Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! And many other seasons greetings for you all!
It has been a very long time since my last post as usual, but this time I do have a good excuse! My poor laptop has been being fully serviced and was just recently returned to me, running smooth and silent like never before! I think the poor techs at the IBM repair center in Wellington must have had a fun time giving my machine a full system transplant surgery of some kind! Cheers to them! They saved my poor precious’ life!
Strangely enough without a computer I have managed to keep myself fairly busy every day! This was helped largely in part by the fact my girlfriend has come back to NZ and since the 24th of Jan she has been here with her Grandma, Mum, and Dad. The whole family came on an semi-traditional Japanese holiday of no more than 10 days. The length of time is the traditional part, the activities and content on their vacation have been anything but traditional mind you. Nothing could really of prepared this unsuspecting, civilized and well mannered Japanese family for the hectic, extended family and friends filled, Christmas in Wellington and New Year in Stephens Bay, celebrations that we guided them through.
Nothing like the usual bus tours with clicker happy photo taking tourists that most Japanese folks seem to find the time to take when they go overseas (or even tour domestically!) but I am sure they enjoyed themselves none the less! Christmas in Wellington consisted of waffles and champagne up at our family friends place by the zoo and then dinner was a good old roast turkey at my Uncles with more extended family. New Years at Stephens Bay just before the Abel Tasman area consisted of boat rides, kayaking, fishing trips, swimming, winery and pottery trips and enough BBQ’ed meat to sink a good sized ship! The batch was so overfull with people that at one stage there were 7 of us in tents outside! Great fun, but again I don’t think the Japanese side of the family were quite expecting to meet and share a vacation with quite so many people, but nothing like an overdose of culture shock to make people adjust quickly to a new environment! I’m sure in another few years they will have recovered enough to come back for more.
The most disappointing thing about summer so far though has been the weather! I think that only three times at most I have actually gone a day without wearing some kind of thermal t-shirt underneath my normal shirt. Basically the only concessions my wardrobe has been able to make to the fact it’s been summer is a) occasional lack of a jacket, b) wearing hat mostly to protect from the sun, c) rolling up my sleeves or wearing short sleeved shirts. Maybe it was my summer spent in Japan in 2008 that has ruined my sense of how nice NZ summers can be, or maybe it just is that summer hasn’t arrived yet and February is going to bring some scorching tropical heat. (The southerly storm brewing outside right now just proves my point!) The Japanese visitors felt particularly confused and possibly slightly cheated as despite my warnings they didn’t come prepared for a country where summer can be this cold on a daily basis! Luckily we expected as much and had extra jackets and jerseys on hand to cover such an eventuality. I think my girlfriends Grandma, Mum and Dad were probably starting to feel like they would be returning to the warmth of a northern winter!
A typically severe northerly storm heralded mine and my girlfriends arrival in a very small engine plane. It is very easy to spot the Wellingtonians on those kind of flights, we are the ones who can leave the plane without walking like we have a large squishy lump in the seat of our pants. Even the flight attendant looked a little green though which is unusual.
Since then we have been enjoying catching up with old friends that she knew when she was a student here for a year in 2005. I have also been broadening my horizons once more into the multitude of Wellington cafe’s that exist outside of Starbucks. Back in High School I knew most of them intimately, well much more intimately than I knew most of my classrooms anyway. So far I have been to Mojo on Wakefield / Taranaki St, Vista on Oriental Bay, and also to a place called Cubita on Taranaki. I haven’t ventured far from the old Starbucks yet, but that’s been a good start and the coffees at both Mojo and Cubita were great.
Now I am going to try and get some sleep seeing as the coffee has finally warn off and the fish and chips we had for dinner have greased their way down into a comfortable position in the digestive track rather than the brick in the belly they always initially turn into. First off I’m going to finish helping N (my gf) put together her own blog so she can record things for her family back home!
Hopefully I’ll do more interesting things soon that I can write about and maybe even upload some summer photos for people to have a look at!