Day Two It Rained!

And that was a Good Thing!

We woke up yesterday morning (after all the fire shenanigans at 4am) to low gray clouds which eventually turned into light drizzly rain. It hung around most of the day and seeing as we'd packed mainly for the glorious Wellington summer we'd been hearing about, we ended up spending most of the day at the apartment, getting busy on the phone and booking times to go meet my new bosses up at Sprott House, to have Livi assessed at WHS and finally, to view our first potential apartment here in Welly which we did last night at six (more on that below).

Mid-afternoon, I grabbed a gap in the weather and speed-walked two blocks down to Cuba Street Mall which is one of the oldest thoroughfares in Welly, and which features a fascinating and funky collection of shops, cafes, bookstores - in fact, anything you could possibly want you'll probably find there. I went to Farmers, a house-and-garden kind of store where I bought an umbrella, pair of closed shoes and a beautiful warm autumn jacket!

At 6pm, we walked down - no first, we walked UP then down! - to 126 The Terrace, where we saw a teeny, tiny apartment on the third floor. Although it was reasonably priced, fully furnished and within walking distance of Lambton Quay, the cable car and the waterfront, we both had an instinctive NO to it: it was a dismally soulless place and looked out onto nothing but other tall apartment buildings. Welly has so much to offer and we are still so new to it - I think we'll probably look at a LOT of places before we find the one that says YES! :-)

OK, now piccy update. A lot of you have asked for Welly pix, so here are a few random shots, mainly from where we are staying now, which is on the corner of Willis and Ghuznee.

Looking down Ghuznee Str - on the left, a high rise apartment building, on the right a beautiful old church with a parking space set aside for the Vicar!


Looking back up Ghuznee - a cool mix of high rises and small houses ...

Close up of some of those houses ....

Inside the apartment ... sleeping on Day One!

This is the link to the ad for the apartment we viewed yesterday - it's on TradeMe, which is THE online shopping site for Kiwis - just like Gumtree and Craigslist, but (imho) even better! I now have a watchlist of about twelve other potential rentals which I need to start pursuing today .. so watch this space for updates!

Love to everyone back home and elsewhere!
L&L

Shopping in Welly for the first time ...

Our first purchases (apart from bread, cheese and tomato last night at the superette on Willis and iced coffee down on Lambton Quay today) were these:

A Skype phone from Dick Smith Electronics for $29.95 - installed it and chatted and it works just perfectly!


Food from the New World Food Market on Willis Str - the brands are almost all new to us, but there is a HUGE amount of choice and lots of Asian / foreign food to try out too. This little lot cost us $32.65

And then there were two ...

..... and those two set off for Wellington, New Zealand on Friday 23rd Jan.

Color-coded travellers! This was totally unintentional - neither of us knew what the other would be wearing as we spent our last nights in different places!

There were four legs to our journey - CT to Joburg, then Joburg to Perth on SAA, followed by Perth to Auckland and Auckland to Welly on Air NZ. For any SAfers flying this route, all I can say is that SAA has gone to the dogs - lousy food, unfriendly staff, tatty airplanes, very poor movie choices - in fact, Livi's TV screen was broken and we told three different people, all of whom brushed us off with a quick 'we'll look into that just now, it probably needs to be reset' - but it stayed broken the whole flight. SAA used to be very, very good but not any more. But Air NZ was absolutely stunning: beautiful, clean, up-to-date planes, warm and friendly staff, excellent meals (not served on plastic plates!), fantastic choices of movies and TV programmes and interactive games etc - and when the TV screen futzed out once, it was reset within three minutes and no more problems. We had a 7 hour layover in Perth, and the Aussies were great! One staff member collected all the passengers transiting to Auckland, checked us through and saw us safely into the transit lounge - no transit visas required! Livi kept herself busy with emergency nail repairs, sleeping, window-shopping and listening to music.

Doing nails in Joburg ...

Sleeping in Perth ...

We landed in Auckland at 5.15 am Sunday and cleared customs and passport control with absolutely no problems at all, then flew the last leg to Welly in a state of almost drunken euphoria - jetlagged after nearly 36 hours en route, unable to believe that the beautiful land beneath us was really and truly the New Zealand we'd been looking at pictures of for so long.

The wonderful Air New Zealand plane out of Perth ...

And Wellington!!! It really IS the most amazingly beautiful city! On the shuttle to the hotel, I kept seeing things I'd spotted on Google Street View! The weather was amazing - sunny, light breeze, water twinkling in the sunlight ... but as soon as we got into our rooms, we hit the sheets and slept most of the next twenty-four hours!

Monday only served to confirm what we'd seen so far. Bank accounts validated within minutes and what fantastic deals and service we got from Westpac! We walked all over the place, drank iced coffees, explored the ins and outs of Lambton Quay and Frank Kitts Park, then discovered the Willis Str New World market and shopped for dinner. I guess last night I was still a bit hyped, couldn't get to sleep - and then at 4 AM, we were awakened by the most awful screeching siren - the hotel fire alarm going off! When I finally figured out what it was, we joined all the other residents staggering down the fire escape in various states of dress/undress (I even managed to grab my bag with keys, camera, passports and wallet - yay, go me! LOL!). Within three or four minutes, no less than FOUR huge fire trucks roared up and we watched as they sprang into action ... even though there was no sign of any fire. We later learned that they found a melted down lamp in the reception area ... so it could have been very nasty had it blazed up and spread, but kudos to the fire alarm system and the Welly fire guys who were amazingly calm and efficient.

4 am in Willis Street ... lots of sleepy folk and a few hunky fire guys!!

Goodbye to The Boy

The last few days we've been staying with my brother and his family, cluttering up their house with our backpacks and cases and last-minute frantic organising and phoning and chasing up of documents etc. It's been a non-stop whirl since the beginning of Jan, but at last we are out of the flat with boxes shipped and cases packed.

On Jan 22nd, The Boy left on his own Big Trip - he'll be spending a year or so over in the UK before joining us in New Zealand, hopefully in Jan 2010 or thereabouts.

Da Boy, Livi and best buddy Brent!

Bye to Granny and Grandpa ... lots of tears and love...



Last hugs, jokes and advice from Dad!


The three of us together ... last group shot for quite a while ...


And he's off! :-)

(After this I made like the little piggy .. cried all the way home! )

Counting Down

The Final Countdown is in progress! Today being 14th January, that means ten days to go! Well, ten until The Boy leaves and eleven until Livi and I go.

The flat is almost empty. We sorted out and threw out and the left over stuff went into the yard sale piles ...






... which we held last Saturday morning! It went brilliantly and we cleared almost two-thirds of it in five hours! Yay! Then we started filling the boxes for shipping and ended up with four tea-chests and three book boxes - and that is it! Apart from our bags, those seven boxes are the sum total of what we'll be taking with us to our new life in NZ (and even that feels like too much ... but I'm sure that once they arrive - three months from now - we'll probably be very glad we filled them!) I'm amazed at what we managed to squash in .. books, mainly, but also stuff like my favorite duvet, a persian rug, an old-fashioned electric clock I once bought at a yard sale, teddy bears and board games and photographs and DVDs and CDs and so on...



The boxes shipped on Monday and the guy from the shipping company posed very happily for a picture - in fact, he did it so smoothly that I am quite sure I'm not the first person to have asked him to 'smile for the camera'! LOL!


So now we are down to the bare essentials: a few mattresses, TV, laptop and family computer. Most of the furniture has been sold - the fridge goes tonight and there's a guy coming to see the coffee table on which this laptop now rests!


Hopefully the updates will be a lot more frequent now as the Final Countdown continues!

Progress Report - Step Two

Step Two, you may recall, was Find A Job!

Here's is where it got weird. There's supposed to be this huge shortage of nurses in NZ, yet did anyone rush to get back to me when I applied?

Nope.

We want to settle in Wellington, so I concentrated my job search there. Answered some ads, sent off a general letter of enquiry to several facilities and kept my eyes open, checking the job sites regularly. From all of that, I got only one fairly quick reply and set a date for an interview (which was almost a month away due to the busy diaries of the two managers involved!). While waiting, I got a bit edgy so I contacted two agencies - one here in SA, and the other in NZ - Geneva Health. Within days, the local agency came back to me with two "fantastic opportunities" - their interpretation and mine of 'fantastic' were clearly not even on the same planet ... but Geneva, on the other hand, arranged a telephonic interview for me with a really great-sounding rest home in Karori, which is about 4 kms from Welly CBD. They phoned, we chatted, they said they were impressed with me, I was certainly impressed with them - then they offered me a managerial position at $10,000 pa more than the previous agency had offered. Woo hoo!! I said YES!

Now we're going to be getting my work visa organized and a student visa for Livi. OH, and in the mean time, a few of the places I wrote to initially have been writing back, wanting to organize interviews... but too late! Seems like NZ runs on Africa time too ....

Four weeks ago I took a Big Leap Of Faith - and booked our air tickets! We fly to Welly on 23rd January 2009. Now at least I'll have a job when we get there! Whew! :-)

Progress Report - Step One

This adventure started back in June when we decided to Do This Thing! Steps needed to make it happen were as follows:

1. Get registered as RN in New Zealand.
2. Find a job and get a work permit.
3. Go.

So I started the paper trail in mid-June - requested police clearance, requested three references, requested the SANC to send over verification and transcripts and contacted a few agencies to find out about getting a job as an RN. The police clearances took FOREVER as they kept losing things and sending them to me piecemeal, but eventually, by early September I had them all. The SANC also took FOREVER to process my request, and they too sent my docs to NZ in early September. Yay for that!

Then the NZNC wrote back (by snail mail nogal!) with a string of queries. One was their mistake - they thought my certified copied were photocopies of certified copies. Duh! Then they said the SANC had given them a wrong verification number - which they had! Took a week to sort that one out. Then they wanted a hard copy of my IELTS results - they had already verified them online but they wanted the Piece Of Paper! From next year, IELTS will be compulsory for all foreign nurses but they made it compulsory for SA nurses from August this year - and did not put that info on the website or the application forms. The bad news was that my IELTS results expired about three days before their letter requesting it arrived in my mail box. The good news was that I wrote them a two page email explaining why I thought they should waive the requirement - and they agreed to do so! Yay again. To rewrite the IELTS exam would have meant a two-month delay and would have cost me almost R2000.00.

Finally, I got a letter dated 9th October from the NZNC telling me my registration has been approved.

Double YAY! Step One is now complete. I've started on Step Two ...