How's it going?

Well, again, it has been over a month since we last sent you news from NZ. Suppose life is taking over finally, which in some ways is a good sign that we are settling in more, but in other ways you'll find, makes for possibly boring reading .......! :o)

Wellington is a great size, nice and compact after living in London, but still with plenty of things to do - good cinemas, theatres, restaurants and bars. We actually haven't checked out too many bars yet, as we're still getting acclimatised to the beer, although having said that, there was a BrewNZ festival last week which did have some very good local beers from micro-breweries around the country, comparable to real ale in the UK. We went to a couple of the gigs too at the recent comedy festival and we saw 2 great comedians - one was a Geordie called Ross Noble, if you ever get to see him live, he's hilarious. The other was a Kiwi called Benjamin Crellin who was good too, quite dry, but some of the humour was very Kiwi (so we didn't get it)!

We've not had a chance to travel around much yet but are looking forward to doing some skiing - 4 hours drive to Mt Ruapehu (and season passes for equivalent of GBP90 if you buy them early enough, which is excellent value). There's plenty to do in and around Wellington, though, and it doesn't take long to escape the city. Graham swapped his shifts around a couple of weeks ago so that he worked through 7 days rather than his usual shift pattern - it meant that he then had 4 days off, so we decided to go on a little adventure!! We went off to Wanganui and Palmerston North - that was fun.

Graham and I were very proud of ourselves that we got the house sorted quite quickly ...... until last week that is!! One job that we had put off was sorting the garage out and packing all the storage boxes, paint, roofrack, ladder etc... away properly (rather than them being dumped down there!) We did this and were considering what type of shelving we needed to put up, but we thought we'd wait a while until our cashflow was looking a bit more healthy. Then last week the heavens opened and we were DELUGED with rain for about 2 days and it turns out that we have flooding problems in the garages below us, so, being on the ground, quite a lot of our stored stuff got completely soaked/ruined, so in some ways we wish we hadn't been quite so organised then perhaps the boxes wouldn't have been down there in the first place!

There are a couple of things we haven't yet got used to. We still keep converting all the $ prices into GBPs. This means that things generally appear to be very cheap. We must stop doing it because now that Graham has been earning NZ$ for a few months we are quickly realising that converting back is not a good way of working out your spending power! Another thing is the NZ driving - not so much the NZ drivers (although some of them could rival London drivers) but a couple of really odd (to us at least) road rules. If you are turning left from a main road into another street you have to give way to anyone coming from the opposite direction wanting to turn right into that street. WHAT!!!!??? This causes no end of confusion and some of the NZ drivers don't seem to understand the rule either. We have heard talk of them changing it, so hopefully things will improve. Another rule that we can't really comprehend is that you must park facing the same direction as the flow of traffic. We assume that this is to stop people from pulling across a road to park. We got a ticket when we were parked outside our flat in Talavera Terrace (which is a quiet narrow cul-de-sac) because we were parked facing the wrong way - this seemed pretty excessive, especially as we hadn't been aware of the rule beforehand. When Graham told his work colleagues they couldn't believe it either, one said that he had thought that it was a myth that they booked people for that offence. We wrote to the council, explained that we were ignorant Brits and (we're sure the UK councils wouldn't have done this) they waived the fine!

We're very excited as Pam (Graham's Mum) and Derek are planning to come out and see us in August and hopefully Helen (Graham's sister) and Phil will also be coming over too around that time and we are really made up about that. My Mum & Dad plan to come out later in the year. It will be so lovely to see them all and we are pleased that our house will be used to its full potential!

Well we'll sign off now until next month. Would love to get news from some of you who we've not heard from in a while . . . . . .

Love to all - Vida & Graham