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!