Things I Love About Living in Wellington (and New Zealand).

1. GO Wellington - local bus company with tons of attitude and fantastic service. The drivers chat with the passengers and are helpful, the passengers usually shout out 'Thank you driver' as they hop off, and if you happen to be waiting to cross the road as a bus is approaching, the bus will come to a screeching halt to let you get over safely!

2. TradeMe - fantastic, brilliant local online auction site where you can buy and sell absolutely anything at all. It's the go-to place when you want to rent a flat, buy a bed or a book or a budgie, or sell that weird ornament your great aunt left you in her will - and there'll be a buyer for it, have no fear!

3. It's all local. From our place in Kilbirnie, it's a two-minute walk to the local dairy (cafe), bus stop, football club, aquatic centre, Presbyterian church and osteopath. Five minutes will get you across the park to the seafront, where you can follow the path in either direction - back into town through the la-di-da suburb of Oriental Bay, or out along Cobham drive and into Miramar. Five minutes in the other direction will get you to the library, chemist, video store, grocery retail and wholesaler, bar, more dairies, shoe stores, banks, etc etc etc. Ten minutes on the bus and you're either in the city centre (and that will be a post all of it's own) OR you're at Wellington International Airport.

4. Recycling. The Wellington City Council supplies medium-sized turquoise tubs which you fill with all your recyclable paper, plastic, tins and bottles, then on garbage collection day, you simply put it out next to your waste. It's brilliant and has converted me to a recycler quite painlessly. Back in SA, I never quite got around to it, simply because finding a place to take my recycling to was such a mission!

5. EFTPOS: best thing since money was invented. Works like this: you open a bank account. Stick your money in it. Get your ATM card. Then, when you're shopping, you present your ATM card to the vendor who runs it through his EFTPOS machine, you punch in your PIN and voila, payment is made. I can use it to pay for a plane ticket or for a piece of chewing gum - no difference and no fees. That's it. Hardly anyone pays cash for anything. It's all EFTPOS!

6. Wellington Public Libraries are marvellous! They have great opening hours including Saturday afternoons and Sundays, they carry a HUGE range of books of all types both old and new, there is no limit to the amount you can take out at any one time, plus you get to keep them for four weeks! You can return books from another library (for a fee), you can request books (for a fee) and you can use the internet (for a fee). All the libraries I have been in so far are light and bright and modern and spacious and very welcoming!

7. Multiculturalism: SA might lay claim to being the rainbow nation, but in Wellington it's for real. At work my one boss is British, the other one Welsh. My co-managers are Samoan and Kiwi. My staff are British, Kiwi, Fijian, Samoan, Tongan, Zimbabwean, Indian, Filipina and Chinese. Language can be an issue but you learn to really start listening with more than just ears - you have to really focus fully on someone when they speak and to hear the intent as well as the words - and that can make for really good working relationships.

8. Community spirit: We saw this in operation at the Cuba Street Carnival Night Parade. There were clubs and groups in the parade representing all kinds of activities and communities, from belly dancers to stilt walkers to fireman to sports clubs to old car enthusiasts to transvestites to ballet schools and corporate teams. The crowd of 150,00 was happily squashed up against barrier rails but within the press there was support and caring. Someone near me dropped a mobile phone, so we all made way for her to get it again. Kids got handed up and over to their dad a few rows behind. It was very cool!

9. Emergency preparedness: Not only do all public places carry notices and have programs for disaster preparedness, but every single building seems to have a fire alarm and an evacuation plan in place. Our first night in Welly saw us down on the street at 4.30 am following an alarm (turned out to be a melted lamp which the hunky fire guys soon dowsed!) At work, we've had so many false alarms that we're now on first name terms with the firemen!

I'm sure I'll think of more ... Welly and NZ are great!

Inside Da New House ...

We love it here. Furnishings are coming along slowly ... but we decided long ago NOT to buy a lot of cheap junk furniture this time around. Few and nicer pieces are going to be the order of the day - well, that's the plan .... so we're currently in mimimalist style ...

1. Kitchen: all black and white and wood and spotlights and loads of cupboards and even a dishwasher ...


2. Lounge - a work in progress:



3. Upstairs hallway looking into bathroom:


4. As we are perched at the top of 44 stairs ...




..... you can see the tops of the trees from both Livi's room ...



5. .. and from mine ....


6. And then there's the view. Did I mention the view? When I first stepped inside the house at the viewing, I fell in love with the view ....

On our front balcony at twilight ...


.. and from my bedroom window just before sunrise ...

It's beautiful.

Why We Have Been Missing In Action ... and other stuff

There is a certain frantic quality to life when you arrive in a new country. The urge to explore is tempered by the need to get settled and begin making a home, especially when you’re a mom with a teenage daughter to provide for! For me, this sense of urgency was compounded by the fact that I was due to start work within a week of arriving in Wellington, which reduced the amount of time I had to explore, plus I had no other adult to send to house viewings in my stead. So the pressure to ‘get settled’ was on from the start.

And practically speaking, finding a home isn’t easy. As mentioned before, rentals are shown for very brief periods and it is often first come, first served. Added to this was the fact that we were totally dependent on public transport (and thereafter feet!), we didn’t really know what any of the areas were like and we also didn’t know how far our new budget would stretch. So when on our sixth day in Wellington we found a sweet little flat that seemed OK and was relatively inexpensive, we grabbed it and moved in, signing a six-month lease and paying a two-week bond (deposit).

And it was a sweet flat, as long as you didn’t mind the fact that the kitchen, a weirdly configured two feet by six feet space, never saw the sun; that the only natural light downstairs came from the balcony in the afternoons, and that the entire place reeked not only of ancient carpets and a touch of mildew, but also of the seventies – and not in a good way. Green-and-beige carpeting and pink walls in the bedrooms … and funky turquoise and orange kitchen colors which would have worked well—IF the kitchen had been filled with sunny brightness all day long. But it wasn’t and never had been!

It might have been OK. But to add to our woes, the previous tenant had abandoned her telephone line instead of disconnecting it, which meant an utterly interminable delay while the various telephony companies liaised with one another to disconnect and reconnect our line ... it took three weeks of repeated phone calls and complaints and chasing up before we had an incoming line - but still no broadband, which meant no email, no Skype and no contact with the folks back home in SA.

I have to confess it never really felt like home. I started to dread arriving back at the flat after work, and coming up a set of stairs that occasionally smelled of cat, then along a walkway overhung by the heavy canopy of towering trees that blocked all light and kept the ground in a permanently damp and slightly slimy state. And because it never felt like home, I lost all interest in making it look like home. We camped out in the lounge, sleeping on a mattress which doubled as a couch during the day, using the bedrooms as over-sized clothes closets and venturing into the kitchen only when we needed to make tea or cook supper. I have to say, though, that the bathroom (apart from the mildewed ceiling) was a lovely little room – it had an actual bath in it – something of a rarity in Wellington flats – and it also had a washer and a drier which both worked fantastically well – speedy and efficient. The bath too wasn’t bad – small and snuggly and the water was always hot, hot, hot!!

So we decided to ‘keep our eyes open’ for an alternative. Having been out to the north before, we both knew we preferred the southern suburbs. So we explored the surrounding neighbourhoods carefully. Visited Lyall Bay and Island Bay – both gorgeous but just a little far out from school and work. We went over to Miramar which is also wonderful, but we would only be able to afford a place in the middle of the central valley – no views to speak of except fences and streets and other people’s back yards! We went shopping in Kilbirnie – a suburb just over the hill from Newtown but a whole other world away - where we found Pak ‘n Save, a great discount outlet for groceries and veg and dairy produce! And we both liked Kilbirnie a lot. Riding the bus over the hills with Hataitai off to the left and the Miramar peninsula on the far side of the beautiful Evans Bay … seeing the sprawling green fields of Kilbirnie Park, the yachts bobbing in the marina, the planes flying in and out of Wellington International Airport – not to mention a fantastic array of shops including branches of all the banks, Farmers, Woolworths, Amalgamated Video, pubs, dairies, organic food shops, furniture stores etc etc.

So we narrowed our eyes at Kilbirnie and watched TradeMe carefully for any possible future homes. And lo and behold! Much sooner than we had anticipated, we found … IT.

A bright, light and airy duplex on the hillside above Kilbirnie Park ...

...with outstanding views of Evans Bay .... :-)

Tbc.