In the mean time this is a bit of a selection of before/after Sunday's shake, rattle and rolling...
Monday, July 29, 2013
Photo Album
Hopefully this link will take you to an album of photos to keep your eye on if you want to see what and where we're up to... "Do we actually live here?!"
In the mean time this is a bit of a selection of before/after Sunday's shake, rattle and rolling...
In the mean time this is a bit of a selection of before/after Sunday's shake, rattle and rolling...
Sunday, July 28, 2013
First World Problems
Well, here we are...I started this (using that term VERY loosely) at 2 1/2 weeks in and now suddenly we've hit the 5 1/2 week mark...one thing I've definitely learned is that time goes VERY quickly when you're living down-under-and-to-the-right-a-bit!!
There are a multitude of reasons that I decided to call this post First World Problems at the time, and no doubt they were all HIGHLY amusing; including such gems as the fact that the flight didn't have the films we wanted to watch or seats that lay flat, our apartment doesn't have a bath so we're forced to use the hotel jacuzzi whenever we want a soak, (natural disasters aside) the weather is so warm we've not been able to go skiing yet (I laugh in the face of your heatwave Britain ) and, most devastatingly of all, not one member of bar staff seems to know what a spritzer is- leaving me no choice but to try a cacophony of cocktails out of an increasingly bizarre range of receptacles (tea pots, mason jars, anything but an actual glass). Alas though it has been too long to send you a list of complaints so I shall start with an apology...
I'm sorry it's taken so long to write...though I expect you don't mind...but I still feel a bit bad. It's not that I 've not been thinking about you all lots- it's more I've been too busy hunting down your every move on social networking sites to write!
I was talking to a friend about this earlier and why- even with a self confessed total inability to write any form of journal- it is really easy to blog when you're travelling; but not as easy as I thought it'd be when you actually move somewhere new. The fact is, it's not very exciting, it's not moving around doing/experiencing something new all the time that just has to be shared (boasted about!), it's just every day life: same as yours but upside down and with better weather...and cinemas.
(...I'll come to that....)
So what exactly have we been doing with these weeks that I claim have gone so quickly then??
The first week was spent very much in limbo. Arriving to an empty shell of a flat with literally nothing but the bed we rented from the hotel (I should explain our apartment block, Museum Apartments is attached to the Museum Art Hotel http://www.museumhotel.co.nz/) was interesting but definitely gave us the impetus to avidly run from jet lag while trying to turn the shell into a home. Jet lag did have it's own laughs mind, with little moments like the time I stared with great confusion at the "emergency wok" we'd bought and it's slowly congealing and ever cool contents on the hob for a good 10/15min before working out that we were in fact the proud owners of our very own induction hob (posh words for a hob that's fussy about the type of pots and pans and, indeed, "emergency woks" you use on it) but sadly not our first in house hot meal.
Still, we battled on and by the end of the first week here we were proud owners of phones, bank accounts, IRD number (tax code) applications and a lot of furniture that was actually our own. Just not with us. Yup, that was the weekend the 200km/hr winds came to greet us and cancelled our delivery... partially because the van couldn't drive in such high winds, partially because the roads couldn't be used in such high winds; due to the rather inconvenient sea/boulder to tarmac ratio that arrived with them. However, this did prove a good opportunity to test our building's earthquake proof foundations. These involve rubber and bearings and general cleverness and engineering that afford the building some "give" in the event of a quake, meaning that they can move with the ground....or as it turns out, the wind. It is a bizarre feeling, seeming to be on a boat swaying with tide, when in fact your on the 7th floor of a building...and not one Mr T was entirely sure he believed until the water started splashing around the toilet bowl.
So the wind blew us into a very sociable and exploratory few weeks, visiting the family here (who we can't thank enough for their incredible welcome. A lot of LOVELY meals and hospitality, the introduction to many new friends, meet up groups and even the loan of a car and a TV, have all greatly added to our Shell-to-Home project and things wouldn't be the same, or nearly as fun with out them, so, again,THANK YOU ALL) and checking out the various bays and beaches around the city, of which there are many.
The thing I love about Wellington, that drew a staunch pair of country bumpkins out here in the first place, is how incredibly eclectic it is. One minute you can be in the CBD (central business district) but walk across a few roads and your at the harbour, drive a few and you can choose to be in the hills, nature reserves or at a beach that feels so remote you feel like you must have driven for hours. As I say, when it's not horrific and terrifying, the weather has been beautiful and sunny and relatively warm- we've even managed a few outdoor dinners on the harbour, so perfect exploratory weather.
I think so far my favourite "discovery" (because don't be fooled by the sprinkling of houses, we were DEFINITELY the only people in the world by the time we arrived...well, us and the goat) is a place called Makara Beach, about 20/30 minutes out of the city. A stunning place, that suits us both perfectly as it's beach (for me!) surrounded by hills (for Mr T), topped off by a small river estuary. We (Mr T) even heroically saved the life of a storm battered shark there!!! (*disclaimer, apparently if you want to talk in real terms it was a dog fish who may/must've (ie: it's a mystery) been dropped by a fisherman). We need to go back and explore it further as, though the sun was shining, it was still a tad too windy for the cliff walk that would've taken us to the WW2 gun emplacements and then onto the, clearly well positioned, wind farm.
We've also had a little jaunt slightly further afield up to Palmerston North, where we learnt that it is imperative, if you go exploring in anyway here to bring your walking boots with you! (No matter how mild you intend your Bear Grills impersonation being.)
There were some lovely, naughty individuals who ignored our request of no wedding presents and instead bought us some vouchers, giving us something to do when we got here. One of these was for a massage up in PN, so it seemed rude not to celebrate our new car and our month anniversary with a mini break and a massage. It was a blissful and slothernly escape, as it should be, and one I think we'll have to do again (with the boots and with out the massage bliss bubble) to enable us to discover sites like, "The Bridge to Nowhere" and the rest of Manawatu Gorge. As it is we got home just in time, for storm number 2 which saw all of the roads in/out of the area PN is in closed due to the rain and more wind (a mere breeze at 165km/hr) etc...but this also meant that we could do a bit more furniture shopping and order our sofas (including one EXTREMELY comfortable sofa bed, thus completing your bedroom ready for when you get here) and reclaim our lounge floor from aaaaallllllll our DVD's and CD's (while reminiscing about how laughably eclectic that collection is!)
The following weeks bought work interviews, jazz shows, (more) massages, cocktail nights, lunches, dinners, bike buying (and desperately trying to remember how to ride-ing), as well as fire dancing, stilt walking, Maori (Te Reo) and Bobbi Brown beautifying lessons, some cinema outings (Oh yeah, why cinema is better here....it's half the price, even for the expensive seats, 3D is actually 3D, you get to sit in actual real life La-Z-boys and have waiter service drinks and even meals bought to you. I bet their pop corn isn't made of card board either) and earthquakes. Lots of earthquakes. At the last official count I saw we were at 1,500 (http://www.geonet.org.nz/), but there've been plenty since then too. I don't envy the person in charge of keeping score, let's not distract them!
The first quake we felt was a bit bizarre really and by the time we'd had our very Surrey conversation about how, it couldn't be a big truck passing (duh you live on the 7th floor guys, how big do they make trucks here?!) and wasn't it a bit of an inconvenience because we (Mr T) had eggs on the hob but we supposed we'd best get under a door way, it had stopped. We didn't really feel any of the subsequent aftershocks until Sunday....which is lucky because Saturday was stilt walking class day and I'm not convinced that would've made for a winning combination! What you could feel was a strange feeling of sea sickness though, like you're body knows it's being shaken around even if you're not consciously aware of it. Sunday put pay to that though and made sure we were very much aware, starting with a rude awakening at around 7am, shaking us straight out of bed and under the door way. The lack of conversation this time though may've been more about the hour! Despite the loss of a reed diffuser the novelty factor was still seeing us through- mostly as we tried to work out just how the reeds had made such a ninja-like protest at their impending demise that they ended up spread between two rooms, over the breakfast bar and even with one hanging out of our loft hatch!
It was the Sunday night tremor that killed the "fun" for us....and from the sounds of it, a lot of Wellington, who stopped joking with Christchurch about stealing their rocking and rolling thunder and started advising people about "Grab and Go" emergency kits and structural scrutiny etc. Coming in the immediate wake of a post unpacking spring clean and not to mention the second round of ornament selection pruning and a meticulous display procedure, Sunday's quake was one big (scary) arse slap in the face.
Our beautifully, brand newly finished, shell no more, 100% home was shaking like things only shake on the news or in museum simulators. There wasn't much more we could do but cower under our dining table as items started to crash and tumble around and your bedroom was totally, utterly, frustratingly and soberingly wrecked by our brand new, fitted and filled bookshelves heaving their contents or falling entirely to the floor. Evidently one of the downsides of allowing a building to move with the earth and then choosing to live at the top of it, is that you move too...a lot....and so does your stuff....a lot. Having felt like we'd just finally finished settling in and making the flat home, it was really disheartening to look around it in those hours after that one hit. To be honest I spent most of the evening still under the table after my first few attempts to move were met with more shaking- Mr T was braver and at least made it to the chair. We didn't really tidy up that evening though, too busy feeling sorry for ourselves and frustrated...and unsure if that was the prelude or the grande finale.
Apparently it was stronger than the big Christchurch one, but we were just lucky it wasn't under the city as theirs was. We were also lucky that there's been a big drive to quake proof much of Wellington so, for the most part, building's mainly suffered superficial damage; though the city was pretty much on lock-down for all of Monday and some places further into the week as debris was cleared up and checks completed. More over, we were lucky it happened on a Sunday night; it seems that it's not just us ruddy naive foreigners that didn't think to secure things to the walls in our buildings, but a lot of offices made the same mistake too and have also suffered a lot of damage to floating ceilings and pipes etc...though I think, for the most part, they're sorted enough that people have returned to work, although many in different offices.
A few buildings are still closed though and there's a road near us that's been evacuated due to a mysteriously owner less (and building-less) lift shaft remaining from a property development that went bust some 30 years ago. How they've just noticed it I'm not sure, but anyway...it's now unsound and so being attached to the building next door until a more permanent solution can be found.
So we rattled into Monday and Tuesday with ever increasing numbers of aftershocks, but ever decreasing magnitudes and statistical likelihoods of another big shake up and back we seem to be at the sea sickness levels of movement....which....in wonderful hindsight is the FAAAAAR preferable alternative. We've stopped sulking about the state of the flat and tidied (well, Mr T did really) it all up pretty much, just need to fix the shelves and re-reclaim the floor...possibly thinking in a more physics than aesthetics based way about how we load them this time...and of course NAILING THE BUGGERS TO THE WALL!!!!
I can't lie I still jump when the building makes anything that even vaguely resembles the weird pre-shaking lurch noise, am apparently now feeling phantom quakes and no longer think much of almighty Mother Nature's sense of humour...but the sun's out, the birds are singing, it's the weekend, which means that the city is flooded with markets and music, the Wellington International Film festival is starting and we might finally get a go at sailing tomorrow and away on our skiing mini break next week....
There are a multitude of reasons that I decided to call this post First World Problems at the time, and no doubt they were all HIGHLY amusing; including such gems as the fact that the flight didn't have the films we wanted to watch or seats that lay flat, our apartment doesn't have a bath so we're forced to use the hotel jacuzzi whenever we want a soak, (natural disasters aside) the weather is so warm we've not been able to go skiing yet (I laugh in the face of your heatwave Britain ) and, most devastatingly of all, not one member of bar staff seems to know what a spritzer is- leaving me no choice but to try a cacophony of cocktails out of an increasingly bizarre range of receptacles (tea pots, mason jars, anything but an actual glass). Alas though it has been too long to send you a list of complaints so I shall start with an apology...
I'm sorry it's taken so long to write...though I expect you don't mind...but I still feel a bit bad. It's not that I 've not been thinking about you all lots- it's more I've been too busy hunting down your every move on social networking sites to write!
I was talking to a friend about this earlier and why- even with a self confessed total inability to write any form of journal- it is really easy to blog when you're travelling; but not as easy as I thought it'd be when you actually move somewhere new. The fact is, it's not very exciting, it's not moving around doing/experiencing something new all the time that just has to be shared (boasted about!), it's just every day life: same as yours but upside down and with better weather...and cinemas.
(...I'll come to that....)
So what exactly have we been doing with these weeks that I claim have gone so quickly then??
The first week was spent very much in limbo. Arriving to an empty shell of a flat with literally nothing but the bed we rented from the hotel (I should explain our apartment block, Museum Apartments is attached to the Museum Art Hotel http://www.museumhotel.co.nz/) was interesting but definitely gave us the impetus to avidly run from jet lag while trying to turn the shell into a home. Jet lag did have it's own laughs mind, with little moments like the time I stared with great confusion at the "emergency wok" we'd bought and it's slowly congealing and ever cool contents on the hob for a good 10/15min before working out that we were in fact the proud owners of our very own induction hob (posh words for a hob that's fussy about the type of pots and pans and, indeed, "emergency woks" you use on it) but sadly not our first in house hot meal.
Still, we battled on and by the end of the first week here we were proud owners of phones, bank accounts, IRD number (tax code) applications and a lot of furniture that was actually our own. Just not with us. Yup, that was the weekend the 200km/hr winds came to greet us and cancelled our delivery... partially because the van couldn't drive in such high winds, partially because the roads couldn't be used in such high winds; due to the rather inconvenient sea/boulder to tarmac ratio that arrived with them. However, this did prove a good opportunity to test our building's earthquake proof foundations. These involve rubber and bearings and general cleverness and engineering that afford the building some "give" in the event of a quake, meaning that they can move with the ground....or as it turns out, the wind. It is a bizarre feeling, seeming to be on a boat swaying with tide, when in fact your on the 7th floor of a building...and not one Mr T was entirely sure he believed until the water started splashing around the toilet bowl.
So the wind blew us into a very sociable and exploratory few weeks, visiting the family here (who we can't thank enough for their incredible welcome. A lot of LOVELY meals and hospitality, the introduction to many new friends, meet up groups and even the loan of a car and a TV, have all greatly added to our Shell-to-Home project and things wouldn't be the same, or nearly as fun with out them, so, again,THANK YOU ALL) and checking out the various bays and beaches around the city, of which there are many.
The thing I love about Wellington, that drew a staunch pair of country bumpkins out here in the first place, is how incredibly eclectic it is. One minute you can be in the CBD (central business district) but walk across a few roads and your at the harbour, drive a few and you can choose to be in the hills, nature reserves or at a beach that feels so remote you feel like you must have driven for hours. As I say, when it's not horrific and terrifying, the weather has been beautiful and sunny and relatively warm- we've even managed a few outdoor dinners on the harbour, so perfect exploratory weather.
I think so far my favourite "discovery" (because don't be fooled by the sprinkling of houses, we were DEFINITELY the only people in the world by the time we arrived...well, us and the goat) is a place called Makara Beach, about 20/30 minutes out of the city. A stunning place, that suits us both perfectly as it's beach (for me!) surrounded by hills (for Mr T), topped off by a small river estuary. We (Mr T) even heroically saved the life of a storm battered shark there!!! (*disclaimer, apparently if you want to talk in real terms it was a dog fish who may/must've (ie: it's a mystery) been dropped by a fisherman). We need to go back and explore it further as, though the sun was shining, it was still a tad too windy for the cliff walk that would've taken us to the WW2 gun emplacements and then onto the, clearly well positioned, wind farm.
We've also had a little jaunt slightly further afield up to Palmerston North, where we learnt that it is imperative, if you go exploring in anyway here to bring your walking boots with you! (No matter how mild you intend your Bear Grills impersonation being.)
There were some lovely, naughty individuals who ignored our request of no wedding presents and instead bought us some vouchers, giving us something to do when we got here. One of these was for a massage up in PN, so it seemed rude not to celebrate our new car and our month anniversary with a mini break and a massage. It was a blissful and slothernly escape, as it should be, and one I think we'll have to do again (with the boots and with out the massage bliss bubble) to enable us to discover sites like, "The Bridge to Nowhere" and the rest of Manawatu Gorge. As it is we got home just in time, for storm number 2 which saw all of the roads in/out of the area PN is in closed due to the rain and more wind (a mere breeze at 165km/hr) etc...but this also meant that we could do a bit more furniture shopping and order our sofas (including one EXTREMELY comfortable sofa bed, thus completing your bedroom ready for when you get here) and reclaim our lounge floor from aaaaallllllll our DVD's and CD's (while reminiscing about how laughably eclectic that collection is!)
The following weeks bought work interviews, jazz shows, (more) massages, cocktail nights, lunches, dinners, bike buying (and desperately trying to remember how to ride-ing), as well as fire dancing, stilt walking, Maori (Te Reo) and Bobbi Brown beautifying lessons, some cinema outings (Oh yeah, why cinema is better here....it's half the price, even for the expensive seats, 3D is actually 3D, you get to sit in actual real life La-Z-boys and have waiter service drinks and even meals bought to you. I bet their pop corn isn't made of card board either) and earthquakes. Lots of earthquakes. At the last official count I saw we were at 1,500 (http://www.geonet.org.nz/), but there've been plenty since then too. I don't envy the person in charge of keeping score, let's not distract them!
The first quake we felt was a bit bizarre really and by the time we'd had our very Surrey conversation about how, it couldn't be a big truck passing (duh you live on the 7th floor guys, how big do they make trucks here?!) and wasn't it a bit of an inconvenience because we (Mr T) had eggs on the hob but we supposed we'd best get under a door way, it had stopped. We didn't really feel any of the subsequent aftershocks until Sunday....which is lucky because Saturday was stilt walking class day and I'm not convinced that would've made for a winning combination! What you could feel was a strange feeling of sea sickness though, like you're body knows it's being shaken around even if you're not consciously aware of it. Sunday put pay to that though and made sure we were very much aware, starting with a rude awakening at around 7am, shaking us straight out of bed and under the door way. The lack of conversation this time though may've been more about the hour! Despite the loss of a reed diffuser the novelty factor was still seeing us through- mostly as we tried to work out just how the reeds had made such a ninja-like protest at their impending demise that they ended up spread between two rooms, over the breakfast bar and even with one hanging out of our loft hatch!
It was the Sunday night tremor that killed the "fun" for us....and from the sounds of it, a lot of Wellington, who stopped joking with Christchurch about stealing their rocking and rolling thunder and started advising people about "Grab and Go" emergency kits and structural scrutiny etc. Coming in the immediate wake of a post unpacking spring clean and not to mention the second round of ornament selection pruning and a meticulous display procedure, Sunday's quake was one big (scary) arse slap in the face.
Our beautifully, brand newly finished, shell no more, 100% home was shaking like things only shake on the news or in museum simulators. There wasn't much more we could do but cower under our dining table as items started to crash and tumble around and your bedroom was totally, utterly, frustratingly and soberingly wrecked by our brand new, fitted and filled bookshelves heaving their contents or falling entirely to the floor. Evidently one of the downsides of allowing a building to move with the earth and then choosing to live at the top of it, is that you move too...a lot....and so does your stuff....a lot. Having felt like we'd just finally finished settling in and making the flat home, it was really disheartening to look around it in those hours after that one hit. To be honest I spent most of the evening still under the table after my first few attempts to move were met with more shaking- Mr T was braver and at least made it to the chair. We didn't really tidy up that evening though, too busy feeling sorry for ourselves and frustrated...and unsure if that was the prelude or the grande finale.
Apparently it was stronger than the big Christchurch one, but we were just lucky it wasn't under the city as theirs was. We were also lucky that there's been a big drive to quake proof much of Wellington so, for the most part, building's mainly suffered superficial damage; though the city was pretty much on lock-down for all of Monday and some places further into the week as debris was cleared up and checks completed. More over, we were lucky it happened on a Sunday night; it seems that it's not just us ruddy naive foreigners that didn't think to secure things to the walls in our buildings, but a lot of offices made the same mistake too and have also suffered a lot of damage to floating ceilings and pipes etc...though I think, for the most part, they're sorted enough that people have returned to work, although many in different offices.
A few buildings are still closed though and there's a road near us that's been evacuated due to a mysteriously owner less (and building-less) lift shaft remaining from a property development that went bust some 30 years ago. How they've just noticed it I'm not sure, but anyway...it's now unsound and so being attached to the building next door until a more permanent solution can be found.
So we rattled into Monday and Tuesday with ever increasing numbers of aftershocks, but ever decreasing magnitudes and statistical likelihoods of another big shake up and back we seem to be at the sea sickness levels of movement....which....in wonderful hindsight is the FAAAAAR preferable alternative. We've stopped sulking about the state of the flat and tidied (well, Mr T did really) it all up pretty much, just need to fix the shelves and re-reclaim the floor...possibly thinking in a more physics than aesthetics based way about how we load them this time...and of course NAILING THE BUGGERS TO THE WALL!!!!
I can't lie I still jump when the building makes anything that even vaguely resembles the weird pre-shaking lurch noise, am apparently now feeling phantom quakes and no longer think much of almighty Mother Nature's sense of humour...but the sun's out, the birds are singing, it's the weekend, which means that the city is flooded with markets and music, the Wellington International Film festival is starting and we might finally get a go at sailing tomorrow and away on our skiing mini break next week....
*********
Just a quick PS:
Sorry for buggering on soo long, will try to keep that to a minimum.
PPS:
Some photos will get sorted and posted ASAP
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