approximate time for other walkers including the slightly overweight woman from Minnesota in all new LL Bean gear:
2x6 = 12 hours.
*Kiwi walkers can be easily identified. They are never shorter than 6ft 3in, weigh less than 11 stone (154lb) without their boots, and have about 0.005% BFI.
Incidentally they always say, as they are flying past you on the trail, something like “Keep it up mate, you’ll get there in good time.”
What they are really thinking though is “I feel sorry for you mate. You just don’t have the
genes to climb mountains.” It was no coincidence that Edmund Hilary was a kiwi!

INDEED!
IXILENT!