Introducing myself and what fascinates me about the country I live in :)

Hello Steemers, I am new here so I thought I’d introduce myself 😊
My name is Kristyna (everybody calls me Kriss though :D ), I’m 26 years old and I live in the stunning country of New Zealand.

I was born in Czech Republic and raised for most of my life in Italy and Ukraine. I met my husband who is South African of French and British descendance, in England. Our son was also born there.
We moved to New Zealand four years ago and we are quite happy about life here 😊
Living on a 268,021 km² Island with only another 4.7M people, 27M sheep and 6.5M cows is a blessing (forgot to include the 30M possums living in the country’s wilderness…)

I don’t have anything against possums, in fact I consider them to be incredibly cute but New Zealand thinks otherwise since possums apparently destroy native trees and shrubs, and eat the berries needed by the native “bird” (if you can call it that since it has furry feathers and no wings): The Kiwi Bird.

I LOVE this country but: a Kiwi Bird over a possum, really? Then again, I guess I like marsupials with a rodent-like appearance more than birds (that have furry feathers and no wings).
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against birds, in fact I think parrots are beautiful and clever: they can sing the SpongeBob SquarePants song, they can learn lots of phrases in human language and their feathers are of astounding colours (then again, they are not Kiwi “Birds”).
I remember when we first went camping in Auckland (which is the biggest populated city in New Zealand but is not it’s capital). We set up our tent, had a nice BBQ and soon, after night fall, we went to sleep. Before that, my hubby ate half a pack of crispy potato chips and left the rest under our, at the time 1 year old, son’s buggy that was standing just in front of the entrance of our tent.
I wasn’t completely asleep yet when I started hearing strange sounds like if somebody was going through our things in the buggy. I thought it was a thief or something so I woke up my husband (yes, he was already snoring by that time) and asked him to slowly open the zip of the tent and look who was there. It was a shock! At first he looked quickly and said: “It’s just a cat” to which I replied: “Does a cat stand up like that? I don’t think so. Please look closely”. At that point, in a very loud voice, he shouted: “Honey! It’s a Kangaroo!!!”.

I kinda laughed cause I knew that Roos are a thing of Australia and not New Zealand but I could see why he got confused, after all in the dark and standing up like that, it really did resemble a kangaroo (though a very miniature one).

Yup, you guessed it, it was indeed a Possum and it was stealing our chips lol
The next night I purposely left some crumbs all around our tent and more food under the buggy and not only one possum came, but a whole family of them (mom, dad and tree babies) …it was so cute 😊

Hence again the question: Kiwi Birds over possums, really?
Do not blame me for liking possums more, after all those are the first wild animals I saw in this country.
Kiwi Birds are protected and you do not see them around (you have to go and pay if you want to see them), while possums you can see everywhere, I even see a couple running on top of my fence from time to time 😊

The government should’ve made them the national animal in my opinion, but then again, they Kiwi Birds are the natives of New Zealand and that is what gives them the upper hand.

Aw man, I was supposed to do an introduction of myself…. instead I have spent most of the time talking about possums (I didn’t even know that they fascinate me so much so thank you Steemit for making me discover this new part of myself lol).
All this aside, I am glad to be part of this awesome community and thank you all so much for taking your time to read my very first article.

Hopefully I will see you all on the next one xoxoxo