Christmas Trees and Coppertone

Happy New Year! I can't believe it is already 2011 and I have been living in New Zealand for 11 months. It seems like yesterday that we were trying to decide whether to make the big move.

Well... Christmas in the summer was a different experience but it was still Christmas. Rather than some of the shortest days in the year, we were having the longest days of the year and temperatures were in the 20s rather than -20s. This means we were less inclined to eat heavy, hearty meals, and we saved money on electricity by not having the Christmas tree lights on all the time and by not putting up any outdoor Christmas lights (not much point since you can only turn them on after 9 pm). The commercial aspects of the holiday are not as in your face down here and overall, the holiday takes a bit more relaxed tone than it did in Canada. Despite these differences, we put up our tree, watched a few Christmas movies, made Christmas cookies and quick chip squares and of course Santa knew we had moved, so it still felt like Christmas, except we definitely missed being with our family and friends.

Christmas morning started as it normally would, waking up early to see what Santa brought. However, the sun was up almost as early as Ted (and stayed out all day to make a great summer day). After opening our presents, and catching up with some of our family on Skype, we went to a collegue's house from my work, and enjoyed a Kiwi Christmas brunch in their backyard. We had cold ham, quiche, baked goods and fresh fruit, oh yeah and beer and champagne. After brunch we headed out on our bikes, Santa had brought Ted a big downhill bike that of course had to be test driven off a few jumps. After that we partook in another Kiwi tradition and went to the beach, we even managed to go swimming. To top the day off we had "Shrimps on the Barbie" along with steak and a few veggies and garlic bread, not quite the turkey feast with all the trimmings; but we didn't have the stomach ache either.

So... all in all a pretty good Christmas Day (other than missing our family that is).

The day after Christmas Ted flew to Christchurch to start the journey to Antarctica. He flew to the ultimate down under the following day and has spent over a week now at McMurdo station in Antarctica, waiting to head to a temporary field camp near the trans Antarctic mountains. He is hopefully heading into the field camp as I write. I won't give away anymore details as I am sure he will tell a better story when he gets back at the end of January.

For New Years I headed to Rotorua with some of our friends to mountain bike. Rotorua truly stinks, it smells like Sulphur due to the number of hot spots in the area, which also means there are lots of hot springs. We spent most of the three days riding our bikes which was awesome. The trails were great, passing amongst huge pine trees and cool fern trees. There was even a shuttle bus to drag our lazy butts up the hill so we could ride back down, we did ride most of the way up a few times though. I don't have any photos but I am heading back in a few weeks and will hopefully remember to bring the camera this time.

Update from Wellington

Again, it has been too long since I last posted something. Sorry. I will try to get on here more frequently but we seem to be rather busy lately.

The rest of my trip to Europe was good. I really enjoyed Vienna, lots of cafes and good places to eat and the streets seemed full of people all of the time, which I kind of like, it makes it feel vibrant I guess. Romania was, well ..... interesting. First off the driving was surprisingly awful, and I expected it to be pretty bad. During my first hour (of a 3 hour drive to the black seas coast) I saw an 18 wheeler truck backing up in the wrong direction on the highway, past several uncontrolled highway intersections (no stop signs for anyone, so people try to cross the highway in front of the cars driving at highway speeds, which was >130 km/h) in which a digger tried to cross in front of us (I am glad that my driver knew what he was doing!!), and a horse and buggy driving on the highway, not to mention the limited use of seatbelts, ridiculous speeds and impatience.

I spent two days on the black sea coast. One day I traveled to an OMV offshore facility and the other day I just visited the main onshore office. The drive up to the heliport was like a scene from a horror movie, where the people are driving up to what looks like an abandoned school or something, a long, deteriorating road with long yellow grass and very few trees, a sign archway that is falling apart so you no longer know what it was. As we drove up this road I started to get nervous since I was going to have to fly in a helicopter from this place, we passed an army base being patrolled by armed guards and then pulled into the parking lot, which was a field (this really didn't help build my confidence) and beside it were old broken down helicopters. Luckily, as we walked out of the parking lot I looked up to see a brand new building, phew. The trip offshore ended up being perfectly fine.

I also spent a few days in Bucharest. It is hard to explain what it was like. I guess in the early 1900s it was called the "Paris of the East", and some of the old buildings from that time are still there, however, many have been left empty and without repair and are now falling down. Then, during the communist reign, the leader decided to build tons of concrete apartment buildings, demolishing many of the old Parisian style buildings. Now, since the fall of the communists there has been some slow rebuilding going on. So, as you walk down the main city streets you see restored Parisian style buildings, then big concrete apartment block, then a building falling down. Overall, Romania was a nice country to visit but I am not sure I would do it on my own again.

Ted returned from field work just a few days after I got back from Europe. Since then we have basically just stayed around Wellington, together! It has been nice to spend some time in our place together. We have spent most of our time either riding our bikes or trying to get our garden fixed up, it hadn't been weeded for over 4 months so it needed lots of work. Next time I will put up some pictures of the garden.

Time for bed, hopefully you are not totally snowed in and freezing (it was 20 C here today!).

Travel Socks and Sauerkraut!

Well, here I am sitting in a hotel room in Vienna. It took me 4 flights totalling more than 24 hrs in the air to get here from New Zealand. Normally, after flying for more than say 4 hrs my feet and legs swell up and it is just uncomfortable, but not this time. I bought these fantastic compression socks just before leaving Auckland and they were a miracle. I wore them on both long flights and had no problems. Not that I wasn't restless and tired of being on a plane at the end as usual, but my feet fit into my shoes. I would highly recommend a pair to anyone going on a long flight.

Ok, enough about the socks. I am currently travelling on an "OMV business familiarization tour", or at least that is what I call it. The head office of OMV is in Vienna so they flew me over here to meet some of the HSE experts who work at the head office. Since I came this far they thought I should also tour a couple of our other facilities to get an idea of what they are like. I spent last week touring around the country side near Vienna, checking out a bunch of well sites that are run by our Austrian branch. I even got to see a well being drilled, which was kind of cool, although it would get boring pretty fast. This week I head to Romania to visit another offshore facility. On the weekend I start my trip home but will stop in Singapore for a few days before finally getting back to New Zealand and the Spring.

This weekend I decided to head to the Austrian Alps and took the train to a city called Innsbruck. It kind of reminded me of Canmore in terms of location within the mountains but was much bigger. November in the mountains here is similar to November in the mountains in Canada, not enough snow to ski but too much to really hike. I was able to do some hiking on the lower section of the mountain though.

One of the common things in the Alps, both in Switzerland and Austria at least, is that there are these mountain lodges all over the place. They are basically farms which also run a small cafe and possibly a guest house as well, high up on the mountain. I decided to make my way up to one that was about two thirds of the way up the mountain, which turned out to be just into the snow, it took 2 hrs to reach it. I guess I wasn't the only one with this lodge in mind as it was already packed when I arrived so I had to sit outside, which really wasn't that bad considering I had a view down into the valley where the town was, although it was a bit chilly. The menu was only in German and the only words I recognized were for cured meat and kraut, don't ask, I am not sure why those are words I recognized either. I picked the one item on the menu that had both of those words, as well as a nice big wheat beer. It turns out I had ordered dumplings with cured meat and sauerkraut which luckily tasted pretty good.

I took a different route when I headed back down, and ended up taking a route that was maybe not the most direct. I knew that if I just kept walking downhill I would eventually make it back to the town, which I did eventually, but I had to do some back tracking. Someone might want to put some more signs up on the hiking trails though.

Hope you are all doing well and enjoying the Fall.
Meg

My nose is sun burnt and my legs are tired!

Yup, you read that correctly, my nose is sunburnt. I guess that means it is officially Spring and perhaps time to start wearing sunscreen. It is Sunday night and I have just enjoyed a completely dry and mostly sunny weekend, albeit very windy. Naturally I spent the time outside on my bike and enjoying the city.

We have now explored the main mountain biking areas in Wellington and the riding is great. Today's tracks (see definition below) were similar to Edmonton, mostly rolling up and down, but with more technical downhill and longer uphills, hence the tired legs. Somehow I managed to stay on my bike which is good, less bruising that way. A lot of the other tracks in Wellington are loops with long non-technical uphills (like 20-50 minutes of up) followed by fast downhills. Like Edmonton, there are lots of trails right in city, making a lunch time or after work ride possible.

I am beginning to understand why Wellington is referred to as Windy Welli. Today I actually got blown over while riding my bike. One minute I was riding along slowly just before heading down a hill and the next minute I was on the ground.

Ted gets home on Thursday from Egypt. He has had a good trip but is looking forward to getting home, as am I. He is probably on his way either up or down Mt. Sinai right now.

Here are a few more New Zealand words and phrases.

Track - used instead of "trail", mountain bike tracks, hiking tracks, etc.
Tramp - this is what you do on the hiking tracks, meaning to hike
Knackered (sp?) - meaning really really tired, like I was at the end of today's bike ride
Good as Gold - an expression used to identify that things are all set and ready to go. For example: Boss says "Meg is everything ready for tomorrow's presentation?" I reply, "Yup, it's good as gold"

Spring Time??

Spring officially begins on September 1st, not the 21st. I am not sure why it doesn't coincide with the equinox like the change of seasons does in North America but just to prove it was the right day the rain finally stopped and it was a beautiful warm day. There is a saying around here that "you can't beat Wellington on a nice day" and I have to admit I agree. Maybe the enjoyment has something to do with the long periods of time without the sun and a lot of wind and rain, but it is pretty impressive to see the city in bright sun, surrounded by green mountains and ocean.

We have now been in our house for over two months and are beginning to settle into our new neighborhood. Each suburb in Wellington has its own town center or village. Brooklyn has a couple of pubs (one which is pretty good called the Corner Store), a coffee shop, an Indian restaurant, a Thai restaurant, a fish and chip shop (or Fush and Chups to the kiwis), a Chinese take-away place, an old theatre that still plays movies and also has a cafe (The Penthouse), a library and two dairy's (little grocery stores). The village is only a 15 minutes walk from our place so it is easy to walk down for dinner and a movie or an evening at the pub watching rugby (the All Blacks won the Tri-Nations cup and are undefeated so far this season, in case anyone was wondering).

Brooklyn is bordered by a large forest area that runs from the West edge of Brooklyn further west to the ocean and south to the ocean as well. This means we have hiking/running and biking trails pretty close to us, and some great views. Despite the reasonably consistent rain lately we have managed to get out and do some exploring. Below are some photos from some trails that are in a bike park called Makara Peak.

The view of the city from the top of Makara.


The view towards the South Island, this area has lots of wind turbines.


Another view of the South Island, you can see the snow on the mountains.


We hope you are all doing well and enjoying a nice Fall.

Airports, earthquakes, and plants.

Well, it has been a few weeks since I promised some more house pictures so here they finally are. Life has been rather busy lately. Ted and I have both been traveling quite a bit for work. My companies (OMV) main office is in Wellington but we also have a small office in New Plymouth, which is a 1 hour flight from Wellington and is the base for our offshore facility. I have spent at least two days a week there for the last month and will be there at least once a week until mid-October. Ted was in the Philippines for work at the beginning of August, is currently doing field work in Taupo (about 4 hours drive away, I know because I drove up to visit this weekend) and he leaves for Egypt in about a week and a half. So, we see lots of airports these days and are both getting rather tired of traveling. I can almost recite the Air New Zealand pre-flight safety briefing. I guess we are getting lots of airmiles though which is good.

I was in New Plymouth when I felt my first big earthquake earlier this week. It didn't last long and wasn't really that big but I did feel two good shakes with steady movement in between, it probably lasted a total of 25 seconds, not even long enough to get nervous or think about going for cover. It turns out there was a 5.1 ~ 100 km away from New Plymouth.

Our new house has a is surrounded by a large garden with many plants we do not recognize. A few weekends ago we looked at the garden and realized it had changed from when we got here, the ferns were significantly larger and seemed to be blocking out a lot of other "stuff". So, we decided it was time to try "gardening", only, neither one of us knew what that meant. I remembered weeding when I was little but as we don't recognize the plants, we have difficulty distinguishing weeds from plants we want. We also remembered trimming things with clippers, so, we headed to the garden store to get some gardening gloves and clippers. We got home and started wandering around the house trying to figure out what to cut. We did figure out how to trim some of the bushes, Ted working to make perfect right angles and flat planes. We could not, however, decide whether the ferns truly were weeds or just needed to be trimmed back. We decided to trim them, rather than pull them out, as they did seem to be planted in specific locations. It turns out that was a good idea, someone told us they are quite expensive to buy, phew. I think we need to buy a book on gardening in New Zealand.

Now for the house photos....



This is the view from the deck in the backyard, you can even see snow on the mountains in the distance. The deck that I was standing on to take this picture will be our first improvement project next summer since the house inspector said we shouldn't use it.


This is our living room, it is really nice to have our furniture back.


Here is the dinning room, Ted is working on setting up our internet.


Here is our bedroom, note the boxes we are using as furniture, the hot water bottle on the floor in front of the end table and in the lower left corner you can see the space heater. When we first got here I noticed that a lot of stores were selling hot water bottles, which I didn't understand. I had used a hot water bottle when I was little and couldn't sleep, but I couldn't figure out why they were so popular here. It wasn't until our first night in the house when we went to bed and found our sheets absolutely freezing. So, now we heat up the bed with the hot water bottle.

Here is our crazy closet, we spent a lot of our first few weeks in the house getting this organized but it is definitely worth it now. This room is actually bigger than the small bedroom but it is connected to our bedroom and can't really be used for anything other than a closet, so, a giant closet it is.

Here is the garage. Ted is very excited to have a place to store and work on the bikes. We have been out for a few rides. From where we live we can be on rails in less than 10 minutes, there is a lot of uphill to get there though. We just got our roof racks set up on the new car so now we can explore some of the biking areas that are a bit far to bike to.

Here is the side deck, which is nicely sheltered from the wind. We bought this half wine barrel to use as a planter, now we just have to figure out what to plant in it.

Here is the music room. We got the piano working last month so next we need to get an Amp so that Ted can play his guitar.

Here is the computer room/office/extra spare sleeping space. So far though it is more of a storage room.

And last, we have the spare room, don't worry we do plan to buy furniture.

Well, that is it. We definitely need some more furniture but the main living areas are pretty much set up. Now we just have to be home long enough to enjoy it.

We hope you are all doing well.

We own a piece of New Zealand - the big move

Well, here I am, sitting on OUR couch in OUR house in Wellington New Zealand. Wow, it does feel pretty nice to own a house but even after 4 weeks I still don't think it has fully set in.

We got the house on July 2nd and our stuff was scheduled to arrive on the 3rd, so we camped out in the empty house the night of the 2nd.



We woke the next morning to a gorgeous sunny day, which is rare in Wellington winters, usually it is raining and cold. The movers arrived late, but to our relief did eventually show up. The road our house is on is so narrow they blocked the whole street with their truck. Not the best way to make friends with your neighboors but it turned out none of them needed to get out anyway so it was ok.



They gave Ted a clip board so that he could keep track of everything coming off the truck, so he stayed out in the driveway while I helped carry things inside. It was rather impressive, how they were able to pack everything in so tightly and kind of scary watching them try to take it off the truck without a ladder, they didn't drop anything though.



Unpacking all of our boxes was like a really big Christmas. Everything had been packed up for almost 5 months so we had forgotten about a lot of things.

We took two weeks off work in order to unpack and organize the house. We had figured we would be mostly finished with the house after the first week and spend the second week relaxing and exploring our neighborhood... right! We spent most of the first week just unpacking and beginning to organize and the second week building shelves and hanging pictures. We were pretty well set-up by the end of our vacation though.

During those 2 weeks we got to know the local hardware store quite well, buying shelving and other things needed to get ourselves organized. The chain is called Mitre 10. They have both small local stores and then a few large stores they call Mitre 10 Mega. The Mitre 10 Mega is similar to a home depot.

Ted, who is very excited to have his own garage, decided that said garage needed some good shelving. We found what he wanted at... Mitre 10 Mega.

Here is Ted before the assembly started, looking excited to build his first garage shelf, note the vacation beard.



Here he is reading the directions.



Once the directions were understood it was time for assembly.



Then a decision was made that the shelf was going to be too high, so modifications were required. Unlike in our old apartment at least these modifications didn't have to take place in the kitchen, it is nice to have a garage.



Then, with a bit more assembly, the shelf was ready to hold stuff.



It was really good to have two full weeks off and we actually had some really good weather. By the end of the vacation we had the main living area, our bedroom, and of course the garage, fully "sorted". I will post some photos of the house with all our stuff in it soon.

Hope you are all doing well.
Meg and Ted