ANZAC day

On 25 April 1915 (during WWI), an Australia New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed in Gallipolli, Turkey. They were planning to defeat the Turks. However, the ANZACs had bitten off more than they could chew, because the Turks turned out to be quite a bit stronger than they had expected. After a year of struggle that got them nowhere (literally) and a tremendous loss of lives on both sides, the ANZACs withdrew.

Even though the whole exercise was a military fiasco for Australia and NZ, this battle has become a symbol of the devotion and the sacrifices that their troops have made for their country. To commemorate this, NZ and Australia celebrate ANZAC day on the day the troops landed in Gallipolli.

ANZAC day has become a national bank holiday in NZ on which not only WWI is remembered but also all other wars NZ has fought in (for example, NZ also fought in Vietnam alongside the Americans). Throughout the country wreaths are laid on war memorials, and in Christchurch too of course.

However, you have to be an early bird if you want to attend these services. The dawn-services are held at 6:00 AM!! That is the time at which the soldiers landed ashore back then. Apart from it being the landing time, it has a nice symbolic meaning too: during the service the sun comes up, and even as life goes on in a fresh day, we will continue to remember them, we will not forget. So even though the time is inconveniently early, it makes it all pretty special. As part of our self-inflicted integration we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:00 AM.

In Christchurch the service started with a dawn parade of veterans at 6:00 AM near Cathedral Square. The veterans marched towards the Square, where the commemorative ceremony started at 6:30. We had taken a position where we had a nice view of the start of the parade. In hindsight that was a bad choice. The start of the parade was two streets away from Cathedral Square. When we finally were able to walk to the Square ourselves (following the parade), it already had filled up completely. The organisers clearly hadn't expected this number of people to attend (8000), because the tiny sound system that they had set up only served the people in the centre of the square! As a result we just stood there for 45 minutes, not seeing anything, listening to some far away incomprehensible mumbling and some far away background music. Right…

Oh well, we have successfully completed our integration task today… time to go back to bed! :-)

How to buy a house in NZ

Emma and I want to try to buy a house here in the not too distant future, but buying a house is not really a trivial thing to do. House prizes are soaring and with an interest rate of about 9% you need to spend a huge sum of money to buy a house. In spite of the prizes being very steep already, they are on the rise pretty quickly too so buying as early as possible seems a wise thing to do.

However, before forking out the largest sum of money we will ever spend it might be handy to know what buying a house exactly comprises. Therefore, even though we already had visited quite a few "open homes" (a half hour in which everyone who wants to see a particular house for sale can come and take a look without the owner present), we did not bid on any of them yet.

Then we heard on our favourite radio station, the Breeze, that a free home ownership education course was going to be held. During the course, which would last a whole Saturday, there would be lectures given by a lawyer, a real estate agent, a budget advisor, a mortgage broker, a bank account manager and a building inspector. All for free! That sounded pretty appealing, so we subscribed.

At the beginning of the course we were handed over a thick reference folder, after which the lectures started. All the professionals held their lectures for free, however, they of course hope to gain your business that way. I didn't mind that though, this remains a free country so we will choose whomever we want when we come to it, not just the lecturers :-)

It was very interesting to listen to all these different kind of real estate professionals; they really gave us some good food for thought. Funny enough, they sometimes didn't agree on the same subjects. The lawyer warned us for tricky real estate agents, the real estate agent told us that we could use him to easily arrange a lawyer and a building inspector, the mortgage broker told us that we really should NOT use the lawyer whom the real estate agent had arranged because they might have their own combined agenda, and then the bank account manager added that mortgage brokers are not to be trusted anyway. The pictures of the building inspector added a lot of drama too… don’t you dare to buy a house without a building inspection because it will fall apart as soon as you move in.

Oh well, the day was very interesting nevertheless. A lawyer and a building inspector are not the cheapest people to hire, however, compared to the amount of money you spend on a house the cost is trivial, and money well spent if it guarantees you are not buying a lemon. The way everything was presented was never pushy; everybody was encouraged to make up his or her own mind concerning the worth of everything that was said. All in all we have learnt a lot, and it was enjoyable too.

This course is being held regularly, and I can recommend it to every migrant who wants to buy a house in NZ. In my opinion it is almost a mandatory course if you are planning on buying your first house here. And to top it all off: the course is free!! Talk about value for money :-) If you are interested in going to a course like this too, just drop me a mail so I can give you the address (which for spam reasons etc. I am not posting here).

The blow holes

Saturday afternoon we left the Arthur's pass behind us and we drove to the South Island's West Coast. The distance from there to the east coast is as the crow flies roughly just 110km/75mi, but the landscape is about as different as it gets. The reason behind this difference is the mountain range that stands between the two coasts. The wind, which like in most places usually comes from the west, crashes the clouds that come with it into the mountains and pours the rain out over them. As a result it rains a lot on the west coast (at some places up to a whopping 7 METERS per year). Most of the clouds will be empty before they can even reach the east coast, so at just a short distance from all this rain is an area that regularly suffers a draught. The vegetation is also completely different, as at the east coast there are a lot of plants that need very little water, whereas on the West coast there is a real rainforest.

Between that rainforest and the sea lies the tiny village where we have slept: Punakaiki. The village, which houses a few hundred souls, probably wouldn't even be on the map if it weren't for one of the most well-known tourist attractions of all the South Island being located near it: the pancake rocks with the blowholes. The pancake rocks are very funny layered rocks. Blowholes are small tunnels that are open to the sea on one end, and open to the sky on the other. Every time a wave comes in, the pressure builds up and the water squirts out on the topside.

However, for this to work there have to be waves at all :-) When we visited the blowholes it was high tide (that's when they work best), but the weather was very fine too and the sea was very calm. This resulted in a very unsatisfactory blow job; see on the photo the result of a half hour wait. Looking at my NZ photo site you can see what the blowholes can do when the weather is good (which in this case means: the weather is bad ;-)

We slept in Punakaiki Saturday night. The next day we visited a small cave there in which we spotted exactly one glowworm :-), after that we drove back to Christchurch via the beautiful Lewis pass. An Easter weekend well spent!

Meet the Kea

Friday night we stayed near Arthur's pass, the highest and most beautiful pass of NZ, especially when there's snow on the mountains. No snow present yet though. It is only late autumn, and still a bit too early for snow. The weather was a bit drizzly, but nevertheless it looked pretty nice with low cloud creeping up the mountains. Saturday morning we hiked up to a waterfall, via a wooden stairway that just never seemed to end (it wasn't even that far up, we are just a pack of wusses). At least our fitness exercise for that morning was completed in full :-) The waterfall itself was really beautiful, we could just see the top before the low cloud took over.

The Arthur's pass is the home of NZ's own parrot species called the Kea. The Kea is a super intelligent bird (video). That in itself is pretty funny, but it can be pretty annoying too. They are so curious, that they like to take things apart to see how they are put together. For some reason they especially like rubber, and whaddaya know, rubber is abundantly present on cars!

The NZ Department Of Conservation (or DOC for short) is warning people to take the rubber off their cars, yes even to take out the rubber of their car's sunroof. I thought that advice to be a bit over the top, until I saw the Kea at work myself (luckily they had chosen to work on another car than ours ;-). They really demolish your car as you are standing by watching. They try to tear the rubber off, if you're really lucky they snap off your windscreen wipers or they cut open your tyres. Legitimate feelings of rage are suppressed by the cuteness of these birdies so you just let them be.

The whole exercise was an instructive experience though: we will never ever book a night in the village of Arthur's pass itself, because the mania for destruction that these birds display, no car can withstand… :-)

Starting to feel at home

Since most working people in NZ only have 15 days off, virtually no long weekend passes by without the average Kiwi packing his bags and going sightseeing. Fortunately long weekends are abundant here in NZ, for example Good Friday is a bank holiday too (in Holland it is just another working day with a funny name), so the Easter weekend always lasts four days. Those extra free days can be put to good use without having to drive for ages... The advantage of living in NZ is that you can go on vacation to NZ without leaving the country :-)

I think we ourselves will use this Easter weekend to go sightseeing too, because apart from a few day trips (all well documented on this web log) and family visits to Ashburton we didn't really yet make much use of the privilege of living in this beautiful country. We have been busy looking for houses, for jobs, working, doing the groceries, eating, sleeping, etc. Both of us working full-time (Emma even for 42.5 hours a week) there's not that much of free time left. I even asked myself at one stage if life here really was that much different from Holland, and if we really were happier here. In Holland we were pretty happy as it was, and we were living in a nice quiet and green street.

The NZ-penny is starting to drop though. Emma has a blast at work and I myself am starting to enjoy myself too. The stress of looking for a job has started to fade away and the next few months we can just relax and enjoy ourselves here in our rented house near the river. Christchurch itself is growing on us and it is starting to become our home.

As everything is slowly falling into place now, we can allow ourselves to go on a long weekend too. We will be going to the west coast, Emma hasn't been there yet, and for me it has been 10 years ago. So we will have lots of fun I think. Let's hope it doesn't rain all the time, because the west coast is famous for its wet weather :-)