Anarchy to Lemon Trees

I am sitting in the laundry room of the youth hostel in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city and the place we have decided to settle for the next nine months, while Mike is taking a shower. The place we're actually staying at here is a really cool anarchist community centre squat, but they don't have hot water or showers, so rather than have a bucket bath, we decided to "borrow" the hostel's lovely showers, and we fit in pretty well so hopefully the hostel won't notice the two grateful temporary guests.
When we decided to act on the advice of most people and settle in Wellington, the next thing we heard was "Oh, Wellington, it is sooo rainy and windy and so many hills! It's going to be murder to cycle around there!" And so far it has lived up to its reputation, miserable, cold, wet, galeing spring weather, but we are hoping it can only get better? And it can't be worse than the November weather in Alberta, Ireland or Glasgow, right? The wind shook the community centre house, and I felt my bunk bed move from it this morning, and its not even against an outside wall! But there are a lot of (hopefully minor) earthquakes here, half of Wellington is supposed to be built on reclaimed land that emerged from a quake, so it could have been that. The activists here are all great, and the collective is really well organized. We're pitching in to help around the centre when we are not out apartment-searching, everyone cooks vegan food together, and they have their own library, bike repair shop, community garden and non-profit internet cafe, and there are a lot of events happening in the city, so Wellington should be a fun place to live. And there are plenty of people around to pester with our brand-new-to-the-country questions like "How much is bus fare?", "What part of town do we NOT want to live in?", "Where can we find wireless internet and a job posting board?"
New Zealand appears to be a perfect place to live: the people are so friendly (Kiwis must be so disappointed when they go abroad), the indigenous culture is interesting, there are palm trees everywhere, people recommend cities to live in solely on the beauty of the nearest beach (none of which have tempted us to swim yet due to the chilly spring weather), it was super easy to find a place to live, and there appears to be tons of work! And we get to eat kiwi fruits everyday! We couldn't ask for more, except perhaps to tempt our families to move here so that we don't have to go back home for anymore Canadian winters! New Zealand really reminds us of Vancouver Island, except for the palm trees, and the sun disorienting us by being in the north, and the Cheshire cat smile crescent moon, of course. Really laid back, all kinds of people go around in bare feet even in the shops, rainy, almost tropical forests. But so many New Zealanders do the "overseas experience" for a few years, so us travelling and working for three years in different countries has ceased to be a novelty, we'll have to come up with some other sort of gimmick to convince people to be our friends. The only downsides is that the place where the ozone layer is the thinnest in the world is over New Zealand (actually a hole!), so we are being very conscientious to put on sunscreen everyday.
Since our tour up north, we met up with Carli-Ann's university Yukon friend Suzanne and her Kiwi boyfriend, Pete for a weekend at his cabin on volcanic Lake Taupo. They took us back to his large deer, sheep and cattle farm in Hawke's Bay to work for the week, and got us helping the shepherds herd and weigh bulls: for the first few minutes Carli-Ann insisted on standing with her bike between her and the galloping herd! And we thought we had missed the opportunity to taunt bulls by bypassing Pamplona! One of the days while we were all out inspecting the fields we helped Pete herd a sheep who had a dizzy little lamb head hanging out of its backside. Its one leg had got caught during the birth, so Pete had to give it some assistance. The experience lacked the miraculous quality that I anticipated. We pitched in on house maintenance and gardening as well: palm trees are tough little trees to prune! Every morning we got out of bed in time for "smoko" which is a NZ farmer's mid-morning break, although the rest of them had been up working for hours by then! All the farmers have long since traded in cigarettes for tea and doughnuts made by Pete's dad, who imparted to us the wisdom that farming is all about "Sex, Death and Taxes". And we joined everyone in the city for the long weekend at the farm fair! The highlight for us, apart from watching Suzanne trying to get all the names straight of all the great aunts at Pete's family's legendary annual picnic, was the speed sheep shearing: a whole sheep shorn in 30.4 seconds. Incredible.
25 October, 2006
We are feeling quite proud of ourselves at setting a personal best "settling in" record: 63 hours after arriving in a brand new city, we have found and moved into a flat, had our first big grocery shopping trip, and Mike has already landed himself a job starting the next morning! We are living with a really sweet 52 year old physiotherapist woman, Fran, in a very central two bedroom house with a splatter-painted front porch covered in flowering bushes outside our sage-green, lemon-sherbet-yellow and teal window. We traded in the horrid Barney-Dinosaur-magenta colour of our flat in Glasgow for a gorgeous, well-spotlighted plum purple living room and kitchen. We also have a back deck glittering with fairy lights and a big back shared garden with five large, exotic-looking trees, and our neighbour has a lemon tree for which Mike is designing a lemon-pinching apparatus to reach over the fence. Fran has lent us an air mattress, and we got a great deal on a tacky glow-in-the-dark dolphin and galaxy duvet set (which nearly blinded Carli-Ann last night), but the most important thing: so far we can connect to someone's wireless internet from our bedroom! Yay!
Mike's first day of work went smoothly in the kitchen of a café called "Fidel's" on... Cuba Street! (here's their website) But the anarchists said not to let the décor fool us, the owners are just in it for the money and don't mind exploiting their workers as much as the next café owner. But it's the perfect place to meet lots of new friends, and get lots of good free food, and its only 450 meters from our front porch! Carli-Ann is feeling quite lazy that she hasn't put in a single job application yet, while Mike's already slaving away! We'll post the good news when there's something to report! Here's a couple of photos of our new place, and a couple other Kiwi tidbits!

New Zealand: Aotearoa: Land of the Long White Cloud

Our first week Down Under's been glorious, great hitch hiking, relaxed friendly people, no dangerous animals, what more could we ask for? We have spent most of our week here taking advantage of Monique and Manolo's hospitality, and that of their extended family in various parts of the far north. Lots of lifts with fellow tourists, European New Zealanders and Maoris, lots of things to learn about this new hemisphere! The only bus we've taken so far drove on the sand down the Ninety Mile beach (at low tide of course) and took us sand dune tobogganing, which was remarkably similar to snow tobogganing, except for the sand lodged in our eye sockets for about 24 hours. The most northerly point of this beach, and of New Zealand, is where the spirits of deceased Maori people are said to travel to the pohutukawa tree which sits on the tip of the peninsula. The spirits slide down a root of the tree to the sea below to rejoin with the ancestors in the next world.
We had time to do some hikes in the bamboo and palm tree forests where we saw 1500 year old kauri trees 5 meters in diameter, and have learned a few new seafood recipes from our lifts. Last night at our campground we slunk out to the inky black forest at night time to scout out the endangered nocturnal flightless kiwi birds and glow worms, flicking on our flashlight in time to see a possum creeping over to check us out. All the New Zealanders that we related this story to have demanded to know if we promptly killed it! Possoms are a vermin here brought from Australia (where they are now endangered) and they are eating through New Zealand's forests at an alarming rate.
Tomorrow we are off to meet Carli-Ann's university Yukon friend, Suzanne, at Lake Taupo (eerily close to Mt. Doom). She has invited us to stay at her boyfriend's farm for a couple weeks to work a bit, so we are off to get a taste of some kiwi rural life! If we like it, we might settle around there. If not, we will probably head to Wellington. Aah, we love those moments when everything is a possibility! We forgot to ask what kind of farm it is though...oh, and the one sink we could determine the direction of water drainage went clock-wise, but Mike's pretty sure that it's determined by the sink rather than the hemisphere. Any of you northern hemispherers going to test it and get back to us with the results?

New Photos...oh, and greetings from Auckland!

Kiora! from New Zealand! We can't quite decide if what we can feel is the effect of standing upside down on the other side of the world, or if it is just jet lag! But something definetely feels strange over here in tomorrow-land! Our flight from London to Auckland spanning three days (but only 27 hours of actual flying time) via LA was remarkably smooth, and every passenger was zoned out on the 80 different movies and TV programs they could watch on the back of the seat in front of them. We are staying in Auckland (<=click to see a photo we just took an hour ago from our host's house across the bay) with a friend of a friend of Carli-Ann's from university, and we are already enthralled with the legendary friendliness of the Kiwis, the intense and dynamic cloud cover over this lush island, the bungee jumpers off the tower on the horizon and the colorful birds perched on the next building. We already have our bank accounts set up and new mobile phone numbers, so we feel like we are doing well for our first day! We can't quite get our heads around the fact that we just traded autumn for spring, days growing shorter for those lengthening, and that at noon the sun is in the north, but Mike can't wait for the sun to set to examine the new constellations! We are still arguing whether the toilet is flushing clockwise or counter-clockwise, so we can't debunk or prove the myth yet!

Here are a few photos

Heiko in Germany

France

Spain (the first 9 photos on the page are the new ones)