Packing, unpacking, packing...

Where were the times that I had plenty of time to update this blog? I guess moving houses is rather time consuming and as soon as we unpacked the office stuff I had to get back to work and make up for the lost time. Our new internet and telephony provider, Telecom, immediately let us down and left us without connection for the first week. This company is quite notorious in NZ after its recent serious network failures, but we thought it couldn't be worse than our previous provider, Vodaphone. How wrong could we be...



The weekend we moved to our new (rental) house NZ winter kicked in, and man, did we feel it! Maybe we should mention that this place doesn't have any heating whatsoever. Fortunately Scott had bought me a tiny oilheater before to keep my office warm. As temperatures dropped, we had to get another heater in, because the kids were freezing at night. Nevertheless many Kiwi kids don't seem to be affected by the cold. Every morning I can see the secondary schoolkids playing soccer outside on their bare feet, in shorts and t-shirts, while I'm wearing my skisocks and winterjacket! Today I saw them twice, once in the morning at 9pm, when the outside temperature must have been around 10 degrees and then again later this afternoon at 3pm, at 13 degrees, this time they had only their shorts on!!!! I wonder what this is about. Is it maybe considered 'uncool' to wear clothes? Is it about being tough, a word that I often hear overhere. Even Ilias is talking about 'being tough' when I tell him off for running around in sandals and shorts in this sort of weather.It won't take long before our kids have turned into 'real' Kiwi's.

We couldn't complain about the amount of visitors this month. When Petra, 'the talented photography student from Merkem', heard that we were planning to move during the long weekend of the Queen's Birthday, she talked her boyfriend into driving all the way up from Wellington (7 hours) to help us shift to Welcome Bay. We really enjoyed their company and managed also to relax a bit after the hard work in the local hot pools, which felt like a real blessing from God. Ilias was hoping for another trip to the pools this weekend, while Gran, Scotts mum, was here, but the weather was so miserable that we didn't make it. While Scott and I were working Gran and the kids explored the local reserve, which is apparantly so big that they got a bit lost in it. Poor Gran had to fly back to the South Island this morning.



This morning the kids and I went for a short exploring walk and were pretty amazed with the reserve. How lucky we are to have this piece of bush just around the corner from the house.





This will be my last posting before we leave for Belgium on Friday. After our return to NZ it will take us some days to digest our jetlag and once we're all recovered I should be able to get this blog going again. The kids will start going to the nursery three days a week and that should give me more time to concentrate on my translations, my Maori course and this blog.



See you in August (or in a couple of days for the followers in Belgium and Poland)!