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Here is the moon a different way up.

It is a long week-end here this week-end. We decided to go for a day to the races, just to see, as it was free to get in. It was quite exciting and we enjoyed predicting who would win, based on the names of the horses and the jockeys’ colours. Big Love was one of my horses, although the name soon morphed into Big Glove, owing to Dave’s interest in hand wear. It didn’t win.

Here’s a good word

No jandals (flip flops) are allowed on the escalators. There were also some warnings about long skirts and escalators. Perhaps there had been a terrible and embarrassing incident in the past.

Then, when we’d had enough of that we went round the coast a bit for a look and had an icecream on this beach. It was actually quite windy and a bit chilly.

Bye

 

today i tried out a few potential bus routes to and from work.  Auckland’s bus services are a riddle to understand as they are run by a number of different bus companies making weekly season tickets tricky to comprehend.  Anyway, i think i’ve found my ideal bus (!) which goes from the local village bus station.  This being NZ the only real way to get to the bus station is by car.  d’oh.  although i may chose to walk to it anyway (30 minutes) if the weather looks ok.

i know you all like roads, so here is a photo taken from a bridge just outside my new office.

you can just about make out the harbour bridge middle left in the picture above which connects North Shore to Auckland across the harbour. It’s quite a car bottleneck which is another reason to look at public transport options.

i had a quick mooch round auckland town whilst i was down there.  i like how this gift shop didn’t try to overhype its products.  and there’s a number of home-from-home type places for visiting tourists.

meanwhile jane set about making new friends at the school gate and has got herself a few new coffee chums lined up.  she met one of them around the lost property bin (kez’s items are stil awol) so that was nice.  And she also had a lovely morning with our lovely NZ friend Wendy.

and the girls had another fun day at school.

after school the girls went swimming in the outside pool in the holiday cottage complex, and after tea we did some excellent Skyping to Jane’s sister’s family.  there was something about today’s Skype conversations which just worked better than previously – i think the novelty factor has worn off, and it’s now just about staying in touch.  and that’s jolly good.

we’ve now got a long weekend ahead of us as monday is a bank holiday ‘labour day’.  tomorrow we’ve decided to go to the Labour weekend horse races so we’ll have to see how that goes !  rain is forecast for monday’s bank holiday which is one tradition i’d hoped we’d left behind.  oh well.

toodle pip

this blog is good for us telling you things that we think you should know about how we are getting on. but have we told you everything you want to know ? eg what’s the milk like, do people kiss each other on the cheek or shake hands when greeting each other etc.

feel free to leave your questions in the comments below or drop us an email, and we’ll see what we can answer.

file under ‘clutching at straws to think of interesting things to say’.

the girls had another great day at school, although kezia somehow managed to lose her compulsory hat and lovely warm (and expensive) school jumper.  jane went with her to the lost property cupboard and kezia was surprised to find that it was full of identical jumpers and hats which belonged to other people. that’s school uniforms for you.

apparently things take a few days to reach the lost property area, so we expect to see them again toward the end of next week.  meanwhile she might not be able to play outside at lunchtime due to the hat rules, so may need to take her old uk school cap along instead.

that’s today’s hat news folks.

over tea (that’s what i’ve always called my evening meal and i’m delighted that seems to be the kiwi term for it too) we learnt that kezia had cooked (and eaten) burgers in her cookery lesson, kezia had done high jump as part of her athletics and esther did discus.  esther has a school trip next week too.

kezia said everything was the highlight of her day as she loves doing things she wouldn’t have done in england.  so hoorah for that.

meanwhile jane and i went shopping to a factory outlet type place and bought a telly and a fridge freezer, both to be delivered to the new house when we get in.  and we’ve also booked up our hire furniture for the month until the container arrives.

one new thing we learnt today is that our eftpos cards (debit cards you use in shops) have got daily spending limits which we reached quite rapidly.  luckily we could split the cost between our two cards and we were sorted.  but it did stop us buying our washing machine and was a great excuse to avoid looking at garden furniture and sofas.  we’re not very good at shopping.

tomorrow will be a little different as i’m going to try the bus route to work (still another week and a bit to go, but i need to practice my commute having not done one for nearly 3 months) and jane is driving over in the new car to meet up with her friend wendy for morning tea.

as a result all 4 of us will be in different places for much of the day.  i think that’s another southern hemispherical first for us.

i think it’s starting to get strange for jane as the rest of us begin our routines and the spectre of home-aloneness starts to loom.

sorry for long post with boring words.  this is exactly why i’m not hugely wordy on the main funkypancake website !

as promised by jane yesterday, here is a picture of our girls standing on our teeny weeny back lawn in our temporary accommodation.  kezia is shown here flouting the rules as she’s not wearing her compulsory hat (as she calls it). The uniform consists of a yellow top and optional jumper.

 

Both girls were understandably nervous this morning, but both got straight in to things when we arrived at school.  Esther’s class has a drum kit in the corner and when we went to pick her up at the end of the day her teacher was busy giving a very loud drumming demonstration in the corner.  Meanwhile Kezia’s class were scoffing chocolate milkshakes as they are learning about dairies and milk.

It’s tricky to interrogate them too much but it seems they both had a great day and have made lots of new friends.

Whilst they were at school Jane and I spent another 3 hours (really!) at the garage picking up our new Ipsum and choosing a new car for me.  I’ve gone for a Corolla.  Safe and boring. blah blah.  After that we took Erk The Beast (our hire car) back and Jane and I went to a cafe for lunch

At the cafe I asked for sausage and chips.  They said they didn’t do that.  But said they did do chips and did do sausage, so what they could do for me was to put the sausage on the same plate as the chips. would that be alright ?  i said it would, but only if they put cheese on the chips.  he looked confused and worried but agreed.  the sausage came pre-cut.

After school we went school stationery and lunch box buying with the girls which was fun. Now they can’t wait to go to school tomorrow to use their new things !

Latest pom-spots: chap in the local electrical shop used to live in Pangbourne and there was a british lady in the garage also attempting to buy a car.

Tomorrow is back to school for the girls and fridge/freezer shopping for jane and I (having failed to do it today thanks for the extended garage visit).

Thanks for all your prayers, comments and supportive emails by the way. It certainly doesn’t feel like we’re in this alone !

Sorry no photos today either. I think that’s because we were always in areas involving children or swimming pools or supermarkets (where you are not allowed to take photos it seems).

Signed the girls up for school today and they are going to start tomorrow! We had to get their uniform, which they found very funny, never having had to wear one before. There are funny culottes for the bottom half, they had never even seen any of those before. Watch out for some photos tomorrow. So we will show up tomorrow and be told which classes they are in.

We then had a tour of a posh school, a possible secondary school choice, which was very impressive as one would expect.

Since the girls will not longer be on holiday after today we went to some thermal pools in Waiwera this afternoon as a treat. The pools were lovely and warm, the outside air was not, which made it challenging for the adult who was on duty watching the girls go down the flumes. The flumes had great names, like Bob’s Mistake and the Gut Buster. The pools are heated by a thermal aquifier 1500 m below the resort. The natural temperature of the water is 50 degrees celcius. Most of the pools were 32 – 40 degrees.

(here’s a sneaky picture dave took of the water works.  note the crocodile sign)

Back home to put name labels on uniforms.

a busy day of non-photographical activities.

today we mostly:

• bought jane a mum-bus (a Toyota Ipsum – nope, i’ve no idea either.  it’s smaller than our hire car, ‘the beast’, which is a Toyota Enima)
• nearly bought me a car (but i bottled in as i was shopping alone and thought jane might hate my choice.  i think she did, but we’ll go back and have another look. how can anyone not love a car called ‘funcargo’)
• set up bank payments for our rent
• applied for tax IDs for me, esther and kezia (which involved huge amounts of photocopying in a tricky to find stationary shop with a strangely broken photocopier).  Couldn’t do Jane’s as I didn’t take her body with me
• spent over 90 minutes setting up home and car insurance (including retaining our UK no claims bonus which involved numerous international telephone calls as our old UK providers refused to speak to the new insurance people)
• agreed in principle to some tenants in our UK house who will hopefully move in this week(hoorah)
• ate pies for dinner and pizza for tea (double hoorah)
• joined the library (we can take out up to 35 books each.  Esther is already taking full advantage of her allowance)

whilst i was out doing many of the above activities, the girls were either playing at the local play park or swimming in the gated community’s outside pool.

time for bed.  we’re (hopefully) enrolling the girls at school tomorrow.

toodle pip

After a couple of Skype catch-ups we headed to the local church which meets in the school where the girls will go to.  Everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming which was great.  I spoke to a chap who lived in Bracknell for 14 years.  In the UK that would be something you’d attempt to hide, but on this occasion it was nice to be able to share memories – including my regular trips to Bracknell rubbish tip over the last couple of months.

Jane drove ‘the beast’ back home from church – her first time in NZ and her first time in an automatic.   We made it safely back which was nice.

after a power nap we headed out to look at things we need for the new house.  our relocation lady is phoning us tomorrow and i think she’s expecting a shopping list so we spent all afternoon looking at fridge freezers, washing machines and tellies.

i failed to take a picture of the sign outside the shop which said something along the lines of “Sale Bargains – bring your trailer and your wife”.  It seemed the world and his wife (and a few trailers) were doing their sunday workship at the mall.

after the exhaustion we headed back home for a drink and a game of rummykub.

Tomorrow holds many more exciting things:  registering for tax numbers (even the girls can have their own tax codes), registering the girls at school (so they can hopefully start later this week) and we may even start our search for cars so we have something to drive once the hire car goes back.

oh, and in the food experimental stakes, we tried this today.  verdict ? fail

 

Late entry.Here is a photo from yesterday

 

Today we went to a new part of town to sign the contract for the house. Our relocations lady asked the agent if we could contact the tenants to see if we could go in to measure for a fridge and stuff. They said we could go round straight away, which we did. They are an English family and were so friendly, we were there for about an hour and a half chatting and things. 

 

 

These are some shelves in a charity shop Dave and Esther visited. Nice!

 

The late on we went to our friends house and have a really lovely time. They showed us how to make a Kiwi dip.

Here are the ingredients.

 

 

Simply add then together and stir

 

Then eat with some nachos. Yum.

It’s late now and we have to be up early for some skye calls. Night night.

We have been being very adventurous in trying new foods some of which we had never heard of before. Here is a golden Kiwi. Not as nice as the normal kind in our opinion. We also tried a tamarillo, which was yuck. Perhaps we were eating it in the wrong way.

 

This morning we went to the local primary school to check it out. It looked fine and the girls will probably be able to go there before we move into the new house as the place we are in at the mo is also in zone. They will have to wear a uniform – a novelty for them. The school uniforms are all very neighboursy and even at the secondary school no-one seems to customise them much.

 

We also heard today that our offer on the rental house has been accepted so we will hopefully be signing on that tomorrow.

 

In the afternoon we went to our nearest beach, Brown’s Bay. It is 10 minutes away, perhaps a bit less than that even.

   

 

 

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

Kezia nearly left her shoes behind and had to run to get them.

  

 

 

Bye