What colour are NZ fire engines?

Various things happening,. Have a new car – a Kia Rio liftback, which works better than the Subaru and has a warranty, etc, so here’s hoping we have better luck with this one. Got a decent price for the Subaru too. Heading off out of the city this weekend to explore.

Bucketed it down with rain yesterday, but that’s really the first it has rained properly here since we arrived (which was exactly one month ago today,) so that’s not bad going. Rained a little again today, but we’re mainly back to warmish sunny days with clear blue skies. Aucklanders, it seems, don’t ‘do’ winter. Apparently it’s the coldest part of winter, yet we were sunbathing at the beach on Saturday. (So you can keep your heat waves thanks very much).

Mind you, being by the sea it can be a bit foggy in the mornings. But I can usually judge how bad it is before I get out of bed in the morning by listening out for fog horns.

What else? Alec took me out for a curry last night and then to see ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 2’ at Sky City cinema. It was out first curry outing in Auckland (though I cooked curry for the house last Friday which went down very well). I don’t know if it’s universal over here, but popadoms were ‘papad’ on the menu. These crazy kiwis have different names for loads of things!

It wasn’t our first NZ cinema experience – we both went to a free showing of ‘Click’ courtesy of the recruitment agency we’re working for (complete with free drinks and ice cream) and Alec also went to see ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (got out of that one myself, thank god…).

It appears that films start on time in NZ. No 20 mins of tads first, meaning that we missed the beginning of both ‘Click’ and ‘Pirates…’. Maybe the latter would have made a little more sense if we’d seen the first 10 mins. Maybe not.

Anyway – there is only one choice of ice cream at the cinema, which is truly bizarre. Though, to make up for it they do have a ‘gold class’ screen where you can sit in spacious reclining armchairs (making the sofas at Ashton Lane cinema look puny) and have a full meal or snacks served to you. Gonna try that one at some point.

Getting into the swing of life here, though there are some tempting offers on the WWOOFing website now. A few more weeks of earning and we’ll be ready to take one of them up.

Still a few things I can’t get to grips with though. They have very little ‘convenience food’ over here. Sure – Alec and I like to cook, but 2-3 times a week back home we would buy something like a chilled pack of ‘fresh chicken in Italian tomato sauce’ from Tesco for tea. It’s just nice not to have to cook a full blown meal when you get in from work. But they don’t seem to have anything like that over here (what a gap in the market). Hence, it’s cheesy beans on toast for tea tonight!

Also struggling to find butter beans for my butterbean and rosemary soup. However, you’ll be pleased to know that it looks like the price of broccoli is coming down. I know you have all been concerned about that one.

Anyway - been working on my list of obscure NZ facts and I will leave you with this one just now:

NZ fire engines are orange.