Wow, 6 months in and I'm only just getting time to sit and write an update, time really has flown by. It's now mid winter here and so far it's been much the same as a UK summer, maybe dare I say it, a little sunnier! We're in our own home now, have been reunited with all our belongings, we've got a pet cat and the kids are settled in school and kindy. Jakob's made the hockey team and has soccer practice once a week, Ol's eagerly awaiting starting school in August and Leni's happy to be wherever her brothers are. The journey here seems to have been so quick and yet, when I look back on life over the past year, it seems to have been a long process to get where we are now.
So, where are we now? Well, we're part of a lovely community here, something which has really helped with our settling in process - everyone knows someone who can help you out somehow, that's very much the kiwi way of life, they're welcoming, helpful and eager for you to fall in love with their beautiful country. And we have, we've only seen a small part of this place so far but every where you look there's something amazing to see. We live in the shadow of Te Mata and there's not a day goes by when the view of the mountains here don't make me take a sharp intake of breath with their awesomeness. The pacific ocean is on our doorstep and the wild beauty of it never fails to soothe my soul when I'm feeling particularly homesick. All that aside, it still feels very new and slightly off kilter being here, we left a life filled with incredible people back home, this move was never powered by a need to leave people behind, we were blessed to have amazing families and beautiful friendships so the leaving them bit was the hardest part of the whole process. That said, we still have those people in our lives, it's just not as easy to get a hug, or a soothing cup of tea and 'it'll be alright' pep talk anymore, though skype and some good friends have saved my sanity by moments!
We arrived in high summer and having stepped onto a plane at Heathrow wearing a fleece, Uggs and many jumpers (it was snowing!) to being spat out of our climate controlled 747 into the heat of Auckland International meant the kids and I were slightly shell shocked on arrival. Factor in a journey which started with me being pee'd on before our plane taxied away from Heathrow (thanks Leni), had a mid point which featured being puked on by Jakob, seeing a cockroach the size of my hand in Kuala Lumpur and finished with me tearfully remembering I had some baby food in my backpack when I went through the (very stringent) MAF controls at the airport and you can see why next time we do that journey, we're doing a stopover somewhere to break it up a bit! Still, the family were back together after 5 weeks of Mr T being here before us and that was all that mattered to me, real life could take a running jump at this point, I was just glad to see the kids with their Dad again.
We decided a long while before that Hawkes Bay was where we wanted to be and luckily it all worked out with jobs/rental house etc. We're pretty rural here, something which my jet lagged brain registered vaguely on our road trip down here - there's a whole lot of mountain and single lane roads to get to HB! You're more likely to encounter a logging truck than a petrol station on the Thermal Explorer Highway, it's beautiful, rugged, isolated and has more impressive scenery than any I've seen anywhere before. And I think that's the thing that NZ gives me, every day, every where I go, there's all this scenery, almost assaulting your eyes, like you can't quite take it all in at once. At no point have I taken a photo that can do it justice, I look at the photos and think 'No, it was bigger and more beautiful than that' and until you see this place, you can't imagine the scale or accessibility of it all. There are beaches here that if they were at home would be heaving with people, but we're often the only ones there because right round the corner, there's another beach and so on and so on.
That's the upside of it all here - the space, the freedom and the life we can give the kids just wouldn't be possible at home. We've had to balance that with how hard it is to be so far from everyone we love and yet, despite bouts of homesickness, this is where we need to be and this is where the kids are thriving, changing and growing before our eyes. The boys have kiwi accents, and their attitudes are very kiwi now (as in, there's less of a sense of fear here - kids climb trees at school, run round like lunatics at lunchtime and are allowed to be slightly more feral than I'm used to from home) The school don't seem to expect the kids to sit still and not run round, when the bell rings for the end of school the classroom doors fly open and the kids pour out - running, jumping, rolling, play fighting and carrying some form of ball (mostly rugby, this place is obsessional - Kris made a joke to a friend of Jakob's that Richie McCaw isn't that great a player and was met with an indignant response) In the summer 50% of the kids at school don't wear shoes, the other half wear leather sandals the like of which I haven't encountered since my own school days. That's the other thing that's surprised me - the high school kids wearing uniform vaguely reminiscent of the 1950s, the boys wear shorts (all year round, even in biting wind and rain, they all wear shorts) and knee socks with clumpy shoes in the winter, or those ever present leather sandals in the summer. The girls get to wear school dresses, jumpers and the same clumpy black shoes/leather sandals as the boys. There's nothing like seeing a sullen 15 year old boy walking along trying to look cool in knee socks and ugly shoes to make you giggle.
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