I didn’t get much of an impression of Queenstown until I took a day off from snowboarding. The town is full of tourist shops (lots of jetboating, bungy, trekking and snow stores as well as restaurants etc) and even more full of tourists, so I set off along the hill above town and saw that it butted right up against Lake Wakatipu in a way reminiscent of Geneva, though I recall more breathing room between the buildings and the water in Switzerland. The surrounding mountains also matched that part of Europe, though the mottled hillsides closer in were more like those of Scotland.
When I started taking more notice of the houses, I was struck by the chalet-style of most. Even walking away from town for 20 minutes, the buildings were predominantly cute, closed-in, A-frames with small balconies, but a closer look revealed that they were also mostly hotels. Where do the locals live? Perhaps closer to the airport at Frankton.