Forgot to Post About the Photo Archive!

How could I forget! We've been taking quite a few photos of our walks about Wellington. Right now it's mostly outdoor shots, however this will be the place for new photos as they come up. Likely they will be in sub folders etc, so keep watching this space!

http://gallery.earthshattering.org/Wellington

There's a link on the right hand side of the blog in case you lose it ;)

6 Long Days Without Communications.

Ok, i now fully admit it, I'm a complete internet junkie. What's worse was not having a phone either to get in touch with people. Now both of those things have been resolved, all is good. We have a local phone number, full time internet access and a skype account that allows us to call anywhere in North America for free ;)

We've also got a nice apartment here, though it's particularly sparse at the moment. Our total count of furniture is 2 desks, 2 chairs and a mattress. It does for now, though we've been scouring trademe (think local ebay+autotrader+mls) and the second hand stores for couches, bed frames, tables, chairs etc. Not having Ikea makes life a little more difficult.

In fact, when we were preparing for this trip, al the research we'd done pointed towards a distinctly higher cost of living. Definitely, going out to the restaurant or the movies is more expensive, but for household goods we've simply not seen it. We got a fully equipped kitchen (flatware, dinning set for 8, pots, pans, glasses, all the nick nacks you need) for under 700$. In fact, it was even cheaper then buying from the Salvation Army! The trick here really is to do a lot more shopping around. There are rediculous sales at many of the stores here, but you have to be willing to wait. Sales of 60% off or more are quite common here which I don't think I ever say in Ottawa.

Wellington Vs. Ottawa

Wellington is not big. Really not big. We haven't had a train ride or bus ride yet that was longer then 1/2 and hour. We went from CBD (downtown) to Petone yesterday and it was a 15 minute train.

In terms of neighborhoods, we've mostly focused on the down town core because we're urbanites without cars. of those,

CBD reminds me a lot of downtown, similar density, though here there's a LOT more retail mixed with the businesses. Living in CBD is a lot like living in the Somerset to Bronson corridor... there's some nice old houses, a lot of high rises but mostly just a lot of business going on around you.

Newtown is a lot like Chinatown is right now (between Bronson and Preston) but with more of a Wellington Village (Wellington / richmond area)

Where we are moving (Mt Cook, between CBD and Newtown) is a little strange. it's close to everything, but doesn't have much around it (other then Massey University, hopefully it won't be too loud!)

From Suburbs point of view, it's very difficult to compare because the land is so different. You won't really find sprawling suburbs with crescents ala Barhaven or Kanata. Because everything's built in the hills, it comes down to the style / newness of the house, proximity to various things and school districts. If you're planning on getting a car when you arrive, you shouldn't have much trouble figuring out where you want to live.

Oh, as a note, your impression of where you want to live will likely change once you get here.

A Week In...

So we've been here a week now. We're over the jet lag, we've got a good idea of the basics of getting around in the down town core (AKA The CBD - Central Business District). We've also figured out the public transit system (more or less) and started to understand what's where.

So what have we discovered?

• Public Transit here is good except when it's not. the buses run on time, they go everywhere we've wanted to go and they've been well maintained and clean. They aren't unreasonably priced, though their pricing structure is a little bizarre. When aren't they good? Weekends and holidays. We've had to disqualify a number of places and neighborhoods because buses didn't run on the weekends.
• Wellington has the most incredible coffee culture. Most people would believe that the number of coffee shops and cafes in Wellington is completely excessive, yet they are for the most part busy throughout the day and there's quite a difference in roasting, bean selection, taste, variety. About the only places I saw that weren't very busy were some of the Starbucks. It's really a case of the local shops having a much better understanding of the market then the chains. In fact, one barrista claimed that 60% of the New Zealand Starbucks were closing down
• Wellington is one of the hilliest places I've ever been. More hilly the Montreal, on par with the parts of San Francisco I've seen. We've been walking everywhere for a week now and we both have distinct pains throughout new muscles we're discovering.
• Meat tastes... meatier in New Zealand. I'm not sure if it's because most of it is pasture grown / local / grain fed, but the chicken tastes stronger, the beef beefier and the lamb more like barn (which isn't a bad thing) We've been making an effort to only buy New Zealand food products - the taste change in the meats is much more notable then in the vegetables.
• Every food product we could find in Canada we've now found equivalents for here. Sometimes it means shopping at more specialized shops (like for our indian spices, some asian products etc) but places like Pak'n'Save do most of what we need. New World is a little more expensive we'd expected, but again, the small specialized places tend to have what we need at the price we need it.
• In general, things aren't that much more expensive than in Canada. We'd originally expected anywhere between a 20% and 40% increase in price, but that hasn't really been the case. What is critical here is to watch the sales and make sure you shop intelligently. The difference between sale price and regular price here is MUCH more notable. It's not foreign to see sales that knock 40-60% off even common items.

I'm sure there's a ton of other things we've picked up on, but thats the first batch that came to mind. I could (and probably will) go on about the restaurants, the people and the city as a whole.

A Quick Note About Kiwi Ingenuity

Kiwis are pretty famous for their ability to re-use, recycle and just "make things work" in ways that people may or may not realize. For example, all those yuppy 3 wheeled strollers you see? Kiwi invention. Watch "Worlds Fastest Indian" for a great example of working with what you got to make something incredible.

Carly's already covered the wonderful Burger Doppers to hold your burger in place while eating it, but I figured I'd post up another fast-food example, The box from Hell's Pizza. It's perforated to be cut out and then fold itself into a little coffin for the leftovers. Genius. And it actually works too :)

New Zealand's been full of little surprises like this so far. Watch this space for many more little food tidbits.

The Burger Doofer

This one is for my dad.

The Kiwis have come up with some odd ideas during the past; some of you may have heard me discuss Zorbing. It’s a truly Kiwi sporting innovation where they throw you into a human sized plastic hamster ball and chuck you down a hill. No seriously I’m not making this stuff up. That’s one end of the spectrum of innovation but at the other end is the Burger Doofer.

As we were busing around learning the neighbourhoods and visiting rental homes Blaise said what he really wanted for lunch was a good burger. Less than a block past that statement I spotted Burger Fuel so we planned on visiting the rental place and coming back to get some burgers. We approached Burger Fuel quite hungry and ready for anything. First off Burger Fuel has some of the most delicious burgers I’ve ever had!!! The Kiwis have an obsession with brie cheese and avocado….bless them. It was a moist juicy burger, fresh tomatoes, red onions and lettuce, I ordered one with brie cheese instead of cheddar; did I mention it was delicious. Oh and its quite large…really ridiculously oversized.

Now the more cultured burger eaters among us recognize that burgers while yummy and good have a major flaw when it comes to eating. The back end of the burger continually tries to escape the bun. For those more enlightened (finicky) eaters a slightly cleaner way to eat a burger is to turn it upside down with the top bun on the bottom. Why does it work? No idea but it does cut down on the mess.

Well the Kiwis took it one step further, presenting the Burger Doofer.



It keeps your burger together, catches most of the ketchupy/meaty juice that oozes out the back and … its kind of neat. Go Kiwis!

Pedestrian Access

I’m sure many of you are familiar with the phrase pedestrian access. In Wellington however I’ve learned to look at the Pedestrian Access sign, sigh and go through a complicated stretching/warm up exercise.

Wellington is built in a nice sheltered bay, its not that big and in order to take advantage of the area there are a lot of terraces and places built on hills. Remind me to tell you about rental property known as “you got to be ****ing me”. So in downtown Wellington you cannot necessarily get to a place by car fast even though its only two blocks over, you have to take a long curving path to get up to the right level. The city planners though knew that people on foot could just walk over to where they needed to be so they built Pedestrian Access points to help out those environmentally friendly people who want to walk.

Did I mention the height difference? Blaise and I needed to catch a bus which stopped on The Terrace; we were down on Willis and saw a sign that said “pedestrian access to The Terrace”. We knew after our first day to expect a few stairs turns out we just got lucky in our first day; today would be a whole other story. As we stood at the bottom of the walkway and looked up we suddenly realized that we were no longer in Canada. The stairs rose into the face of the cliff, they zig-zagged back and forth; to get to the top of this thoughtful pedestrian access we were looking at 10+ storeys of stairs. We were breathing hard that first day and joking about how we better get in shape fast, now I’m convinced that by the end of our first week we will be in shape due to necessity rather than any conscious effort on our part.

We made it by the way, only problem was that the bus we wanted to catch didn’t run on weekends…at least going down was way easier.

We Have Arrived! Wellington Look Out!

Ok, so that's probably a little over dramatic, however we did safely land in Wellington at 8:00am this morning, kiwi time. So far we've been dealing with the jet lag pretty well (flying the direction we did was actually quite helpful and arriving at 8am meant we could sleep for most of the flight from LA, making for a long day yesterday but a pretty normal day today). We arrived at the Quest on Gilmer, our hotel for the next 9 days. It's OK, but I definitely should have sprung for the slightly larger room, as we're staying in a small hotel room that's had a kitchenette crammed into it.

Since we had the full day ahead of us and we didn't want to fall into the trap of sleeping, we headed out as soon as we could to take care of some business.

First thing, we checked into our bank to get the account we'd created earlier activated in earnest. While in Canada we tried to transfer cash using a third party and were completely unsuccessful. Hopefully now that the account is up and running it will be easier.

Then we took a good tour around Lambton Quay, one of the main drags of the Wellington CBD (central business district - aka Downtown). Findings of note: the "outdoor gear" corner, where we found the MacPac store (just for Timo ;) ) and two other gear stores. Conclusion: order online.

We also found one of 2 rock climbing gyms in the Wellington region. It looks ok, not Coyote by any stretch, but it should aleviate any climbing itches we have. We'll post up more info this weekend when we actually climb it.

Also discovered that Wellington has more coffee shops per block then ANYWHERE I've ever been. And they all seem to be full, even at 2pm on a Thursday. Oh, they make a great cup of coffee too. I've found my new addiction already, flat whites (2 shots of espresso topped with milk and a touch of foam)

It's been a good first day so far. Apartment hunting comes next, we have 14 to be called so far. It's incredible how much you can get done online now... we're even avoiding the hotel's rediculous connection charges by using Skype to call out.

T-16 hours to lift off.

It's 10:00pm EST. At 1:30pm EST we leave from JFK international airport on the second leg of our flight to New Zealand. No more stops now! We go from JFK To Los Angeles, spend 4 hours in the terminal there then it's off to Auckland with a local flight to Wellington from there.

Words can't quite explain how excited I am right now.

A Quick Update for our Fans

We're currently 48 hours away from flying to Wellington. We've made a quick stop over in New York city to spend some time with my mother before we go and take in some of the finer things in life (dear god I've eaten so much in the last 2 weeks it's quite incredible).

We got to check out Spamalot on Broadway which was an incredible experience, got to fish on the ocean and checked out some awesome restaurants on top of spending some great time with the family.

Tomorrow we're off to the city to check out some of our favorite museums, make diner for the 'rents then that's pretty much it, we're off.

The next blog post will assuredly be from NZ!

T minus 48 hours...

Its been a crazy last week.

• Thursday was the last day at work. I have a fantastic boss who went all out to celebrate my leaving, including scoring me a part time job with the compan for the next 6 months. That's right! I'll be working from home for the first stint. Now, the hours kind of suck, working 5am to 10am NZ time but its income, it lets me figure out what I want to do and I get to have a day time social life!! We hit a very good restaurant for lunch and there was cake in the afternoon including a card that was signed by at least 50 people (and a nice gift).
• Thursday was also the closing of the house. We ended up meeting the new owner because of a lawyer snafu. Nice guy, really liked the personalized letter we wrote explaining the ins and outs of the house and was very very understanding about our Passport situation...
  
• Which brings us to Friday: chase the passports day. Our passports had been sent back to us with our visas in them, however because of the mail redirection we subscribed to, our passports ended up being lost by Canada Post for the better part of 72 hours. The were sent registered post, marked as Successfully Delivered in the system but never got to us. To say tensions were high would be the understatement of the year, but in the end a very very nice woman by the name of Christine went into the sorting machines and physically pulled out our passports so we could pick them up at the depot. This is unheard of as far as I know and really blew us away.
• Friday night we had diner with our family here in Ottawa, a wonderful little pub called the Wellington Gastropub (strongly recommended). My uncle ended up lending us his convertible for the weekend so we could travel in style to Montreal.
• Saturday Sunday and Monday were spent in Montreal spending time with my Dad and step mother, Christine, Allison and Damian. Lots of wonderful food was eaten, good times were definitely had by all. It was pretty much as perfect a long weekend in Montreal as I could ever imagine, confirming my belief that if we ever make it back to Canada, that's the town for me
• Monday night we went out with all our local friends for one last night out. Hit up Pancho Villa for some fish-bowl sized drinks and tex-mex food (something I've heard is non-existent in New Zealand). Big thanks to Ryan Ryan Jay Wes Caro May Phil Mavourneen Alice Brie Paul Jenni and Robert! We had a great time
• Tonights plans call for a more intimate diner with Marie Pierre and Timo at our favorite Sri Lankan restaurant, Ceylonta.
  

We fly out to New York on Thursday to spend some time with my mom and Bruce, see NYC and mentally prepare for the concept of being immigrants in a new land!

God I can't wait to set foot in Wellington. I'm ready to go now!!!!