So sorry for the lack of updates. I have been quite busy buying appliances and supplies for our NEW PLACE!

That’s right, Ash and I are now official renters. We got this adorable little place in Glenfield, 25 minutes by bus to my campus and 45 to Ash’s. It isn’t quite as close as I wanted but is still pretty good, considering that when I lived in Vancouver I commuted 1.5 hours to my school and 45 minutes to work. So this is looking pretty good!

And it’s in our price-range (actually toward the low end of it), we have a big kitchen and living room, two bedrooms, even a back and front yard, with a garden in the back! Well, right now it’s more of a landscaped stretch of dirt, but it will be a garden, so help me God. I have a very bad track record of killing plants, but that was because our place in Vancouver had absolutely NO light. As they say in New Zealand, this one has heaps!

Here are some pictures, pre move-in... honestly the place will probably  be nearly this bare for a while to come, since we can only afford to buy cheap furniture, and slowly. The living room especially I predict will be pretty sad for a time. But that’s part of being a starving student! Here it is:

    Outside view of back                    Our nice big kitchen!

   A tub can be hard to find!                Our bedroom

So we’re busy running around trying to find cheap furnitures and “chattels” for our new place. Today hopefully we’ll get a bed and that will be the last big purchase I hope!! We were quite disappointed to find out that in New Zealand the only way to get high-speed internet is to get DSL, and you have to have a phone to get that! So we have already gotten cell phones, and those were going to be our only phones as they were in Canada, but now we have to get a home phone as well, and the cheapest home phone plan is $42/month! So we have to pay for that- very annoying. but if we have to do that anyway we’ll just take advantage and make our local calls from home, since they’re free.

Brian and Pat are coming back into town tomorrow, so we’re going to be seeing them again, so that should be fun. Other than all that craziness, not too much is going on... we were taken on a little drive, known here as a tiki tour, by my Kiwi friend, and she took us to this beautiful beach town about 45 minutes drive away called Piha. I think the pictures speak for themselves, the first of which is one where I took a bunch of shots in a continuous sweep while turning around, and it turned out really cool if I do say so myself. Anyway, it was just gorgeous there, as you can see.

                            Cool effect, huh?

Gorgeous beach                    A surfer doing his thing

Rock formation                        Rock formation again