Christmas Visitors

Steve was a bit pre-emptive with the previous blog, mainly I think because he didn't want to reveal the truth - that he was personally responsible for the Christmas wellbeing of many small children.

Yes, dear readers, this year Steve was Santa!

At Steve's work their Xmas do this year was at Victoria Bowling Club. It involved a few ends of bowls, followed by some food and some more ends of bowls (apparently if you roll a good bowl you call "good green"). I went along for the food after work and was lucky enough to catch Santa in action on behalf of his company. His "Ho Ho Hos" were very authentic and I think the 2 year olds were completely taken in by the very poor outfit, quite impressive given that Steve is frankly, not Santa shaped.

Santa attempts to disguise the cushion down his suit

The cushion down the suit helped of course but Steve made a tactical error in not using a belt to keep the trousers up. Let's just say the suit was not designed for men of his girth.

One of the interesting things about being an ex-pat and living in an appealing and low stress place which I didn't appreciate until now, is that you become a target for all your friends and relatives back home who suddenly have a brilliant excuse for making that once-in-a lifetime (or annual in the case of my parents!) trip. Over the past three weeks we have hosted three different sets of guests. Most of the ex-pats we know over here are either hosting guests over Christmas or have gone back to the UK. One guy I know has his parents-in-law visiting for a full five months.

Someone commented to me the other day that "as soon as you arrive everyone starts visiting. I use up half my leave each year showing people around". Apparently the guest volume settles down once visitors realise you're not leaving and anyway I imagine our guests will all start having children of their own soon so that will put the kybosh on most trips. It's great to see people though it has made for a very hectic couple of weeks!

Mum and Dad are in NZ at the moment but doing some travelling of their own. They stayed with us for a short while during which we did "Bike the Bays" in a howling gale. It is an annual group bike ride of 26km from the CBD to one of the nicest beaches in Wellington (Scorching Bay) and return. Half of the ride was easy, with a monster tailwind, the other half was challenging to say the least. Mum got blown right off the road at one point!

Mum, Dad and I at the half way point of the ride in Scorching Bay

During the same weekend we played a tennis tournament at our local club. Conditions were not ideal but Dad still managed to win the men's doubles with another "geriatric" as someone described the two of them!

We've now got Isabel and Paul visiting and we've managed to fit in quite a few activities, including a visit to Weta Workshop where we posed with an Uruk-hai.

Isabel, Lurtz and I

We also went to Kapiti Island which is a predator-free island about an hour north of Wellington. It is one of the few "open sanctuaries" you can visit in New Zealand and you can see many native species including some of the only 300 odd Takahe left in the world. The birdsong is incredible but it can be difficult to actually spot the birds making the sounds. I did spot bellbirds, saddlebacks, whiteheads, kereru, kaka, takahe, stitchbirds and weka though.

It was a misty day at the top of the hill after a very strenuous climb and this was the view we had!

Me, Paul and Isabel, the gorillas in the mist according to Paul

Right, we're off to see Avatar in 3D and I have to plan xmas dinner. Merry Christmas to all... Enjoy the festive season.

Jo and Steve

Christmas in Kiwiland

This time last year we were in Perth working at the grain depot, getting used to 28 degree days and driving hundreds of kms around WA on our days off. A year on and how things have changed! Now we have office jobs, 28 degrees would be highly unusual, and we're still trying to check out Wellington on our days off having been here 6 months. We're still looking for a house, the market is pretty bad here (i.e. there just isn't much of interest to us) and a place has to be extra special to warrant us transferring funds from the UK at a time of the strongest NZ Dollar for some years, so the search continues. One problem we've found is that in our preferred area (Newtown) most of the houses are small one or two bed cottages with no gardens, while we're after a three or four bed place with a garden. We have looked in other areas but Wellington is so hilly that a place that looks geographically close can turn out to be up a huge hill which would turn the hardiest cyclist's legs to jelly.

We've played a lot of tennis in October and November in some strange weather, and you can expect to see us playing the Pro tour soon ;) Steve is now the Kilbirnie TC club captain, the main gist of which seems to be knowing where all the club tennis balls are at any one time. Jo has really put in the hours with rowing and the rowing club have really valued her for her ability to ferry people around in our car! Actually Jo is gearing up for a novice regatta in February on Lake Karapiro (near Hamilton). The rowing training is up to 6 sessions a week including two early mornings!

Christmas in Wellington is a pretty low-key affair, although they do have the interesting tradition of Christmas parades in the lead up to Xmas. I'm not quite sure what the purpose of them is but they seem to be held in mid November which probably means the purpose is to get you Christmas shopping earlier. We don't feel very Christmassy and don't even have a Christmas tree at the moment but at least the weather is finally hotting up after what seems like months of rain and wind. Jo's parents are our next guests, arriving on Friday, so we will be having Christmas Day with them and doing a short trip to Wanganui while Jo does some rowing there after Christmas (the rowing never stops!)

November was an exciting time for New Zealand football, with a World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain which, should they win, would take them to the World Cup finals for the first time since 1982. The only thing I remember about World Cup 1982 was my Spain 82 t-shirt, which had a massive smiling orange with hands and legs, being 4 years old I probably didn't mind...

The Wellington public and some traffic cones glued to the All Whites World Cup match

We went to a big screen showing in the centre of Wellington, having failed to get any tickets. New Zealanders aren't interested in football generally, with the NZ club side that plays in the Australian league getting a pretty poor 5

000 people a match. But give them a sniff of glory and every man, woman and child is suddenly very interested. They're like the Manchester United of international football. So the tickets sold out in no time at all. The shops ran out of NZ football shirts, and there was the strange sight of buses full of people in white boiler suits bought from the plumbing store, white doctor's coats and dressing gowns. NZ were the underdogs but won 1-0, with Bahrain missing a penalty.

Jo's friend's next door neighbour's cat has had kittens. They were all very fluffy and different colours, and surrounded by 7 year olds begging their parents to let them take one home. We managed to resist.

The end of November saw a Hunter reunion on New Zealand soil. It was my sister Katy's first visit here and Jo's second visit, her first visit being a ski trip back in July. A week quickly passed during which time we did a road trip over to the South Island, had 3 days of glorious sunshine (I'm not sure how lucky they realised they were but then they had just come from Oz so maybe they think its normal), kayaked and walked a bit of the beautiful Abel Tasman coastal track and did a day going round the Marlborough vineyards, famous the world over for its whites and for the Hunter vineyard (unfortunately not a relative). And I got to ride on a mini steam train in Picton, hurrah!


Sister Katy coordinates the Great Britain kayaking team's Abel Tasman training camp



The walk north from Anchorage - where did all the water go?


Hurrah a vineyard just for Hunters.

So another Christmas is coming along, we anticipate this one will be pretty different from last year's drunken backpacker spectacular. But then again, we're not backpackers any more.