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.