I think they get sick of all looking the same - and different from all the non-chinese students who are dying and restyling their hair at will.
The things that disappeared here were pasta and bottled pasta sauce and for some reason frozen vegetables The pasta is a problem as my autistic granddaughter is very very fussy about what she will eat and what brand it is and we were all hunting to find packets of the right pasta in the stores
Years ago I gave a talk to the NZ Baking Industry Research Trust. The other speaker was a research psychologist who specialised in consumer attitudes and particularly related to food. She said at that time in NZ that there was an approximately even split between people who can cook from recipes and ingredients (approx one third), people for whom cooking is combining packages (e.g. pasta, sauce, frozen vegies and meat, approx one third) and people who couldn't cook at all (approx one third). If the same holds in Oz I imagine that explains why there was such a run on pasta and sauce etc, although I haven't seen it here in my neighbourhood. Since I grew up with cookbooks and cooking from "scratch" I found that absolutely amazing -- it had never occurred to me that cooking was not a universally held skill (although over the years I have known a small number of families where none of the adults cooked "proper" meals -- but there seemed to be a high correlation with a very high degree of tidiness, and as we all know cooking makes a mess.... so I inferred that the mess discouraged cooking).
While I was cooking for 1 I did keep "emergency" meals for me and for when my children made unexpected visits and frozen lasagne and pasta and sauce were always on hand - my mother would have had fits but there was no point in keeping fresh food "in case" and hard to make my meal stretch for 3 or more.
But many do seem to eat out a lot.
We are fine, It wasn't madly impressive in my single story house. My computer screen rattled - I thought it was my daughter's dog banging the desk legs at first, however I should have been impressed it was evidently the strongest recorded Victorian one. There are 3 theories . One that Australia is trying to raise the height of Mt. Everest, or to escape from the Kiwis, or that it is NZ trying to join up with Australia and take-over, - take your pick. My Geologist daughter has a boring scientific theory.
When I was little we had a book called something like the story of the world in pictures and there was this picture of Napier with a big wide split running along a road. I was most impressed
Anne -- I don't know about your earthquake hypotheses. Maybe your geologist daughter has a more prosaic one. Cracks in roads or whatever are always impressive.
The pasta is a problem as my autistic granddaughter is very very fussy about what she will eat and what brand it is and we were all hunting to find packets of the right pasta in the stores 