Farewell Dinner

I just had a rather touching farewell dinner at Monteith's Brewery with my Porirua colleagues.

I'm really going to miss working in Porirua, I've enjoyed the team and driving around the gorgeous city. I got some ribbing for playing the tourist and taking a shot of the pretty sunset before dinner.

Tonight I had shnitzel for the very first time; it was pretty yum and went great with my cider on ice. For prezzies I got NZ Words fridge magnets, a kiwi cookie cutter, and a kiwi apron. They were perfect gifts for me-- I love to bake and I'm always having endless conversations with them about words and pronunciation. This week's learning was "pikelets," a type of pancake that sends me into giggles every time I hear it pronounced aloud. A wrapped stack of them were waiting for me at my desk this morning; made by my colleague Tania who said that she wanted to know what was so funny about the name.

Once home, Bryce showed me our visas-- newly stamped with our residency permit and returning visa. We can enter and leave the country as often as we like until 29 June 2012. And, if we never leave the country, they will never kick us out. cool. I mean, sweet as.

Bella

I've never been a cat lover. But then came Bella. I was hanging some clothes on the line outside one day when this cuddly kitten started nudging up against my ankles. Love!

Since then, Bryce and I have noticed that Bella always hangs around our house (I'm not 100% sure that the cat's name is Bella by the way; but a neighbour I spoke to said she thought that was its name). Bella sits up against our back glass door when I'm in the laundry room. She peaks in through the bathroom window in the morning. There's suspiciously Bella-like fur on our front door mat. I've always wanted to let her in the house but our landlord is allergic to cats; no pets allowed.

And then came this evening.

10K Race

We slept through our alarm but still managed to catch the train for Bryce's 10 K this morning, which started at Westpac Stadium in Wellington.


It was absolutely awful conditions, cold southerlies and rainy. But Bryce finished at a time better than he expected; our theory is he ran faster to get it over with.


Emma picked us up at the train station and took us to Floriditas for breakfast. They had these beautiful jars of jam for sale at the front counter.

When we got home I did NOT feel like running at the gym. Then I realized how lazy I was compared to Bryce so I dragged my buns down there. Pretty proud of myself, my knees let me run a whole 30 mins, whoo hoo! I made the mistake of telling B, who said I'm ready to run 5K's now. The 5k's they start back up in August-- they're on the waterfront Tuesdays after work. I usually like to sit and have a beer on the water while he runs, so well see.

Christmas Party

Our American friend invited out out to her house for a Christmas party. She lives with a bunch of Uni students-- most from Northern Europe. I'm not sure that any kiwis were at the party. It's now becoming a huge goal to hang out with kiwis; I'm finding that we're becoming friends with a lot of expats lately (not unusual being that so many immigrants work in the capitol).

We were all supposed to bring a dish to the party from our home country. I was supposed to make pumpkin pie but ended up bringing pumpkin bread, which another American girl at the party has actually had before. She said she found a recipe for pumpkin bread online after she moved to NZ and was trying to figure out what to do with the huge amount of pumpkin on hand. Just goes to show you that my NZ experience (specifically, the pumpkin experience) isn't all that unique :-)

We had a great time and even had our first glug (mulled wine). I learned about this wonderful thing called "shortcrust," which is a yummy, bread-like crust that you can use on pies and other pastries and can be bought ready made in the freezer section (the "short" stands for "shortbread"). Now I know that that was the crust that my student's family used for my feijoa slice earlier this month.

2nd Anniversary

We showed up to work all dressed up for our anniversary. I took a taxi to meet Bryce at the City Council building where he works and then walked to Logan Brown, a posh restaurant known for serving small portions. It was really good and the portions weren't all that small; I was pleasantly surprised to see how much wine I was poured. I ordered the onion souffle and Bryce got a plate full of venison. After this meal we realized that at nicer restaurants here we're supposed to order a side dish along with our main; it's not usually included. Oh another thing about restaurants in NZ: "entre" is the appetizer, not the main course. ("Main" is the main course).

We walked to Circa Theatre to watch a play about a Maori love story called Te Heo Aroha. It was really nice; there were only two actors who each played 2 or 3 characters. The female actress was sang beautifully. Afterwards Bryce admitted that I could probably drag him to a few more plays in the future.

The night ended with a drive-thru hot fudge sundae at McDonalds. Perfect date :-)

Quiz Night

Question at quiz night at the Petone Working Men's club this evening:

In New Zealand, in what direction does the sun set?

Creatures

Bryce and I have a new rule. When one of us (usually me) suddenly screams, the other person races for the vacuum cleaner while person number one (the screamer) stands guard and maintains a watch on the 8-legged monster to make sure we don't lose it. This is a very effective rule; it has risen organically over the last few months.

There's some big spiders here, but they're honestly not bigger than the huge ones that swarmed a house my mom and dad rented about 15 years ago when we were between houses. I remember a particularly huge black one hanging out on the wall above my sister's bed, and I remember that twice my poor brother had a spider crawl onto his shoulder: once while he was sitting on the couch and once while at the dining room table having dinner. That second time all I could do was look, point, and give silent screams and stutters.

We were always bug-bombing that house.

Twice, while making the bed in our current home, a spider has come out of the mass of blankets on the floor. Once it actually had the temerity to crawl ON TOP OF THE CLEAN SHEET I had just put on the bed. eeghhhh. There is new rationale to making our bed every morning: I don't want any blankets hanging off the bed to act as a ladder for any dang spiders.

They get in through the windows, which we leave cracked open during the day for moisture reasons. You might wonder how spiders can slip through screened windows. Well. Our windows have no screens. I have yet to see a screened window in New Zealand. Apparently only Australians need screens on their windows; everyone knows that THEY have the bugs to worry about.

Chai Latte

I have discovered something new and wonderful and that is a chai latte. Yum. It's like Christmas in a cup. Some girls from the Porirua office and I met downtown and shopped Cuba street. I got a nice little black cardi at Glassons and some lollies at the candy store. We went for coffee at this great little cafe called Midnight Espresso (where I had the chai latte initiation).


This morning Bryce and I went out for breakfast at the German Bakery in Petone. We brought some danishes (which we think were called "dutches" or maybe "deutches"??) and take-away coffee back home, where Bryce mentioned that he "could be convinced" to move to Europe one day. I had no luck finding an SLP job on an air force base in Europe when I looked, but Bryce pointed out that the last time I looked was 2 years ago. Lets forget about the fact that Bryce isn't fluent in German, I'm going to go ahead and look again. One visit to the German Bakery and all of a sudden we have aspirations to move to Europe. It was THAT good of a breakfast ;-)

Homey

There's a great new tradition starting in the Wood household: going out for breakfast on the weekends. Ahh yes. With all the cafes around here, we can go to a different one every time and never have to repeat a place if we don't want to. We're really liking nearby Petone with its cute shops and easy parking. We had breakfast at Go-Bang-- I had poached figs (which looked like slugs) on muesli. It was good despite the slug-ness.


Our landlord thinks that it is somehow cost-effective to try and assess our 10-20 year-old tv to see if it's repairable. So we dropped that load off and was told it would take a few days to get fixed. (grr)

We had friends over for dinner-- we had tacos and made pumpkin pie. Ok pumpkin pie is sorta hispanic and goes with tacos; pumpkins were a New World discovery afterall right? New learning today: whipping the cream too much is NOT a good thing for pumpkin pie (but IS a good thing for butter).

I am feeling more and more at home each week now; I had no idea I was missing out on that feeling until recently. Bryce and I really have a routine going on the weekends which is really comfy. I think it all starts with a good breakfast. Out. :-)

Say what?

Well, Grandma wrote me an e-mail today saying that the Dutch expression she says, "Is something like" "Oh how my honda taka." Huh. I just have a strong feeling that she doesn't say, "My hand itches," whenever she's frustrated. Stay tuned on that little mystery, still working to decipher that one.

Bryce and I met our American friend at Regional Wine & Spirits today for a free (!) beer tasting. Yum. We went off to Scopa for some pizza-- where I tried to be devious and order a feijoa vodka drink for my friend. She wasn't having it so I had to drink it-- that's karma for you.

We walked to the Downstage Theatre to watch Le Sud, a cute play about what would happen if the French had really settled the South Island. The first 5-10 minutes of the play was entirely in French, which freaked us out at first... when will the French end?? This is a French play?? But luckily the English started up so I could understand what was going on. I could understand about 1% of it with the gestures and such-- I was actually surprised I could understand that much.

There were a lot of jabs towards sexuality and ethnicity that I was pretty surprised about; in a phone call to President Obama, one actor said, "Yo yo what's up n---? How's the ho and the chillin?" It was a little bit of a shock for me to have a non-African American use the n-word in public, I had to review the statement over in my mind to make sure that I heard correctly. What with the non-politically correct speech and the references to kiwi culture, I definitely had a kiwi experience for the night. There were tons of jokes that definitely went over our heads.

Chicken Enchilladas

I baked the cinnamon rolls this morning that I had made up yesterday and brought them to work. Everyone seemed to like them, but I noticed that everyone chose to wait until morning tea to try one; they were too sweet to eat as a breakfast. huh. Now that I think of it, I eat a lot of dessert-y things for breakfast (cinnamon rolls, pumpkin bread). Don't know if that's an American thing or just something that I learned from my family. There is a perception of America (that is probably true) that American portions are really big-- at a pizza place they serve "regular" sized and "New York" (large) sized pizzas.

The treadmills at the gym measure your speed in km's (of course). (Kilometer's are called "k's" for short.) I keep forgetting the conversion factor for k's to miles, so on the treadmill today I just sorta ran as fast as I wanted. I usually run 5.2 mph on the treadmill, and today I was at 9.2 k's and feeling a little winded. I had to knock it down to 8.5 after a while. Talking with the math-whiz husband afterwards, he calculated that I was running 5.7 mph until knocking it down to my more normal 5.3 mph. Huh-- pretty cool I accidentally got myself to run faster than normal.

Bryce was pretty proud of himself when we met at the train station/gym-- he had found corn tortilla mix (you can't find corn tortillas at the store yet, although I'm sure they're on their way shortly. There's pre-packed enchillada sauce sold with corn tortillas already, and Ole El Paso flour tortillas are available too). Bryce made the corn tortillas (which he rolled out with a full bottle of wine-- we don't have a rolling pin). We made Jessica Alba enchiladas. We can't find enchilada sauce, green sauce, or Anaheim chillis to make green sauce from scratch, so we made do with a can of pureed tomatoes with various spices added in (chilli powder, habanero sauce, jalopeno juice, some onions and garlic). They turned out wonderful-- a good culmination of about 2-3 hours of effort.

Crazy Baking

So cold in the house today! Our tv pooped out last week, and with only one computer to browse on and only a few books from the library in the house, there isn't much to do. I had a roaring headache all day so I wasn't up to the gym. So I made cinnamon rolls and Bryce made a Guinness Cake. Awesome way to warm up the house!

Health Insurance Update

I finally got around to contacting Southern Cross insurance about getting visitor's insurance while we wait for residency. The information I was e-mailed back basically said that if the cost of treating us was more than the cost of an airplane ticket, they would just ship us back to the States-- where we have no health insurance at all. So that's not an option of course. And I realized that there's a department here in NZ called ACC, which funds your medical treatment if you're involved in any type of accident-- even visitor's to NZ. So I'm going to take a gamble and not get health insurance for the few weeks while we wait for our residency to get through. (Our health insurance offered through work is only available to residents). Health insurance really isn't necessary here, but it can make your total outlay smaller in an emergency, and lower premiums for doctor visits and meds (which are already quite inexpensive already).

Just another Random Monday

Lots of funny things happened today that I can't really post on a public website. A few interesting things of note that I can post:

Today is Matariki (Maori New Year), and the dinner served today at work was a hangi (cooked in a pit).

I thought my grandma had a Dutch saying, "Oh how my honda taka," but after talking to my Dutch colleague, I found out that that roughly means, "My hand is itchy." I don't think that my grandma says this. An e-mail has gone off to my grandma for clarification.

Bryce had a venison hamburger today at Burger Fuel. It was their special. We ate off a place mat that had a deer staring at us.

Bryce went to Alpine Club tonight, whoo hoo! First steps towards completing his goal of climbing some mountains her in NZ.

I can't figure out how to open up our huge bottle of rum (B can't figure it out either), so I plan on bringing it to work tomorrow and asking people to help me with my problem.

Wow the wind is gusting outside right now! It roared in all of a sudden.

Cheers!

Cinnamon Rolls

The picture on our tv went out. eeek. Now we're arguing over who gets the computer, even cleaned out the spare room, and I'm baking so much that I ran out of butter.

I strongly urge you to make this recipe: Best Cinnamon Rolls Ever
They tasted as good as Cinnabons. It was the most heavenly light and fluffy recipe ever.
I put some apples in mine:

Hair Salon

Every time I get my hair cut I go to a different salon. I really miss the girl who cut my hair in Juanita; I would just show up and let her do what she liked and I would always love the results; it would never be the same. In pursuit of the perfect NZ haircut I've been to 3 different salons now, all recommended by different colleagues. Today's hair salon was super trendy and cool. There was a huge pink divan in the center of the salon that I was told was "art, not furniture." Next to the sofa were giant (5') tubes of mascara, eyeliner, and concealer.


The stylist did something that I've noticed at my other hair cuts: sit down while cutting hair. It struck me as funny that I am a little contemptuous of this; I consider it lazy to sit down while cutting hair although I'm sure their poor feet are tired and it doesn't really matter if they're sitting or not. It's just another cultural taboo I've unconsciously taken with me.

The hair cut was fine but I'm looking forward to the next salon: an "organic" hair salon :-)

Looking Back a bit

I spent most of my sick day yesterday resting in bed, going through old pictures on the computer to clear out some hard drive space. I only got up to Jan 2007 but managed to clear out about 400 pictures. It was fun to see pictures from when hubs and I started dating.

I took a peek at some of our first pictures from Wellington; almost a whole year ago now.

B checking out our wintertime view of the harbour from the mailbox:

Mamaku fern trees in the ravine near our house:


Ryan visiting and learning with us a week after we arrived:

It's overwhelming to think of all the experiences we've had; the year has gone by so fast. We've made wonderful friends and have learned so much. I learned to have the confidence to be more friendly, an easy thing here when almost everyone is friendly and reciprocating. Bryce and I are much more relaxed about things; we never honk our horns any more, we generally try and go with the flow, we'll give a minute here and there to talk with a chatty stranger. In some ways though, I've surprised myself at how stubborn I've been at assimilating to a new culture.

Overall, I'm pretty grateful for the chance to live here and share this with Bryce. There's a lot of little things that the other person misses that we discuss with each other. I'll come home from work with recommendations, new words, and no-no's that I hear from colleagues and parents. And last night, Bryce had to have a little sit-down with me to teach me what this whole "World Cup" business was all about.

Sick. Again.

Have this ick cold right now. I tried to go to work today, but at the train station I realized that I was too yuck to be out in public. So commenced Day 3 of staying home from work.

I've been sick from work about once a month since moving here. I've started to get this down to a science. There's stages of being home sick:

Day 1: lay around and do absolutely nothing but sleep, read, and be happy to not be at work.

Day 2: Feel pretty anxious about all the work stacking up while you're at home. Take energy out on house. Clean everything and do every speck of laundry. Wash hands every 5 minutes. Make fabulous dinner.

Day 3: As mentioned, wake up feeling like crap. Just...don't...want... to enter real world yet! Feel so gross! Not normal. Why do those people on tv look nice and healthy and can breathe through their nose and go out in public and have a glass of wine if they want?? Do not leave bed so that there's no chance of getting nice clean house dirty. Agonize over missed appointments that will take so much work to reschedule.

Day 4: Show up to work. Navigate fine line of looking healthy enough to be at work but not so healthy that it looks like you were lying about being sick.

Grossness Alert

It wasn't until pretty recently that I realized that when spiders die they shrivel up really, really small. So that dried scrunched up spider the size of a dime-- HUGE!

A few days ago I noticed a dead spider, about the size of a quarter, on our back porch. Then came the rains. It has been raining pretty much nonstop for 3 weeks (ok I lie, Met Service says there were 4 sunny days). Coming up the back porch steps today with laundry basket in hand, I did my habitual check at the big shriveled up spider to make sure it really was dead. Well, it was still dead-- but RECONSTITUTED!!! All that water in the air had plumped him right back up.

Proof-- that the spider was in fact huge during life. And thank goodness it died before making its way through a door or window. ugh!! (Bryce said it died when another bigger spider killed it--!)

I sacrificed my sandal and kicked the spider off the patio onto the dirt and leaves. I swear to you, it made a thud.

Priorities while on Staycation

Home sick with a cold so I set out getting some stuff organized:

• All Blacks rugby tickets: check

• Figuring out immigration: our residency was accepted but our passports need to be stamped still and Immigration wants a fatty $600 check from us. grrr.

• Ski baches at Ruapehu: Organizing ski vacations in July.

• Check in with Hutt Clinic: We have a GP! Whoo hoo!

• Health Insurance: Guess we'll go with Southern Cross, they have the more professional looking website. I'm bad but I don't care.

• Pay off the American credit card that was accidentally used to pay parking: all done.

Queen's Birthday

Although it's not celebrated in England, the Queen's Birthday is a holiday here. I had been playing around with the idea of going away for the long weekend (not much to do in NZ-- rainy, cold, and no snow in the mountains yet). Fiji, Samoa, Tasmania, Vanuatu,-- all ideas were nixed in order to save money for a future trip to Australia. Turns out that we lucked out on Fiji; apparently they have a typhoid outbreak right now.

Unfortunately, I woke up today sick and slept through most of the day. I managed to meet up with friends to watch Sex and the City 2-- the movie was pretty bad and too long, but we were expecting that so I wasn't disappointed. I definitely cringed at a lot of parts and many scenes played out pretty awkwardly-- but the ultra critical reviews I read seemed over hyped.

Clothes

Sunday morning we woke up thinking, Why make our own breakfast when there's a zillion cafes nearby??

We had a nice brunch at Caffiend in Petone, and then I was able to persuade B to go to Queensgate Mall in the Hutt. The most exciting of things happened: I found a clothes store I liked! Fashionable clothes that I didn't feel stupid in! At Espirit. The prices were pretty high but I didn't care because they were great clothes. Then we found out it was a 30% off day so my happiness was complete. Even hubs got something.

We tried to get a phone but gave up because it was so busy at the Vodofone store. (I'm going a little nuts now with sharing a phone). Sharing a car has been working out fine, but sharing a phone means that when I have the phone, I forget I have the phone, so I don't check it for messages or make sure the ringer is on-- so I totally missed a text from a friend today inviting us to dinner. :-(

Sunny Saturday

A friend picked me up from the Wellington train station this morning and we headed for the Maranui Surf Cafe. We didn't head straight for the cafe however, we made sure to head there along the waterfront, driving on Oriental Parade. It was a gorgeous day today and we wanted to make the most of it, as it is supposed to be rainy for the rest of the 3-day weekend (Monday is the Queen's Birthday). The Maranui cafe burned down last year and only just reopened this week. It was a fabulous spot-- great decor, amazing views, friendly staff, and yummy food. I was about to order the rhubarb pancakes, but the waitress told me that the fruit was replaced by feijoa-- gasp-- my friend is the only kiwi who I've admitted to that I'm not such a fan of feijoa. Luckily there were banana and bacon pancakes I could get instead.

After breakfast we walked along Lyall Bay; we could see the snowy caps of the Kaikouras of the South Island in the distance.

I was taken downtown and introduced to the organic store Common Sense, and the clothing store Glassons, where I picked up an inexpensive merino wool top.

Hubs picked me up at the library. We tried to have dinner at Sweet Mother's Kitchen (a creole place) but it was too crowded. I had been walking around in my high-water tramping pants, so I went back to Glassons to try on some more kiwi fashion; but I was so uncomfortable. The skinny pants, the emo flannel top; I looked the look but felt like such a poser. A lot of people tend to dress quite similarly: tights or leggings, knee high black boots, skirt and a scarf, or skinny jeans, knee high boots, and a scarf. I haven't had too many new clothes in a long time because we had been saving first for the wedding and then for NZ. I decided again to be strong and just wait until I go back to the States and then I will just go crazy.

We finally had dinner at BurgerFuel (we've been meaning to go forever). They served our burgers with these flat cardboard things called "doofers" that we had to fold and figure out what their function was...they were hamburger holders.

Black Harp

Met up for drinks at the Black Harp after work. Showed off the toy store, Toy World, to hubs on our way to the bar-- I'm looking for fun games I can get for work but selection is not the best and games are really expensive.

Our American friend was wondering why we always go to "fancy" bars and she said she gets to pick out the next place. She mentioned a place called Alice where alcohol is served out of teapots. ooh~

We brought up sailing tonight; it's too cold to get into it now but I need to make sure to get sailing this spring.

Wanaka

The plan today was to go to a show at the Dowse, a really nice little museum in Lower Hutt. I got ready to go out but all of a sudden got so tired-- I think it's leftover tired from being out last night. I wish these events would be on the weekend-- it's forecasted for rain and I'm running out of rainy day excursions.

Hubs tried to get us tickets for our ski trip to Wanaka through this new company called "Fly Direct" which offers inexpensive plane trips directly from Wellington to Wanaka. (The usual alternative is to fly to Queenstown and then drive over the hills to Wanaka). He's been meaning to get tickets forever, and finally went on the website today, and found that the business is already bankrupt!! Major bummer, but pretty glad we never booked through them. He went ahead and got plane tickets anyway, but now we have to have a layover in Christchurch to Queenstown. Our friend from the States is going to go with us; we were going to go heli-skiing but it is too expensive - $700 pp.

Acoustic Punk

We met up with friends for dinner at Roti Chanai and then went to the Bodega to watch an acoustic punk show by a group out of Cali--Joey Cape and Tony Sly. It was a pretty good show overall but it was my first punk show so I had to get over being shocked by how rude the guys were-- chewing gum during the first song, one guy leaving during another song to get a beer-- We were only out until about 11:00 but it was sooo hard to drive home, I was so tired.

feijoas

I had speech therapy with a little girl today while her grandmother watched, knitting. In the kitchen, her mum was baking up a storm. It was pouring down rain outside and inside it was nice and comfy and warm. It's amazing to be let into someone's house like this.

When speech was "all finished," the mum gave me a freshly baked feijoa slice, wrapped in wax paper. ("Slice" is the kiwi term for a dessert bar). Feijoas are a fruit that originate in South America and held in high regard here. They're pronounced with the "j" sound here in NZ. Many people have their own feijoa bushes and they're in season now, at the beginning of winter. Bryce and I are having a hard time getting used to their taste, especially when eaten fresh. In pastries they're easier to handle though.

Bryce was at a cafe the other day with a coworker; they ordered two quince danishes. The woman behind the counter said that there were no more quince available, but how about feijoa danishes? The coworker, without conferring with Bryce, said, "Oh yeah yeah that's fine." Bryce said he made a little inward squeak but couldn't say anything. He said it wasn't bad though :-)