Settling In

Bryce and I have boysenberry cobbler to eat this evening, that we got "to go" from the quaint restaurant near Mt. Hood.  Mt. Hood is our new mountain that we live by, here in Portland, Oregon.  It's about an hour and a half away from home, and the plan was to go hiking today.  Well Bryce ended up going hiking; I ended up being seized by fear from the prospect of bears and didn't go more than 2 minutes down the path.  It's been three and a half years since my last hike in bear territory after all, and my fear of bears seems to have increased.

So I had a pleasant three hours in the car napping in the sun with a gorgeous view of Mt. Hood while Bryce hiked on his own. He said the only animals he saw were the two dogs that some hikers were walking.  He also heard a chipmunk.  I wish there was an app for Bear GPS so I knew how close they all were to me.

After a lunch/dinner at this wooden restaurant called the "Zigzag" we met up with friends for kickball.  It was a late 6pm game and it was already getting dark an hour later, when the game finished up.

Home now for boysenberry cobbler and tea.  Bryce wants to know how I'm supposed to heat up my water for my tea as we don't have an electric kettle.  "Microwave," I say, and he jokingly gasps.

Every day we have is touched by New Zealand, in some way or another.

Preparing for our Return

It's been a crazy few years, and an especially strange last 6 months in the household.  We moved out of our apartment in December, thinking that we were soon to be arriving in Vermont, but a job that Bryce had been promised fell through.  The temporary living arrangement we then secured of flatting with 3 others turned semi-permanent; we've been here 5 months now and are leaving the country in another month, via SE Asia.

The topic of conversation between B and I the last year has been-- do we move or stay?  Why?  We've finally decided to move back to the States because we just need a good dose of family and our old friends, as well as that feeling of being home and comfortable.  I know that when I move back and get in the swing of things again, I'll remember the beauty of NZ, how I could take a gorgeous run or drive along the coast whenever I feel like it, and I'll kick myself for moving.  What has reconciled me to moving is knowing that the US isn't better or worse than NZ, it's just different.  We love the two places equally and definitely plan on moving back.  Just how soon is the big ?

NZ: waaaaaaay better than Aus!

Okay Australia has a lot going for it:
you get paid more
hit less by the recession
better shopping
better prices on clothes/food/petrol
culture is pretty similar to America; less of this tall poppy stuff.

However, New Zealand is way way WAY more beautiful. There's more to do and Wellington in particular is a pretty special place because you have a small-community feeling combined with big city bars/museums/events. This beautify and community feel, combined with an almost complete lack of dangerous animals that can kill you, means that NZ is the place for me.

In an effort to convince my loved ones to leave downtrodden America for NZ, let me show how wonderful it is to move to NZ, where it's beautiful almost all the time. (And don't move to Aus where you can't even swim in the ocean for fear of salties (Salt water crocs) and stingers (jelly fish)).


Cathedral Cove in Hahei, NZ


Hahei Beach

Queenstown, NZ

Mt. Ruapehu in the summer, seen from the small airplane Bryce took to fly to Rotorua this week.

Picton, on the South Island of New Zealand.

View of Wellington from Mt. Kaukau



sailing in Wellington

Sheep on the North Island of NZ

The pass to Gisborne on the North Island

Road to Mt. Cook on the South Island of NZ

jaywalking kiwis

I think I figured out why kiwis don't make a huge effort to use the cross walk when crossing the street. I think they think that by using a crosswalk, that is inconveniencing traffic by making them stop, and that just isn't polite. So they'll wait until one lane is clear, walk to the center line, and then stand there in the middle of the road, (sometimes holding their child's hand or pushing a stroller), and wait until the next lane is clear to run across.

I'm in their miiiiinds.

___________________

This whole issue of jaywalking is a big one for me. Wellington is dealing with many pedestrian injuries/deaths lately and are grasping at straws trying to figure out what to do about it. They've lowered the speed limit to 30 kms (That is 18mph people!) They have started a small advertizing campaign about safe crossing. They considered erecting barriers along the footpath, but data from Europe show that pedestrians jump over those barriers, making crossing in front of cars even more dangerous. Next, the city is hiring a psychologist to help relate to the pedestrians.

Police in Wellington do not ticket jaywalkers.

I've mentioned to acquaintances that giving out jaywalking tickets would solve the problem. I've received various responses:

• Guffaw!! (askance smile to neighboring non American)
• Seems a little Big Brother doesn't it?
• Wellington can't make a city law for the police to enforce, as the police are national (well okay that makes sense then).
• The police have better things to do than to hand out tickets to pedestrians!
• The police department and city do not have the money to employ officers to hand out tickets. (The local newspaper, the Dominion Post, reported in July 2011: "The Dominion Post counted 336 people crossing against the traffic signals at the intersection of Willis St, Willeston St and Lambton Quay between 1pm and 1.30pm on Wednesday." ) (dude, they generate revenue k?)
  

There is something seriously wacky going on with the Wellington pedestrian for sure. I've made it my personal mission to honk some sense into any idiot who strays across my path when I have a green light. Yeah I see your snotty look you brat. But now you're deaf. ha ha!

Routeburn Track and Milford Sound

American Birthday

Some things never change, like me celebrating my birthday for almost a week. I feel pretty spoiled. Today heaps of Happy Birthday messages came in, reminding me that today was my true birthday because that's the time zone I was born in.

Mom wrote me yesterday, saying that she's been reading my notes here and that I write like Harlan Coben. I've never read him before. I googled him and there was actually a video clip of his upcoming book: http://www.harlancoben.com/

Jacquelyn, my only American colleague, arrived to work with the best lemon bars ever. They're pretty much my favorite dessert, although I think I say that about several desserts. I might have strongly hinted to her that they were my fav. The sorority I was in for all of 11 weeks sometimes served them and I would sneak as many as possible.

E-mails have been going back and forth between my friends and me, figuring out the details for lawn bowling. Summer is here! We're going to do the Island Bay lawn bowls again. Pretty excited for handles of beers in the sun! Hoping the weather is as good this year as least year.

Tomorrow night we're off to the bird sanctuary again to see Sirocco the head-mating kakapo. It's a rare bird that bonded with humans too much while being treated for a respiratory infection, and is now helpful in fund raising. And it mates with human's heads.

Bird Sanctuary (Zealandia)

Today we visited the bird sanctuary in Karori. We were here for the first time when we first moved here, in August 2009. We really enjoyed our visit today. There's a new cafe and visitor's centre now which are pretty nice.

We saw a bunch of cute geckos hanging out together in a terrarium. Not sure if they're native.

They have these amazing birds there, called the takahe. There's only a little over 100 left in New Zealand. They were once thought to be extinct, but around the 1940's this guy, sure that the takahe were still around because of sporadic reports of sightings, would spend this weekends and holidays tramping around the fjordland in the South Island looking for the bird. I can just imagine how excited he was to find the bird, they are really cool. This one is pretty old (18 or so, they're expected to live until around age 21).
They just walk around part of the park like pheasants. They look quite a bit like my other favourite NZ blue bird, the pukeko.


I can almost imagine how that "discoverer" of the Takahe felt. There is a bird called the "fan tail" that I thought was extinct, but I was confusing it with another bird, the huia, which is extinct. I was in a bathroom at a campground almost two years ago with my friend Erin when a fantail flew in. I got so excited, thinking, "I must tell everyone! They're alive!" But happily the the flitty pretty birds are alive and well all over, although still not too terribly common to see.

Our whole goal today was to hike from the bottom of the park, in Karori, to the wind turbine, in Brooklyn. Goal met!

The trail back to the entrance of the park was along a high, wire bird sanctuary fence. (The fence is built to keep rodents and possums out) It was over grown and difficult to avoid the sticker bushes. Apparently it is unusual to see people on the trail we were on, because people on the trail on the other side of the fence, in Brooklyn, kept giving us funny looks. Finally an older woman stopped us and asked if we were lost. :-)

On the way back to the carpark we got a sighting of a kaka.

We even got to see a tuatara.

And a baby tuatara. (It's hypothesized that tuataras were around at the same time as the dinosaurs, and stayed with New Zealand when it broke away from Australia).