Kiwi life is now settling down for me, as in I sleep, eat and drink to the times down here now. I know that after 4 months you would have expected me to have lost the jet lag and be operating all kiwi, but it honestly does take a while for the 33 years of habits to subside. I now have a good understanding of the value of things here, for example the set of domino's I purchased today for NZ$2.50 were a bit of a bargain, and the NZ$860,000 house Caroline looked at yesterday was less so.
Again I apologise for the lack of regular updates on here, and again I thank the regulars for keeping with it and prompting when their hunger for information becomes too great - oh, by the way, good luck with the new job Daf ;) I am sure you will pick it up pretty quick - hopefully the guy doing the introduction will have a working login!
So what have I been upto since 18th Jan? Well the first thing of note is that the sun has been shining pretty much everyday so far, and even the wind has been a mere breeze at times. I still do not have any sunglasses out here and I think the UV is starting to have an affect on me now...sore eyes at the end of some days...mmm I really must invest in some soon.
Talking about investments, I guess one thing that has been taking up time has been house viewing - so far for Caroline priced properties, but today I had a good scan for Kev could buy ones and found a few on paper. But I will tell you about the Caroline ones as they are much more impressive!
The current area of interest is now Seatoun which is a delightful little area to the east of the main city bay, overlooking the opposite side of the harbour ( which is incidentally one of the largest natural ones anywhere, I think, and could in theory hold the Worlds entire naval fleets and still have room...source on this was some map book, so it may not withstand a google). Anyway, two notable things about Seatoun are, it was the home of the Chocolate Fish Cafe (and soon will be again we hear), and PJ lives there. Oh, sorry, of course you non-Seatoun types call him Peter Jackson - but hey, when in Rome ;)
Yes, Mr Jackson has bought several homes in one area of Seatoun and pretty much all of the others are either rented or being pestered by agents for rental to the stars of his various films. It seems they like the views and access to watersports that Seatoun offers. Caroline is now having day dreams about 'bumping into Vig, Liv or Orlando' down the local Dairy one day, being invited to some fancy party, and then having a fling with someone connected to the film industry! Now, I know the guy from the local DVD shop is single, but she can do better!
So apart from name dropping, Seatounites do not seem to do much else other than stare at the view they possibly paid well over the odds for, or bemoan the cable car they need to use to reach their castle in the sky - on one journey up one of these things, our estate agent remarked "That house we just passed is home to Peter Jackson's pilot'. I am not sure where the 'my neighbour is PJ's pilot' line gets you in terms of minor celebrity, but I suspect it is not high.
Still she has yet to make on offer on one of the two possible homes - but there is a 3rd viewing of one tomorrow which Charlotte and I will be coming along to as well.
I have still not 100% decided on what I am doing with my UK property. The rumour mill has been going well about market crashes and £30k falls in the UK, but I checked the various property web sites a minute ago and all show Coggeshall as being more expensive than when I last saw it, but I guess there were less on the market overall so maybe people are holding fire. One thing about the £100k a bedroom market back there is that if I do sell up and convert it to NZ$'s, there is really no going back for a while and even then some sort of cash flow injection would be needed to buy in the same area.
The only reason I would sell up is to be able to purchase out here once I have started a good job. Prospects on that front have picked up significantly since last week, and I have two confirmed interviews this week, and by the end of it I will have another 5 or 6 suitable applications on the go two (1 at the moment).
To keep track I may put them all on a sidebar, but I would have to use code as some Kiwi's have this web site and this place is a very small town rather than capital city when it comes to 'he said, she said' stuff! For example yesterday in a random downtown, bank paying the rent, the teller remarked how she knew our land lady...she then went on to show Caroline her right foot as on Saturday a boy had dropped a rock on it down the beach...I think the advice in the end was 'visit your surgery or GP', yep, technically she is still unable to practice over here as her paper work is still missing some bits!
To finish up I wanted to include some footage of a nice little 'Wellington Kiwi' thing that goes on here, but as I have yet to record it I will just describe it instead.
If you have been to Wellington you will know that it is basically spread around a large natural harbour, and when the ground is more than 15 feet away from this it starts to get vertical - the exception being the CBD which is flat but built on land that was not actually there prior to an earthquake in the late 1800's ('55 I think) - anyway, they like to build roads here with pretty steep gradients. In fact I guess it was a innovative cost saving that Wellington city council does not put up the '1 in x' type road signs, as not only will this frighten away people, they would also need a bloody lot of em!
Telford Terrace and its start in Hay street, for example, where I live, was once the opening section of the World Mountain Running race! As you can imagine they look for steep places to run, and in 2005 they picked the three hills I affectionately call 'hell', 'bastard' and 'call me an ambulance' each time I stagger up them. Even the rental car is down to 1st or a struggling 2nd on the last bits. I will take some photo's tomorrow and post them here - but essentially you can almost hold you hand out in front of you whilst standing on them and touch the road ahead of you!
Anyway, Telford Terrace actually leads you up the start of the 391m Mount Victoria and a little further west of here where the main roads approach it - a modicum of good sense prevailed back in the early 1900's, so they built a tunnel through it instead of going over! In fact it was one of the first road tunnels in New Zealand which is predictable really as the motor car had only been around for a dozen or so years before they dug it, and building a road tunnel without cars being invented is too silly, even on this side of the World!
Now, thanks for sticking with me to this point, for here is the interesting and
I think charming thing about Wellington Kiwi's - they bib! Now, not just at pesky other drivers or stray pedestrians, no, they bib in Mount Vic tunnel!Bib you say? Yes, bib, blow their horn and in some cases knock out a little tune! When do they do this? Every time they go through the tunnel! Yes, without fail so far day or night, every time I have driven through the tunnel someone bibs! Once one starts then there is an almost animal mating response, with the rest of the drivers joining in - those entering the tunnel continue it and in then end the echo becomes quite impressive!
You can walk through the tunnel, and it was this I planned to do and film for you - just to prove that it is not me that starts off the bibbing! (however those that have driven with me in the UK will know I have a passion for bibbing my car or more often, bike, horn in echo places...and turning around on other peoples drive ways when I get lost...both of which I continue down here).
I have asked several people why they bib in the tunnel, but the strange thing is that no-one actually claims to know. I would like to think that they are bibbing due to the natural friendliness of Kiwi's and there desire to have fun in mundane situations...but it could also be that whilst building the tunnel a young worker brutally attempted to kill, and then buried alive his pregnant girlfriend! He was caught and hung for his crime, but maybe it is nice to know that people remember the girl (whose name escapes me at the min, sorry) by bibbing each time they traverse the spot near her early grave....but when I mention this story I have so far got blank responses, so lets just stick with the friends thing!
Well it is getting late here and early there so I will click the old 'Publish Post' button now and take my sleep. I have a busy day of job applications and house viewing tomorrow but maybe I can walk a bit of the tunnel to! Until the next time, have fun and stay warm I guess!