Well, a week ago, I said I’d post again and catch up with what’s been happening since I arrived here in New Zealand. Today’s the day. I really need to get to it because enough time has passed that I’ll begin forgetting important things.
For those who don’t know, Godzone is how Kiwis often refer to NZ. It’s a contraction of “God’s own” – referring to this beautiful land. You’ll also see me (and many others) use another term, Aotearoa, which is a Maori word and it is their name for NZ. Translated, it means “The Land of the Long White Cloud“.
As I sit typing, it is 6 PM and the sun is blazing in the front window-doors of my apartment and just across the street in Christchurch’s Hagley Park, people have been assembling all day for a huge show which is going to be put on this evening. It’s called “Christmas in the Park” and I’ve heard that as many as 100,000 people may show up. I’d be amazed if that many do since that would be 10% of the South Island’s population – but we’ll see. last night, when I went out for a run, they were doing a rehearsal and I stopped and listened to two or three numbers and it was pretty good stuff. The space they’ve laid out is HUGE so they are expecting a lot of folks.
Well, when I first arrived here back on November 16th, I had a cold and it stayed with me for about five days and made everything a bit of an uphill struggle – as colds do. The other major thing that happened right away when I arrived and checked into my room at the guest house i was staying at was that I discovered that the wireless Internet service they were providing wasn’t up to what I needed to do with it.
So, even on that first day, I began looking for other accommodations. But, it wasn’t easy because I needed to find a furnished place for just a month and if it didn’t already have Internet, I was going to have Telecom wire it in.
One place I looked at on Thursday looked good but we couldn’t get the Internet to do everything I needed (like Skype).
I had another idea that I thought might work and I gave it a try on Friday. And that was to take a bus out by the University and see if I could find a room for rent out there. College is out this time of the year so rooms that would normally be occupied by students might be setting free – and who more than college students would need the Internet?
I got there just as it started to rain lightly. And then I discovered the problem with my plan. Friday’s a big holiday here in the Canterbury area of New Zealand. Its called Show Day in honor of the huge once a year County Fair-like show they hold at this time of the year. I originally was going to go to the show but after I arrived, I thought finding a place was a higher priority. I had no idea they’d created a holiday for it.
So, the upshot was that essentially the University was closed. I did find a fellow in the security complex and he said that they did have such ads for rooms in the library building but that I’d have to come back on Monday to see at them. because the building was locked up.
Someone else told me that students often placed ads in a big store on the other side of the U and showed me where it was on my map. It was quite a walk but I decided to go for it. now, it started raining in earnest. And my nose? Oh yeah, it was being rude rude rude and my head was a brick.
When I was almost to the store, I came across a big complex of student housing called College House and decided to go on in and see what the possibilities where. The place was pretty empty but I found four people sitting in their cafeteria talking over coffee and tea and I told them of my quest. They were great people and a lot of fun to talk to but the bottom line was that they weren’t the decision makers and I’d have to wait and call in on Monday. Ah well.
I went on to the store and the ads there were no help so I just had some sushi there for lunch and bussed back to my room at the guest house.
On Saturdays and Wednesdays, The Press newspaper here in Christchurch runs all of the houses and rooms for rent ads. So, on Saturday I bought a copy and went through it closely. I made a number of calls and just missed a nice studio apartment that I think would have worked. But, most of my calls were in vain because in spite of the fact that the ads come out on Saturday, most folks here aren’t interested in messing with all of that on the weekends or they are professional property management types who are off for the weekend. In the end, I concluded that most of the ads from the paper would have to wait for Monday.
I was pushing pretty hard to get my housing problem resolved but, in the end,it was looking like nothing was really going to happen until Monday – no matter how hard I pushed.
Sunday, I walked and looked at things but with no results. I walked so much in these few days that I got a good sized blister on the ball of my left foot. But, I actually think I preferred being really busy like this with a cold rather than sitting around waiting for it to depart. I think the time passed quicker.
On Monday, I called the leasing manager at the Park Terrace Apartments where we’re buying our apartment and he gave me some good news! The tenants in out apartment, who have a legal right to stay until December 31st, if they want, had decided that December 18th would be their last night there.
That was very good news indeed because our real estate deal is set to close on the 20th of December *and* even better, my real estate agent had earlier offered me the option of leasing another apartment he owned in the same Park Terrace complex. The rub was that I had to be out of his unit by the 22nd of December because he had it rented after that. I’d declined his offer earlier thinking that I needed a place to stay through December 31st. Now, suddenly, this option worked! I called him and it was still free. Yahoo!! I met him there and we shook hands on it and I began to call the power folks to switch the power into my name and the Telecom folks to get the telephone and Internet broadband connected. We agreed to meet there at noon on Tuesday and sign the lease papers and transfer the keys.
Tuesday, we met at noon and signed stuff and I moved in. Man, was it nice to finally unpack my suitcases. I’d been living out of them since I left home for Dan’s place in Southern California on November 9th – and this was now the 21st.
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Since then, things have gone well. My cold lifted for the most part the day I moved in. The telephone was on the first day I was there and the DSL broadband modem arrived the next morning on Wednesday.
Wednesday evening, a Kiwi friend, Bob, came and picked me up mid-afternoon and took me out to his place for dinner with him, his wife and her mother and their kids. They live in the Harewood area not far from the airport on five or 10 acres. Bob and I met some time back on the Internet because we share deeply held convictions about the way mankind’s history is working itself rapidly into a nasty corner. It was nice seeing him and his family again. They’d had Sharon and I out for dinner as well on our previous trip back in August. Very nice people.
The last few days, I’ve been settling in here and getting my computer systems working like I want them to. Telecom gives their customers a modem/router with only one port to connect your computer to. I wanted to link to the Internet with both my laptops and one or more of my PDAs wirelessly so I spent a lot of time working out how to stack my WRT54G router up behind their DSL-502T router and get a multi-way Internet setup like I wanted. Eventually, it all came together.
Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I made it over to Dick Smith’s Electronics Store (New Zealand’s equivalent of America’s Radio Shack) and bought myself a small laser printer for $150 NZD. I also went to Office Max and got a high intensity lamp and a ream of paper for the printer.
On Friday, the 24th, I met with a fellow who knows New Zealand tax law pretty well so I could find out what the implications are for Sharon and I now that we are official New Zealand residents. I was a bit scared because I’d read that once you become a NZ resident, all of your world-wide income becomes taxable under NZ law. But, on the other hand, NZ and the US have a reciprocal tax law to prevent double taxation. I just wanted to see how it was all going to shake out.
Jamie, the tax expert, was really a pleasure to talk to and even if I hadn’t come away with good news, I would have been very happy to have made his acquaintance.
The good news would appear to be that:
(1) any money I move to NZ is tax free there so long as I’ve already paid US taxes on it and
(2) If I take a job here, my employer will take out all the necessary taxes so I won’t have to file income taxes at year end.
So, it looks like the only time I’ll be entangled with New Zealand’s tax people is if I employ people here and/or start a business here. Jamie’s still confirming the details on this.
Life with the Internet here at the new place hasn’t been all roses and kisses. Internet here in NZ can be problematic. The government is still working its way through the recognition that easy, fast and dependable access to the Internet is a grease that makes everything run better in a society from human rights to business deals. They’ve had a near monopoly here and only recently has the government forced the company sitting on top of things (complaining loudly that they couldn’t so any better) to ‘unbundle the loop’ and let some others onto the physical network structure to see if they could spur competition and improve quality, services and prices. It is all still a work in progress.
Here at Park Terrace, I sit 1.5 km from the switching station so with that distance (according to their tech types), I should have a good, fast and reliable signal. I signed up for Telecom’s new “Go Large” plan for $49.95/mo NZD. This plan is New Zealand’s first to offer the public a plan with unlimited throughput. All previous plans have had 1 GB or 5 GB limits per month on usage. I’m close to the station, I’m in a new building – you’d think this should work well?
Well, it does work and it’s at DSL speeds. The problem is that in any 30 minute period of time, I’m likely to lose my connection for 30 seconds to a minute at a time. Then, it reappears, magically. It’s been a minor annoyance and thus far, they’ve been unable to resolve it. In fact, I’ve been all through the first level of tech support and they’ve had me try various things and have finally escalated my case (#12933084, if you are interested – who knows, maybe a Telecom executive is reading this) up to the second level. These 2nd level folks will ‘watch’ my line for three days and then contact me by phone. It’s Sunday here and I’m hoping to hear from them on Monday.
Yesterday, on Saturday, at noon, I walked to the Art Center here in Christchurch. They’ve given an entire city block in the CBD (Central Business District) to art and things associated. They have an arts and crafts fair there on most weekends and I walked down to see what it was like and it was fun.
Then, last night, when I began typing this, the city was having a huge party across the street at Hagley Park. Many tens of thousands showed up for a big Christmas show. At one point, I stopped typing and went over and just walked through the crowds as they were pouring in and getting places for themselves on the grass.
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It felt good and relaxed unlike many such large gatherings in the US. I saw no groups of sullen hoodlum youths prowling like sharks. Just people out having a great time at a big event. I’m going to post a few photos here later today if I can figure out how to make the WordPress blog software put photos into the text that people can click on to see a larger image. The big show ended at 10 PM with a large burst of fireworks which I walked out onto the grass in front of this apartment to watch. Very nice.
Today’s Sunday. The weather’s shifted into light rain and I plan to resume blogging and post some environmentally related articles here on this blog later today. I’ll also be posting more recaps of my experiences here in New Zealand as I go along.
I can sum up my thoughts about it so far, however. I haven’t seen anything yet to make me doubt my opinions about this beautiful little country. It truly is a haven in an increasingly insane world.