Joe | Queenstown, Otago

“There’s a lot of kindness in Queenstown. It’s a good spot for it.

For me, personally, second-hand kindness, I guess. This year at Christmas I worked in hospitality in a restaurant, and a colleague of mine, after a very busy Christmas/New Year period went out for a few drinks after work with a wallet full of cash, and misplaced it, and before she even realised she’d lost it, she was contacted by somebody who looked inside, got her details, and they drove to her house and gave it back to her with all the money in it, which I thought was quite special.

I think kindness is paramount, because everybody likes to have kind deeds done to them, and to experience kindness from others, and if you reciprocate that, it creates a circle, doesn’t it? You give, you receive. Then it just makes a nice environment for everyone. 

So, I grew up in the south-east of England. I left home when I was quite young. I went to Australia for a couple of years, lived in Sydney. It was very thick and fast and I came to New Zealand for a bit of downtime, to experience some nature and quietness, and just absolutely fell in love with it.

In Queenstown I guess it’s the same thing that’s going on in everyone’s lives right now. Kind of rebuilding after lock-down, and the whole Corona madness. So, just slowly getting back into work. A lot of friends in the community are out of work. So, everybody’s sort of trying to help each other out, and spot each other for jobs and rooms et cetera. So, yeah that’s, that’s me at the moment, coming back into it.”