Good things are a'happening

1. My stuff arrived in Christchurch's port - Lyttelton - yesterday and is now going through customs. It should be in my possession by early next week at the latest. I won't have my bike for this weekend's bike ride, but I cannot complain - it took less than 6 weeks to get here.

2. I got the first portion of my permanent residency application in today. This is key because my medical certificate expired (theoretically) today, and if I can get Them to use my certificate, it saves me a lot of time and money, not to mention blood - we all know that is in my best interest. Now, I just need Penn State to send me my transcript and I will be ready to go. I don't plan on staying here forever, but there are definite tax benefits to residency and I get to partake in the socialized national health insurance. Plus, in a couple years, I could get dual citizenship - how cool is that?!?!

3. I have made arrangements for Orli to get here finally. She will be leaving Baltimore on July 28th, so you will have to get any visits to my folks to see her in before the end of July. I cannot wait until she gets here!

Quite an amazing turn of events

Okay, so not really that amazing in the Grand Scheme of Things, but I am still pretty pleased. I have been playing on the company coed soccer team for three weeks now, and tonight, for some reason that I still haven't grasped, Coach (that's Sean - he's a Manc) put me in as keeper. Yup, the silly Yank became a keeper for a team full of Pommies and Kiwis. NZ, Australia and the UK are better at soccer than America and I like to think that I embody that pretty well. In spite of all this, Sean threw me in as goaltender and I was probably 5-1 on saves to goals; not bad as far as I am concerned. Plus, we scored 3 to their 4 goals (although the final score was 3 to 6 since they got more points for goals scored by girls). Still, a satisfying night - maybe I do have a future as a pro ball player after all!

Never fear, pics from this last weekend's adventure are on their way!

Oh, and today's Phrase of the Week: Whinging Pommie...I love it! (you have to look it up to get the definition, and then use it!)

Pesach in Christchurch

I am sitting on my bed right now (my flatmates have decided to adopt a cat they found outside - brilliant!) letting a stomach full of matzah ball soup digest. Not quite my grandma's recipe, but quite decent all the same!


I did two seders this year - the first night at the Chabad House and the second night at the local synagogue. Now, a warning: for those of you unlucky enough not to be Jewish, you might not get all this. So, back to the story. The first night, of course, has all the local families doing their own seders, so I, without a family (insert dramatic sigh here) went to the local Chabad house, not without quite a bit of trepidation. You see, Chabadniks can be the Jewish equivalent of those college kids who join the campus police department to give out parking tickets because they really feel, deep down inside, that parking scofflaws are the scum of the earth. Okay, it's a stretch. In any case, I had little to fear, because the Chabad in Christchurch serves more as a community centre (as there is nothing of that sort here) so they tone down the proselytizing. The seder was mobbed - they spent a good half hour at the beginning rearranging the room so the 80-100 people present could all have a seat. I'd say the room was probably 2/3rds full of Israelis, who are culturally Jewish but not so much religiously. The whole thing was quite chaotic, with that many people and so little room. The Chabadniks tried to do the service a bit in English, but the Haggadahs were all Hebrew and with so many native Hebrew speakers in the room, it was almost hopeless. I had an Israeli family on side of me - the son and daughter-in-law had moved up to the Northland above Auckland a couple years back and the mother and father were in town visiting. On my left was Karen, who was on a working holiday from Chile and spoke as much Hebrew as I (none) and on my right some other Israelis that didn't introduce themselves. It was a good night in spite of the chaos, and I ended up staying there until 1am, helping clean up at the end. Would I go back? Well, not unless I have no choice, but I didn't so it did the trick. It was nice to see so much Judaism at once in Christchurch - even if the bulk of it was imported from Israel on tourist visas and not particularly religious - because this city really is homogenously white and Anglican.

That's all I have time for now. Part two will be later...

Finally, a cell phone!

It seems that last night and today, the stars lined up for me. Last night, my new flatmate Nick invited me along with two of his mates for pub trivia at one of the local bars. Well, all of my practice in the smoky dens of Denver and Seattle proved quite handy - the trivia here seemed quite easy in comparison. We smoked the competition and coasted into first place, and are now in the running for some national competition with a $5,000 prize. Not bad for a Sunday night.
My Vodafone cell phone arrived at work shortly after I did, so now I can stay connected with the rest of the world after I leave work at night. It also makes for a handy repository for phone numbers from girls, or, erm, guys (that is a different story) that I meet along the way.
After work, I stopped by ol' Johnson's Grocery to stock up on my Passover supplies - two boxes of cardboard-like matzah, a container of matzah meal, and one matzah ball soup mix all the way from Jerusalem. Something tells me I will be going on the Passover Diet this year.
When done, I ran over to the local indoor sports arena. You see, Beca sponsors a bunch of athletic teams and there are two indoor soccer (trans. "football" for you Kiwis) playing at the moment. They needed some more firepower, and although I have not played since 4th grade, I figured it couldn't hurt to try again. It was a blast and I think I managed to avoid making a fool of myself enough to be invited back, although only time will tell.

Oh, I guess I forgot the important part - if you want my New Zealand cell phone, it is (+64) 021-105-8171. Don't you be going around and writing this on the stalls of mens' loos in disreputable bars, now...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I have always figured that a measure of how well-integrated you are in whatever locale you call “home” was how often you ran into people you knew under unexpected circumstances – the supermarket, the bus, your jail cell, the local Starbucks or the other local Starbucks, etc. Well, it has already started for me – I was walking home this evening from work and, lo and behold, in front of Christchurch Casino (yes, there is only one here – we don’t have any Indian reservations!) I ran into an older couple I have met several times at the synagogue. Assimilation has begun!
So, I guess it is high time I put down some observations I have had over the last two weeks on average Kiwi life, if you can ever call anything around me “average”…

• Dogs don’t seem to be such a big deal here. Maybe it is a function of where I have been (downtown, mostly), but I have seen very few dogs, being walked around, or playing in the park or at the beach or going for jogs, or drinking at the bar (good lord, I miss the White Horse!). There have been a handful of gorgeous goldens about, but not too many other big dogs either. When you figure there are parts of Belltown (and Denver, no doubt!) with more dogs than kids, this is a pretty big change.
• Cost-wise, just about everything is more expensive here. Everyone says that this is because retailers have to ship everything across the big globe to get it down here, but I don’t buy it. It’s a bad excuse, especially when concerning food – either the food is more expensive because it is shipped in from abroad (a lot of manufactured food) or it is more expensive because New Zealand exports all of it abroad (like lamb and cheese, for example). On the flip side, everything financial is simpler here – sales tax might be a stunning 12.5% but it is wrapped up into all prices – the price you see is the price you pay. Everyone pays with EFTPOS, which is essentially just like using your debit card, as much as or more so than cash. And it’s not like the imaginary world of Visa commercials – you actually run into stores that are cash and EFTPOS only – every store has a card reader and a keyboard for your PIN. Car insurance is a simple add-on when you buy your car (no complicated processes to go through!) and you don’t have to bother figuring out a tip when dining out! So nice, it almost makes paying $15 for a Jaeger bomb worthwhile.
• When getting food, at least at fast-food places, I have found the portions to be more expensive (see last point) and smaller too. There is a burrito place next to my building that could be compared to Chipotle or Qdoba, at least in the sense that they are all businesses that give out “food” in exchange for currency. I will go on a rant about the state of Mexican “food” at another time. The burritos are made in the same open assembly manner, with your choice of meat, beans, salsa, toppings, etc. But the burrito comes out maybe 2/3rds the size of a Chipotle burrito, and the accompanying Coke is 325ml. This does seem healthier (although there are definite problems with obesity down here too) and I guess I will get used to it, but I miss that satisfying so-full-I-am-almost-sick feeling I get when I finish a burrito as big as my head.
• New Zealand promotes itself as this über-environmental country, but that is only half-true. Everyone bikes into work here – the city is nice and flat and it is municipal policy that all new roads and intersections must have bike lanes, so riding around is pretty easy. In fact, one of my coworkers was recently promoted to Associate at work, which meant he could get a company car or the equivalent raise. He said the company sometimes has to force cars on people because no one was taking them – everyone bikes instead. It is also really nice to see how cognizant everyone is of carbon-dioxide emissions here – a lot of major companies advertise their carbon-neutral states and it is a stated company policy at work to minimize our carbon footprint – can you imagine my old employer doing that? Only if it impacted the bottom line!
• We watched a movie at work last week called “Snail” – it was 20 minutes of in-depth recap on a coal strip mine on the west side of the country; they were planning an expansion and discovered some rare snails in their way. Under the terms of the mine permit, they had to save this rare snail and actually try to encourage its recovery, so there is this 10-year-plus effort, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, to go through by hand every inch of the mine expansion, collect all snails and their eggs, and relocate them to a preserve with predator control. I wonder what predators snails have? I think the more important question would be: what is not a threat to snails? And I am not limiting that question to animate objects either. Anyway, back to the snails: not only did they relocate all of the snails, they also built a huge, state-of-the-art snail research and reproductive facility with huge refrigeration units and special worm cultivation (these are carnivorous snails; did I mention that?) to attempt to get the snails on the road to species recovery. Somehow, I have trouble seeing Big Oil doing that back in the States.
• On the flip side, I am told they just started recycling in a large scale maybe 5 or 10 years ago. What?!?! I remember recycling in the wilds of New Mexico when I was in middle or high school! And as winter approaches, I am told to expect a cloud of smog to periodically envelope the Canterbury plains from all the wood- and coal-burning heat sources in the city and the surrounding suburbs. More a scene you’d expect to find in a third-world country, or Albuquerque at least. Well, at the very least, New Zealand is well on its way to cleaning up.
• I have been told repeatedly that, as an American with my sexy foreign accent (funny, I thought everyone here had the weird accent), I get some kind of huge advantage with the ladies. Well, gents, I hate to disappoint you, but I have yet to use any of these alleged “dating super-powers” (a Kiwi descriptor, not mine), so I cannot validate this. In fact, I have not yet met any Americans dating Kiwis (or Americans who weren’t tourists or students), so I really have no thoughts on this yet.
• New Zealand has high taxes and universal health care, so it seems like quite the socialist state; you know, a nanny government. Well, this manifests itself in many odd ways. On TV, it seems that a good 10-20% of the commercials are warning against bad behaviour - smoking, not recycling, and the most popular of all - bad driving. Kiwis are not the greatest of drivers, but I imagine they cannot hold a candle to the stellar Miami motorists or the dog-eat-dog world of driving in Midtown Manhattan. But if you watch just 15 minutes of TV here, you'd think there was mass carnage on the roads daily.
• Kiwis seem to have some unnatural infatuation with Jack Johnson, although since I like his music, I cannot object.

Well, that is all I have for now. Sorry, I haven’t made it on to the front page of the local paper, The Press, but I will be sure to let you, my no-doubt adoring fans, know when that happens.

Important Time Announcement

Since we are upside-down over here in the Southern Hemisphere, Time works a little differently here. We are in the middle of fall right now, which means that Daylight Savings Time just ended today. This means that Christchurch is now 19 hours ahead of Seattle and 16 hours ahead of the East Coast. We are also 18 hours ahead of Denver and 17 hours ahead of Dubuque, if you are not doing math really well at this late hour. So, in conclusion, if for some crazy reason you are planning on calling me 1st thing in the morning, remember that it is now 0th thing in the morning.