Note To Future Self

It’s Monday morning and Anna’s just headed off to her first day of work. Time for Aaron to starting eating bon-bons and sipping champagne in the bubble bath.

Here’s the brief recap:

Tuesday: A&A arrive, wait for world to stop spinning.
Wednesday: A little light sightseeing, getting to know the lay of the land. Landcare has very kindly put us up in a hotel which is on the main westerly (inland) drag out of town. It’s also quite close to one of the major malls and the University of Canterbury. At first blush these all seem like positive factors and we start looking for housing in this area (Riccarton). Anna becomes violently ill.
Thursday: After looking at a sequence of filthy student flops which we felt were “in our price range” we violently adjust our price range upwards and decide to look in the Southern suburbs instead.
Friday: Thoroughly demoralized by Thursday we drive out to Lincoln (site of Anna’s job) just to “check it out” and to get a little drive in the country. It’s barely 20 minutes from city center, and it looks quite cyclable. Lots of little farm roads though not much in the way of shoulders. The traffic volume is low enough that it may not be a problem but I still get a vaguely sinister air off the average NZ driver. I develop a fever.
Saturday: I spend the whole day in bed, while Anna checks out a series of “likelies” in the Southern suburbs. A few are close but nothing perfect. By the afternoon I have a fever of 40 (104), which prompts our first experience with NZ’s health care system (net result: rest and drink lots of fluids).
Sunday: I rally and we go on another round of apartment searches. In the afternoon we finally view a 2-bedroom nice house in our price range and decide to go for it. The landlord is amenable to a 6 month term which will give us time to answer the buy/keep renting question. The major downside is that it’s being repainted and won’t be available for 2-3 weeks. Well that’ll be enough time to find a fridge. For the truly obssessive, here’s the location in Google Maps

A few observations from the traveller’s notebook so far.

It’s stressful to show up in a new town and try to build up from scratch. We were quite lucky that Landcare put us up in a hotel for a week and provided a rental car, and at that we’re going to run out that week before we’re completely sorted. This probably comes as a surprise to noone but me.

It’s quite normal for NZ rentals to not come with a fridge. We asked our new landlord and he claimed that he’d never rented a flat with a fridge and he just carried his fridge around with him from apartment to apartment. I’m just envisioning all of the Uni students driving around on Moving day, with Frigidaires hanging out the back of their Honda Civics.

NZ drivers have a bad reputation, and I was initially really turned off by the driving situation (as a driver and as a pedestrian), but I’ve since tempered my view. For one thing, we’ve spent far too much time around our hotel or walking along major thoroughfares, so too much high-speed/high-density traffic. We’re also near the Uni which means a greater number of vehicles which have either been, ahem, enhanced with new mufflers, or should simply be taken out back and shot. And finally, the traffic laws conspire against peace and sanity. For one thing, there’s really only one in-town speed limit: 50km/h (30mph) which makes traffic on even residential streets annoying. There are virtually no stop signs, as when a side street joins a larger thoroughfare, only the ubiquitous “give way” which is an invitation to not stop but just roll on in. And there’s no yielding to pedestrians. Ever.

That should be enough grousing. Two happy thoughst:

The hotel has SkyTV (dish) which means rugby all the time. (NZ broadcast television is notoriously bad — our choices last night were Fear Factor, Survivor and one of their long-running soaps). So far we’ve enjoyed some Super 14 and something called IRB Sevens. I don’t understand most of it, I’m just glad I don’t have to play.

The average Kiwi takes a tea break every 7.5 minutes, where they drink a full liter of tea and have one or more sweet confections called “slices.” I approve of slices whole-heartedly. In fact, I think I’ve just earned a peanut-choco-caramel slice.