House trip

Last Saturday we went for a hike with our Japanese flat mate in the Rakaia Gorge. We had been walking over there before, but this time we went for a hike along the rim. Beautiful! According to a hiking guide this should have been an easy walk of three hours tops. Well, we were able to do the hike without problems, but it’s not what I’d call easy. Especially when taking the wrong turns ;-) A few parts of the track were pretty steep. A slip of the feet would land you 15 meter (50 feet) further down, if you’d be lucky. Halfway the track we encountered a snapped tree laying on it. We had to climb over the tree to continue the track. Not very easy… Anyway, we survived :-)

We enjoyed magnificent views along the way, and we had lunch in a small meadow with a great view of Mount Hutt. I bet we will return to that meadow one day just to read a book or something. Could you imagine anything more relaxing? After about 5 hours we returned to the car, tired yet refreshed.

By the way, take a good look at Emma’s small hat, because these are the last photos ever to be taken of that hat…

The container has arrived!

The ship that is carrying our furniture has finally arrived at the port of Christchurch after a journey of two months. I will surely be glad to be able to lay my hands on our own desktop computer again. Our 300 MHz laptop can be switched on, but that’s all there is to say about the thing. It takes a whopping 8 minutes to start it up – I kid you not. Oh well, a slow laptop is better than no computer at all, and we have gratefully used it for the past two months, to maintain this blog, for example :-)

The price we paid to the mover company was all-in, except for port charges (harbour costs). Just to lift the container off the ship the harbour wants to receive a staggering NZ$455!!! What a rip-off! Oh well, just one more migration bill to pay of many, I guess. Not that we have any choice, if we ever want to see our stuff again :-)

The contents of the container still have to be checked by the MAF. The MAF is the department of NZ customs that has to prevent all kinds of seeds, animals and creepy diseases to enter the country. NZ is an island and therefore the native animals and plants here are very specialised. In the past imported plants and animals have wreaked havoc inside NZ because they were doing so well that they were (and still are) suppressing the native wildlife. NZ also doesn’t have any deadly species like snakes and tarantulas and they’d like to keep it that way :-) Emma and me have obeyed all import rules stated on the web site of the MAF so I don’t expect any problems to arise.

Since we don’t have a house with storage room here in NZ yet, the container will go to my father in Ashburton. Before that happens it will take a few more days though, as the container first has to be sent to the moving company in Christchurch, which in turn will make an appointment with the MAF to check out the stuff. Only after all the paperwork and the checking is finished will the container be at our disposal. We’ll have to wait and see…

Akaroa

For part two of the framework of on-the-road-together we went to Akaroa last Thursday. Akaroa is a peninsula with a beautiful harbour bay at an hour’s drive from Christchurch. That is to say, an hour’s drive when you take the shortest route. When you take the tourist detour (and of course, I dragged Emma into doing the detour again) it is about two hours. If on top of that you stop all the time to take pictures – like I do - it takes about three hours in total.

Akaroa is the only town in NZ where the French have tried to establish a settlement with the intent to gradually colonize the rest of NZ. They were a bit too late for that though, since the Maori people (the original inhabitants of NZ) just had sold the whole shebang to the English. So that was a typical case of merci, mais ne pas merci (thanks but no thanks). A handful of French settlers who had already settled down there were allowed to stay in Akaroa. The street names and local family names are the only remaining evidence of that (rue is French for street). In spite of all efforts made by the local tourist information to make you believe Akaroa is French to the bone, I didn’t really notice anything else being French about the town :-)

Oh well, we didn’t come for the French anyway; we came to Akaroa for the stunning landscape, which is abundantly present there. We took a hike, wandered around, made some more pictures, fed sparrows, ate ice cream, in a word: we enjoyed ourselves!

The best deal of the year

Sales still are pretty hot over here, especially in Ashburton. For some time we had been looking for a mobile phone for Emma. She had left hers in NL. A few years ago it still was a bit poshy walking around with a mobile, now it has become such an essential part of our lives that each of us should have at least one. Therefore we already had been looking for a while.

In NL cheap mobiles usually come with a pre paid provider membership that lasts for at least a year. The cell phones are locked electronically so you can only use the SIM card you have bought it with. After one year the provider can unlock it for you, for a fee of something like NZ$30. Here in NZ cheap mobiles are sold without any membership at all, so you can use the phone any way you like! A pretty appealing concept IMO.

In Christchurch we already had spotted a Nokia for NZ$70 and a Motorola for $90 (both with black and white display). On top of that we would have to buy a SIM card for $35, totalling the cheapest deal at $105.

In the framework of our on-the-road-together experience we went to Ashburton for a family visit last Tuesday, and in the framework of “they do know how to discount in Ashburton” we went looking for mobiles too.

At one store a Panasonic with on-board camera was on sale from NZ$200 for NZ$75. The mobile came without SIM card, so $35 would have to be added, totalling the amount to NZ$110. Not a bad deal for a mobile with colour display and a camera built-in. However, even though Emma does want to have bells and whistles with her mobile, she does not need a camera. So we went to another store to look a bit further.

A nice Sony Ericsson mobile with colour screen was on sale from $200 for $100, including SIM card. That was cheaper than the other phone. When the store clerk took the box out of the showcase I spotted a sticker on the back of the box. The sticker said $60. That probably was a mistake, but the sticker was unmistakably there. Here in NZ they don’t argue about that sort of things, they just sell you the goods for the lowest price on the box.

For NZ$60 we now have a mobile with SIM card and $15 balance on top. When deducting the $35 of the SIM card that leaves a total of $25 as the price for the mobile. Not bad. Not bad at all…

It is even possible to speak your own ring tone into the thing. Which I already have done for Emma… “I am here. I am here. I am here. Are you there?” :-)

A bit chilly

Cold cold cold cold cold!!!!! We do not seem to be able to get used to the NZ building style. In NL, almost every house has insulated double brick walls, double glazing and central heating. Here, almost every house has a wooden frame with thin walls attached to them, very thin insulation (if any) and single glazing. No central heating either, because gas is not available here. Just an electric heater here and there. The single electric heater in our student room is attached to a timer of 15 minutes, after which it shuts off automatically. When the temperature outside equals 13 degrees Celsius (which it did yesterday, and today as well), the temperature inside is not much higher. To think that we didn’t even had to go through winter here yet… I know, we are wusses like you wouldn’t believe, but it surely needs a big portion of adaptation for us. Maybe next year we will be hardened. Well, if we don’t hop into bed with the electric blanket on all the time, that is…

Today there’s a bank holiday called Labour day. The whole country has a day off, except the store personnel. On radio and TV we are swamped with ads that today of all days there are fantastic discounts, so don’t hesitate to spend your well-earned free day rushing through stores. Maybe we will, our electric blanket couldn’t stand the cold anymore so it broke yesterday evening. By the way, did you know that when a bank holiday would be on a weekend day that it gets shifted to the next Monday? Never again Christmas on Saturday and Sunday, because the days off will just be shifted to Monday and Tuesday! Nice eh! (In Holland you just lose the days off when bank holidays are in the weekend)

We keep on discovering culinary oddities over here. Crumbed chicken schnitzel made from chicken thigh (never seen that in Holland before, there they are always made with chicken breast fillet)??? It looked nice anyway, so we tried it. Normally we fry chicken schnitzel in a non-stick pan without any fat, to keep the calories down. After some time in the pan loads of fat started dripping from the schnitzels. Where did that come from??? As we discovered during dinner, the skin hadn’t been removed, it had been crumbed so it didn’t become crispy but stayed very gooey. Cutting fat off meat isn’t really a widespread habit here :-)

Emma has got a job!

One moment no one seems to want you, the next one they are standing in line...

Emma had applied for a job with a financial trust management company. The job would be for 8 months. The job itself was a kind of financial customer support. She had also applied for another 12-month job with a fire prevention company, as a kind of office manager. You might say a job where she will be the one who everyone may bother when they have a problem, just like I do her at home...

Wednesday 4:05 PM one company calls her she can have the job. She barely has hung up the phone when the other company calls her that she can have their job too. What to do??? Both salaries were identical, so she really had to decide which job she would like best. So she slept on that for a night. Or rather, she laid awake on that for a night :-)

In the end she has chosen for the job with the fire prevention company. The job seemed to be a bit more hectic, and the team completely crazy, which means that she will fit in perfectly ;-) She starts 30 October. Next week we will go on the road together, as it will probably be some time before we can do that again after Emma has started with her job.

It is pretty nice that finally some money is going to flow into our bank account, instead of out of it. Living off our savings didn’t really feel relaxed. Myself, I am currently in the running for six different job applications, of which one would really fit me very well. We’ll just have to wait how that turns out. Hopefully everything will be clear before mid December, because from mid December to mid January NZ is shut down completely… “silly season” as they call it here.

Vely tastely, sil!

Sunday night. We didn’t feel like cooking so we went out looking for a cosy restaurant in which our appetite could be satisfied in a not too expensive way. We ended up at the doorstep of restaurant Denny’s, of which you could compare the meals to a Dutch motorway restaurant. However, I was not really in the mood for steak and fries, so we extended our search a bit further.

Across the street there was a restaurant called “Restaurant Oriental”. It looked like they served a Chinese buffet. We tried to extract from a Chinese waiter what exactly the buffet consisted of and how much money it would cost us. We couldn’t understand a word he was saying, his English really was very very poor. The only thing we learnt was that it would cost about NZ$ 19 each.

The restaurant looked everything but cosy, more like a workplace cafeteria. But oh well, it did smell nice and an appetite for Chinese buffet started to grow. In the restaurant itself there were heaps of Chinese people enjoying a meal, so this had to be something good. Emma wasn’t too sure, but I found it rather interesting to eat where the Chinese themselves eat, so we sat down and ordered buffet for two.

The waiter asked us how we wanted our “won”. Our what? The… eeer… the... the “won”. Oh… right. It soon became clear to us that there was some kind of communication problem arising. The waiter saw the problem too so he dragged an eating Chinese man away from his dinner table to translate for us. The English of the other man wasn’t that good either, but he did manage to tell us that a pan would be put on the table in which we could prepare our own food. He asked us which sauce we wanted, Normal or Chili. He suggested that we would take the normal sauce, because the Chili would be much too hot for us. I wondered why it wouldn’t be possible to place two bottles with sauce on the table so I asked him “both?” Yes, that would be possible too. Good.

Well, our won came and it wasn’t exactly what I had expected. It turned out not to be a Wok. It was a filthy small gas burner with a pan on top. The pan was split into two sides. On one side there was milky water (Normal), on the other side there was red fatty water (Chili). Rigggghhhhtttt…. When we walked over to the counter to get our raw food, we weren’t exactly thrilled by what we saw. Or maybe we were. Everything you would consider butchery waste was neatly put into little containers. How about a piece of lung? Or little rubber balls that tasted like fish? Luckily there was something we did like somewhat: a bowl with deep fried chicken wings. Our evening out had become KFC-night with budget cola. Pretty interesting indeed, but not very funny or tasty. Now you know what Emma has to put up with just by being my wife. Oh well… never a dull moment ;-)

So what did we learn today: if a restaurant is filled with Chinese people only, run away as fast as you can !

Welcome to the big city

Well… there we are, in our new room, next to a busy street in a crowded city. VROOOAAAA.... Bam bam bam bam… another beat box comes racing past. Someone tell me why again did we come to NZ? Or house in Holland was situated considerably more quiet than this one. Oh well, this will not be the end destination of our journey to NZ… we hope :-)

The room by itself wasn’t that bad, though. In the room there were already standing a bed, a couch, a table and a TV. Of course, in Emma’s opinion they were totally in the wrong place, so we started to re-arrange them all. I must say that the result indeed is an improvement, and the room looks pretty nice now, actually. Our flatmates, a Japanese girl and a Korean girl, are very nice people as well, and we are starting to make good contact with them.

The only thing we really have to get used to is having just one room for the two of us. With sleeping hours as different as Emma’s and mine, that can be really inconvenient. The one who is trying to sleep is being disturbed all the time, and the one who is awake cannot do what he wants to do because someone else is sleeping in the same room. So we are going to have to come up with a creative solution to that.

A first week in a new city is filled up mostly by checking out the place, and finding out at what times the shops are open. There is not a law here that regulates the times shops can be open, therefore they can be open whenever they want. And so they are. While one shop closes at 4:30 PM, another closes at 8 PM, and some of them are even open 24/7. However, we also already at 4:45 PM have stood on the doorstep of a closed MEGA store, of which you would think it would close pretty late. I can really not discover any logic in the times shops are open here, but on the other hand that makes it fun too… never a dull moment :-)

Due to all the turmoil one would almost forget we still are looking for a job as well. Emma already had had two more interviews (Monday they will call her back), I however am having considerably more trouble getting businesses to be interested in me. It is eating away my motivation a bit, however most of the jobs are not even advertised, you need a social network to be aware of outstanding vacancies. A good social network is therefore essential, and that is exactly the reason why we are now living here in Christchurch.

All in all there hasn’t been much time for the laid-back lifestyle of NZ, although on our wedding anniversary we did have a nice walk in a forest outside of ChCh, after which we drove around a bit having a very nice view of the snow-capped mountains. All this just a 15 minutes drive away from our room. Oh and to top it all off, the library is free here! For Emma, who devours books for a hobby, heaven really has become a place on earth now. So for the time being we are really enjoying ourselves here!

We've got a house room!

Last Monday we went to ChCh again and while we were looking for houses we came across a very nice one. In order to be eligible for the house, we had to make a rental offer on it. A rental offer is binding, and as a result you cannot make any other offer on another house when the offer is made, because if both landlords take your offer, you have to rent both houses.

At 11:00 AM we made the offer. There was one other lady who would make an offer as well. At first, she would make the offer early in the afternoon. Then she would make it late in the afternoon. Then it would be delayed until 1:00 PM the next day. 1:05 PM the next day we received a call that the other lady did get the house. That was a major disappointment. Mostly because we more or less had expected that we would get the house, but also because the landlord obviously had preferred the other lady to begin with, and it had cost us a whole day waiting for that call.

After we had recovered from the disappointment we reconsidered whether we would want a house to start out with, or maybe just one room instead. The stuff that’s in the container on its way here can be stored in my father’s garage for some time to come, so we don’t necessarily have to have a house to put it all in when the container arrives. A room would be cheaper of course, and rental houses usually have a minimum rental term of six months. That is pretty long since we don’t even know yet where we are going to end up having a job etc. A room to start out with suddenly didn’t appear as such a bad choice after all. We looked in the news paper ads for rooms to let, and Wednesday we went to ChCh once again to look at some of them.

Outside the first room the fag ends were laying on the doorstep, so we passed on that one :-) The second room was not that nice, but the third one was pretty neat.

The room was in a house with a maximum of 4 flat mates. The kitchen and the bathrooms were cleaned by a cleaning lady twice a week, so we wouldn’t have to do that, oh luxury :-) NZ$ 200 per week, including energy and telephone! We liked the concept, so we went for that one. Tomorrow (October 5) we are moving in there already! Hopefully we will make good contact with our flat mates, our first integration into NZ society :-)

The house can be seen pretty nicely from the air using Google Earth. In the picture on the left hand side I have coloured the roof of our house red. In the next post more pictures from the ground :-)

House hunting

The interview with Designline was very positive. They would have liked to hire me, if they would have had any work for me to do :-) So that job offer went south. I also had another interview in Christchurch, however that too didn’t get me to the next step. We are starting to get pretty fed up with driving from Ashburton to Christchurch all the time, so we have begun to spend some more time looking for houses there.

Last Friday we went to Simes, a real estate rental company. Of course we again had to fill out an extensive form before they would even talk to us, but after that they gave us a list with all their rental properties. The rest of the day we have spent touring Christchurch to look at the houses from the outside (a so-called drive-by). They gave us the keys from one of the houses, so we could check that one out on the inside too.

Most of the houses here have pretty small bedrooms compared to Holland, a bit like the houses built in th 40’s. That is a bit of a concern, particularly because a container full of furniture is currently making its way towards ChCh. No idea where we have to put all that... oh well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

In contrast with the houses in Holland, which normally are rented completely bare, houses in NZ are rented out with carpets and curtains fitted. When you are lucky these have been put in place recently. The house we went inside to look however, was so unbelievably dirty that we didn’t even dare to touch anything. The standard Dutch student house would be called “very clean” compared to that house. And that is something that doesn’t show up in the agent’s pictures :-) Oh well, we also saw a few houses that were very clean, so it wasn’t all like this one house.

The rent has to be paid per week; not per month. A unit with two small bedrooms is about NZ$220 per week, 3 small bedrooms will cost you about NZ$290 per week. As we still have no income, and as this house will be a temporary solution anyway, I think we will opt for two bedrooms.

After a full day cruising through ChCh we developed a pretty clear picture of the houses we wanted to investigate further. So the next day (Saturday) we once more spent an hour and a half driving to the rental shop to get the keys of the four houses we wanted to see on the inside. Well... two of the four houses they already had rented out the day before. For the other two they had to make an appointment with the owner to organise a viewing. While waiting for the appointment call we went driving to ChCh again, looking at yet more houses. When later in the afternoon the rent shop had finally contacted the owners of the houses we wanted to see, it turned out that the owners already had rented out the houses by themselves, without notifying the rent shop first. You could say the whole exercise of driving through ChCh the past day had been in vain. We had learned the hard way that agreements are not worth a lot over here in NZ. Oh well, that is Kiwi Land, too.

In the mean time we have become interested in a few other houses, so that’s something for Monday to do. Hopefully the title of our next post here will be “We’ve got a house!”