> 2. Don't be surprised to find movie rentals and bait in the same store.

That's unusual? Heh. One of my favourite things about very small towns (which describes virtually all of New Zealand) is small-town shops. I love them. They're like the Tardis. On the outside they look about ten metres square, on the inside you can buy ANYTHING. If they ever took all their stock out of the shelves, off the strings hanging from the ceiling, out from under the counter, and off the window boxes and the verandah, the amount of stuff would probably equal the whole rest of the town put together.

I was going to continue about this kind of shop, but if you want a better description you'll find it at the beginning of chapter one of "Cannery Row" by John Steinbeck. Lee Chong's Heavenly Flower Grocery may not have rented videos, but only because they didn't exist at the time. In New Zealand this sort of shop is often the local post office, too, among other things.

The other thing I like about them is that the front window is always the town notice-sticking place. I can never go by one of these shops without reading all the papers people have stuck in the window. Lost pets, garage sales, people wanting to sell or buy something, kids wanting work babysitting or exercising horses, hand-written ads for all the local cottage industries. You can find out everything you want to know about a town by reading what's stuck to the front of its shop.

Brunnen-"In Coromandel you'd be amazed how many psychics, mystics, rune casters and water diviners advertise in a grocery shop window"G