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By now, aproximately two of you (give or take two) may have noticed I've been off radar for a while.
This is because I'm in New Zealand. My wife accepted a locum temens (doc temp) job here on the North Island, where we're going to be residing until March. It's lovely here, but there's the small matter of a house having been put down smack on what was supposed to be our phone line. As a result, I'm not going to be on the Internet very often until (if I'm lucky) mid-to-late October.
My best wishes to the forum until then. Hopefully when I re-emerge I'll be able to share/inflict some photos and stories.
posted
I'm in a little town called Coopers Beach, about half an hour east-northeast from the bustling metropolis (of 5,100) of Kaitaia.
Apparently there's some things to see at Hobbiton still, but I'm a little nonplussed that all the publicity photos show the same view of Bilbo's front door. I have mental images of showing up to witness dozens of tourists taking snapshots of Bilbo's door, because that's really all that there is to see. I'm sure we'll get to it at some point, though.
Yes, I'm afraid I'm not kidding; they dropped a stinking house on our landline. The house, and plot of land, on which we're living used to be one residence; somewhere along the line, the owners divided the house into an upstairs and a downstairs apartment (we're the upstairs) and either put a small house down the hill or did some sort of bizarre realty gerrymander and sold the land down the hill for someone else to do the same. Between the new house and rearranging the old house into two residences, they cut off the telephone cable... And, no one living in the original house during the change, they failed to notice this little snafu.
Several (cell) calls and endless hassles later, a trench was dug along our house and a new cable was lain.
Weeks and several more calls and hassles later, I finally have a broadband modem on which the proper lights come on that actually consents to talk to my laptop.
Gratuitous growling and snapping at the heels of Telecom aside, I'm ten minutes walk away from a very nice beach. And while Coopers Beach itself is very small, I still have access to a grocer, butcher, and pharmacy, and my daughter seems to be thriving at the kindergarten up the road in Taipa.
At some point, I'm going to get some photos online and possibly a kind of blog where anyone interested can read my fairly banal musings about peculiar New Zealand products (bacon flavored rice cakes?...) and the kind of ridiculously overpowered electric kettles that a tea-obsessed culture provides.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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Don't forget to go to the underground lake with the glow-worms at Otarahonga.... it's been close to 15 years since my NZ trip and I'll never forget it.
Avoid Palmerston North tho. Most boring town in the world. I got arrested there just to relieve the boredom.
Posts: 2245 | Registered: Nov 1998
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The north part of the North Island is one of the few areas of New Zealand that I haven't been to at this point, but it's one of the places that I might live were I to move there -- since it's the location of New Zealand's sole oil refinery.
Added: I think what I'm trying to say is in a roundabout manner is that I'm jealous. Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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That is so exciting! Please let us know when you begin your blog. We're still hoping to be in South Africa early next year, and some of our acquaintances there say it is pretty common to vacation in New Zealand. Sounds lovely.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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twinky - you'd like it up north, I think. Quite scenic. Also it's a lot warmer... (not always a good thing, I know, but still). Posts: 1431 | Registered: Aug 2003
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