A MEGA mushroom

Our Hungarian flatmate has been fishing in Hanmer Springs for a few days. In the forest over there he has found a mushroom. Man what a gigantic ball that thing was! It smelled exactly like ordinary mushrooms, but its structure was much softer. Our flatmate gave us half of the mushroom, which we enjoyed tremendously, after we had removed all the little white worms from it :-) Stir-fried it with onions in butter with a creamy pepper sauce on top… great!

BOXING DAY SALE!!!!

Boxing day is a nice day off work for most people. So how to spend that well-earned free time? Go relax shopping!!! As if the Christmas stress built up the weeks before Christmas hasn’t been enough yet, Boxing Day is used for the biggest sale of the year. Almost all stores participate in it, offering discounts of up to 50%, but ONLY TODAY!! So people, by all means spend your nice day off rushing through stores! The more you buy, the more you pay save!

Boxing Day sale is a real workout for the mind as well as for the body. To not miss any deals, you have to visit as many stores as possible as early as possible, because stocks are limited. Heaven forbid some other scumbag may just have taken the last item of the equipment you wanted to get. If you want to make a major purchase you only have a short time to decide, because tomorrow the deal will be gone forever. There’s money enough in the bank to pay for it all too: just before Christmas many people here receive a few extra weeks of salary in advance. The fact that this money is also needed to buy food in January is conveniently being forgotten by many…

Boxing Day received its name because in the early days poor people brought boxes to the doors of the rich to collect the Christmas dinner leftovers. In NZ the name is as applicable today as it was then… on no other day as many boxes are being dragged out of stores as on this day.

Since we are moving into a new house on January 4, we need a fridge and a washing machine anyway. Therefore we happily took part in the shopping frenzy. Boy was it crowded. No parking space in sight (again…). The salesperson-client-ratio was about 1:2, and each and every one of the salespersons asked us if we were being served… sigh :-) Oh well, in the end we scored a pretty good deal, and happy we left the store. Without boxes even, because the stuff will be delivered at our door.

Outrageous deals to be had or not, this was once and never again. The next time we will have a nice and QUIET Boxing Day. We will, won’t we? Well, as long as we don’t miss any good deals, we might… ;-)

Even more job hunting

It is hard to keep hopes up when one company after another turns you down. One company doesn’t want me because I have done too much software to be a hardware guy, the next doesn’t want me because I have done too much hardware to be a software guy. Or they don’t want me because I don’t have enough experience with just that one software package that they are using. Or even though I do have experience exactly with what they want, for example being an IT help desk employee serving 20 people, I don’t have the experience doing the same thing for 100 people (which happens to be the size of their user base). In the unlikely case that I even have passed all technical tests they want, I fail to answer a trick question about my character. And even when I pass that test too, and they really seem to want me, the branch in question suddenly is not allowed to hire new staff anymore for 6 months. Aaaargh!!! The job of looking for a job is not an easy one, as many fellow job hunters probably will confirm :-)

But oh well, in spite of all rejections I have kept on applying for jobs. By applying for jobs you learn a lot about the local companies here, and every job interview is a good learning experience by itself. Apart from that I have started doing some courses, I have time enough on my hands for now :-) Well, that is, the lime left after doing the laundry, the groceries, cooking, filling and emptying the dishwasher, putting the garbage out, in short, playing the h(o)us(e)band. No time to be bored, yet :-)

One of the many job interviews I had was on December 5 for the position of Technical Writer. As a Technical Writer I would be writing installation manuals (you know, those things that are binned as soon as they come in sight). The job description contained talking to software and hardware engineers, translating their technical mumbo jumbo into something that the masses would be able to understand. Since I have been a hardware and software engineer myself I would be able to have a conversation with these guys, a conversation that would even remotely make sense. Having been a helpdesk employee I have learnt to bring complex material in an easy way, and while doing that I found out that I really like that challenge. So the job was something I thought would suit me very well.

The job interview was a lot of fun. I had to comment on an existing manual of theirs, what I would do differently. Well, when it comes to giving comments I am as opinionated as Simon Cow (the head judge of American Idol) himself, so their manual had to endure some comment from me too ;-) All in all they were impressed enough to invite me for a second interview, on Tuesday December 19.

At the second interview I had to take a kind of IQ-test, they presented me with a few cases I would encounter in the real job, they gave me a tour of the factory, and I have met the person I would work close together with. All of that went fine.

It went so fine, that they have offered me a job! December 21 I received the contract in the mail and December 22 – the very last day before the start of summer vacation – I signed it and brought it back. I can start at January 8!! Talking about a nice Christmas present!

The company is called Dynamic Controls. They produce these joystick-thingies used on electric wheelchairs. If before long you see a wheelchair overtaking you on the motorway, it just might have something to do with me working there now ;-)

All joking aside though, I really like it to work for a company that tries to make the life of disabled people a bit easier. It will probably give me more satisfaction than designing the next electronic gizmo. All in all I am a happy camper (and Emma is a happy campess too), so at the last moment we can celebrate a nice and relaxed Christmas!

Down under Santa gets a suntan

For two weeks now I have been playing non-stop every Christmas CD I could lay my hands on, yet the Christmas Spirit cannot really get a hold of me. As a Dutch guy I am used to celebrating Christmas during the wintertime, with dark days, many Christmas lights, hot cocoa and green pea soup. Over here it is mid-summer now. December 21 is the longest day of the year. When I wake up at 6:30 AM the morning hasn’t just broken, it has completely eroded. Going to bed the darkness has fallen for a staggering 15 minutes already. Trying to use Candles and lights to lift up the spirit is therefore just plain ridiculous, you can hardly see if they are lit at all.

Yet all Kiwis give it their best shot. “Winter wonderland” plays on the radio, Christmas trees are everywhere you look and the streets are also filled with Christmas decorations. Santa Claus is walking through the streets, sweating all over the place dressed in his winter suit. It sure looks a bit peculiar for someone who is used to celebrate Christmas during the wintertime.

On top of that Christmas time is the start of summer vacation here. During summer vacation NZ just completely grinds to a halt for two weeks. The week before Christmas is THE week to get all the things done that you could have done weeks earlier but didn’t. Everyone not at work rushes to get to the store for some last minute Christmas shopping (nowhere an empty parking space in sight… almost feels like a Dutch home sweet home), everyone at work rushes to get it all finished before the Christmas deadline. Christmas-stress is a very common disorder among Kiwis. This time of year is called “silly season” over here, and rightly so in my opinion :-)

Anyway, feeling out of season or not, we still want to celebrate Christmas in one way or another. We have cosily decorated the room, and closing the drapes early almost makes you believe it is kinda dark outside. On Christmas eve we will have a nice home-cooked lamb roast, we will attend the carol singing in the Christchurch Cathedral, after which we will visit another carol singing event, which is held in a small park and is being organised by the Salvation Army. On Christmas Day we will drive to Ashburton for the traditional Christmas family visit ;-)

Fun enough to be had. But any Christmas spirit oozing down on us… nah…

Looking for a new home

A single room is nice ‘n cheap, but sharing a house with flatmates… One moment you’re having a great time together, the next you’re wishing you‘d have a house for yourself. So we started looking again.

Once again we drove all around Christchurch to view houses of which either the listed rental price was incorrect, the living room smelled like mould (moisture is a BIG problem with a lot of houses in NZ), the bedrooms were so small we wouldn’t even be able to assemble our queen size bed in there, or the landlord really liked us but still gave the house to someone else. To find a nice house for an affordable price (for now only Emma has a job so we have to be careful with the expenses) isn’t an easy task over here.

At one time Emma spotted a very nice house on the web, on the riverside of the Avon river. First we did a drive-by of the house. Three bedrooms, nice garden, double garage. Very quiet street, and a veranda with river view. All that for only NZ$250 per week, which is pretty cheap here for a house with three bedrooms. The whole day I tried to reach the real estate agent to ask if the house was still available. The lady was hard to reach. Before long I was able to recite her voice mail message by heart. Finally I went to her office in person. There I found out that there already were three applicants for the house. However, we still would be able to apply, after which all applicants would be thrown in a pool and one would be picked. I didn’t think we would have any chance, but oh well, you never know, and it was a great house, so I applied.

Here in NZ, when you put an offer on a rental home, the offer is a binding contract. As long as the offer stands, you can’t make an offer on any other house. Well you can, but if you are accepted for both houses, you have to hire them both as well. The system by itself is logical, however, it becomes very inconvenient for the applicant when the real estate agent takes a long time to decide who gets the house. First all the references of all the applicants had to be checked. Then the landlord had to be sent the results, after which the landlord would have the final say in who should get the house. The landlord was overseas and therefore hard to reach. He didn’t reply to the voice mails and emails that the agent had sent. In the mean time we were seeing a lot of other nice houses being advertised, so the forced waiting time started to get really annoying.

After a week of waiting I had had enough so I called the agent whether I could cancel my bid. The agent told me that because of the long waiting time it had taken already I could cancel, however, it might not be wise to do so because we were at the top of the list! She only had to get the approval of the landlord and the rental agreement would be in the bag. Oh well, in that case, we would be able to endure the wait a bit longer :-)

Two days later she called me... we got the house!!! Yesss!!! Signed the rental contract, and January 5 we will be moving in there. Hopefully we will experience a bit more of the NZ lifestyle over there. Until now the street we have been living on was noisier than the one we lived on in Holland :-) However, a veranda with a view of the river should be able to create a laid back feeling, right?

a picture I made from the driveway

The weather is mental over here

The weather in NZ is described by some as “four seasons in one day”. Well, they are correct. If one day the temperature is 27C/80F, the next it can easily be 11C/52F. Over here it is supposed to be summer in December, but I haven’t seen any of it yet :-)

Then there’s days when the sun is shining but also a cold southerly breeze (straight from Antarctica) is blowing. On those days the sun makes you sweat and the wind makes you shiver at the same time. Sweater on, sweater off. Sweater on, jacket on, jacket and sweater off, etc. etc. etc. I suppose we’ll get used to it eventually, we regularly see Kiwis walking about in shorts and tees when the temperature is just 11C/52F, without them showing any sign of being cold.

The weather forecast here is a complete show with a computer animated flyby of the country. However, the value of all this is purely for entertainment purposes, because the actual forecast is never to be trusted. NZ being an elongated island with a mountain range in the middle of an ocean makes it virtually impossible to accurately predict the weather. There is a chance that the weather forecast is correct, but there’s just as much chance that the weather will be completely different. Today, for example, it was supposed to rain the whole day with a temperature of 13C/56F. This morning there was a small shower. The rest of the day was pretty nice: partly cloudy with a temperature of 20C/68F. I’m not complaining. Not today, at least :-)

The Santa Parade

At the exit of Christmas In The Park we were given a flyer with an overview of upcoming events, called “be there”. Showing up on these events is good for our integration, because that way we learn what’s going on over here. On 3 December the Santa Parade was going to take place. The Santa parade was supposed to be “without doubt the biggest and most successful annual event of the NZ South Island – BE THERE!!!”. Well, that ad surely looked promising, so we went and had a look.

OK, if this is the biggest annual event, I wonder what the other events are like. The Santa Parade was a kind of carnival parade. However, without much music, without confetti and with a parade of many laaaarge gaps, a few big and many tiny carts that were mainly rolling advertisements for the local social clubs. All in all the parade was scheduled to last for 1.5 hours, but after 20 minutes we had enough… booooooring!!! We prefer Christmas in the park by miles, much more fun!

This photo is not mine (didn’t have a camera with me), it was taken by Philip Pearson in 2004. It represents pretty well what we have seen though.