The weather in Auckland


Describing the weather here - as opposed to that in Cape Town - is like trying to track a fly: hard to place. That's why you can hang around immigration forums for over a year and not get a straight answer out of anyone about it. You could read two posts written in the space of an hour from two separate people: one loving the weather; the other in the doldrums over it.






So, my humble take...

Summer was broody, hot, cloudy, intense, humid, rainy, and when the sun shone, as it did for at least a few minutes every day, it hurt.

Autumn has been sublime. Still, peaceful, cloudy, sunny, misty, sometimes gloomy, occasionally windy.

Winter has crisp, cold, sunny days, interspersed with storms and the occasional three-day drizzle. But actually, compared to Cape Town where it can rain for up to two weeks at a time, the bad weather has a faster turnover here. If you get my drift - "changeable" is an understatement.

Overall, I would say the weather (but not the laser sun beams!) is gentler here. The wind doesn't blow as hard as Cape Town, thunder and lightning are rare, and you tend to wear layers of clothing to adapt to the changes.

For the past month, locals have been moaning and groaning in anticipation of Winter. It's a big gripe here; why, we have yet to find out....




This photo is of us in the Domain - a 75-hectare park in Auckland city, well worth a visit for its fernery, historical gardens, ancient trees and city and water views.

Auckland still in top five of world's most liveable cities

The cities that came out on top in yesterday's Mercer Quality of Living survey aren't necessarily the most exciting, writes the Independent's John Lichfield

The songbook of the world's most likeable cities needs an urgent rewrite. "We will always have Dusseldorf"; "I love Zurich in the springtime"; "Tulips from Vancouver"; "Maybe it's because I'm a Frankfurter that I love Frankfurt so".

In a survey of the world's most liveable towns, published yesterday, European cities dominate but not the European cities that you might imagine. Paris comes only 33rd, between Adelaide and Brisbane. London comes 38th, jointly with Yokohama.

The city with the highest quality of urban living in the world, according to the survey, is Vienna, followed by Zurich and Geneva. Auckland and Vancouver come joint fourth. All of these cities have a reputation - perhaps undeserved - for crashing dullness. Cities with romantic, glitzy reputations, from New York (49th) to Rome (55th), fare badly.

The Worldwide Quality of Living Survey is, arguably, more suburban than urban. The league table of 215 cities reflects the criteria set by Mercer, an American management consultancy which specialises in advising companies on the relocation of executives. Political stability, security, air pollution, schools, supermarkets, environment and transport rank highly. Cutting-edge culture, architecture and excitement count for relatively little.

Read the rest....

"Crashing dullness?" Well, after the unpleasant adrenalin rush of living in Cape Town, we are loving just that!

Letter home: Three months in New Zealand

Life on a pacific island

Well, we may live on the biggest island in the Pacific, but we're still living island style: simple, peaceful, convivial. Days are Alexandrite-blue and drift dreamily from one sublime Autumn week to the next. We find we are doing less adventuring now, and more homey things like arranging pictures on our walls, potty-training Adam (almost there!) and bravely eyeing the tremendous task ahead of turning our land into more of a food garden. (Photo: view from our house)

The beginnings of a food garden


Our first step was to buy two huge bins for composting the "weeds", like ginger, plectranthus, honeysuckle, agapanthus and jasmine. Even though these were plants we would happily nurture in our SA garden, here, because of the climate, they grow too prolifically and strangle the native bush. We remove them, chop them up, and bin them in water for several months before we can use them as compost. The lids have a clamp lock because the contents are supposed to ferment. Occasionally they explode. Everywhere we drive in Waitakere city there are huge open weed bins provided by the council for the public to dump weeds, for those who don't want to risk blowing themselves up at home.

Next we bought a worm farm bin from the council, and 1000 tiger worms. These are our new pets. They can dispose of up to two litres of organic waste per day, and by the time we have 8000 worms, they will turn all our kitchen scraps and vacuum cleaner dust into nutritious compost for our garden.

The biggest hurdle is identifying the different plants on our plot. We have used the Internet and several library books - but we are still not convinced about what is native, what is exotic, what is a weed and what a pest. NZ may not have many bright-flowered native garden plants, but it has hundreds of species of indigenous trees, ferns and shrubs, and we have never seen anything like them. The Waitakere area alone has 542 species of native plant (111 of these are native ferns). The bush is so dense that in the space of a metre you could find four or five small trees all competing for space…and needing a name.

Is this a paw paw? Or a deadly nightshade?

As far as fruit trees go, we are having a bit more luck. We have labelled seven banana plants, two huge loquat trees, a grapefruit tree covered in big green grapefruit, a lemon tree and possibly an orange tree, something that looks like a nut tree (help!) and is this a paw paw? It has about 20 fruit that popped out in the past week.

We have loved tasting new edible plants, and rushed out to buy two feijoa trees (you need two to make fruit) after eating our way through a big bag of them over the weekend. Exquisite. We have about 20 pak choi and beet plants doing very well, and potato plants that have yet to surface.

(Photo below: The "in" thing right now in our household: Feijoas.)













Changes

One of the biggest changes we made when we got here was to only go shopping every ten days for a bulk grocery shop. This has created hours of free time every week, as I no longer "pop to the Howard Centre" for supper stuff every second day. No more driving, no scramble for parking, no queues. The nearest big store is about 30 minutes drive away, depending on the traffic, and Isobella and I make an outing out of it. So far, it is still fun.

Also, we decided before we came here that the children would no longer watch TV in the week. We wanted them to go back to playing the old-fashioned way. So far, it has worked beautifully, and right now they are having the kind of school holiday I always wanted for them: hours and hours and hours of disappearing into the bush, building forts, riding trikes, painting with leaves and bark, swinging in the hammock, even having chilly Autumn swims in the pool.

Today K and I spotted them heading off into the bush, knapsacks on their backs (see photo). What they had packed into their bags, I don't know. I tend to let them explore anywhere, as long as it's not near the road. We share a driveway with two other properties, so they can wander around on about 6000 m2 of jungle before getting into any serious danger.

I did overhear Adam muttering that Belli's plan was "scary", but she managed to convince him to go with her. We found them about 40 minutes later stuck in the bush, and Adam wailing little "help me's".

They have made lots of new friends, and yesterday we had two little girls over to play from Uganda. They were rescued there by two Aids workers I have befriended, who all risked being hacked up by some tribe a few months ago in civil unrest in Uganda. My friend, Colleen, helplessly watched 150 abandoned babies starve to death as families evacuated the villages and left 200 babies behind. They managed to save 50. Colleen's best friend was murdered, and she was warned her family was next. Luckily BA flew her, her husband and two little adopted girls back to the UK, with four suitcases of clothes, hours before her house was attacked. The NGO they had worked for, for almost a decade, didn't really care that they had lost everything in Uganda, and they decided to move to NZ for a fresh start.

Stories in the news

We don't get much news here, unless you make a point of watching the news. There are no headline banners on lamp-posts, and no-one in my small circle talks about the news… ever. The closest we got to a crime story was when Isobella came home from school a few weeks ago, upset that the vegetable store in Green Bay, where we occasionally buy our fruit and veg, was held up by robbers. Her classmate was in the shop at the time, and most traumatic, the lady shop assistant was punched in the face by one of the robbers. This was a conversation piece for several days at school, and Isobella ended up being quite nervous of burglars coming to our home.

We have stuff

We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without. --Henry David Thoreau

Our container arrived ten days ago, and much chaos ensued as we unpacked 173 boxes. Our peaceful, spartan house suddenly looked like a warehouse shop floor, and only the kids seemed to relish the unpacking frenzy.
K and I were dismayed to find that our furniture didn't look that great in our new house, after all. Pale Rimu wood floors, huge skylights and pale cream walls against our colourful, dark-wood and shabby-chic mishmash of stuff made a slightly depressing combination. Luckily we have two empty rooms in the basement where we have stored crates of things we actually no longer want. The couch and tub chairs we bought in SA a month before we left were a great move, as here, everything costs twice the Rand price.

So far, apart from a slightly bent lampshade that was tossed into the boxes in some frantic last-minute packing, we had zero breakages. Kings Movers rock!

Some things we were thrilled to see:
  • Our washing machine. No more hand-washing three to four loads per week. Yay!
  • Our couch. No more movies that may have been good but seemed really bad because of butt aches.
  • Our gardening tools. We spent Easter Monday gardening, and visiting a fabulous garden centre near us (http://www.palmers.co.nz/store_locator/glen_eden.cfm). LOTS of new plant names to learn. I was fascinated to see that many of the NZ native shrubs look a little bit like fynbos. Tiny, intricate leaves. By the way, proteas, aloes and ericas are popular here. I saw the biggest protea bush ever a few days ago.
  • K's Mac, because now we can skype.
  • Our photo albums and picture frames, so we can see where we come from.
  • Desk lamps. No more eye-strain from late-night working on the computers.
  • Toys. Whew, this was a biggie. The kids were quiet for, well, about two hours as they played with their long-lost toys.
  • Our down duvet. Things were getting a bit chilly under two skimpy single duvets.
  • Shoes. Glorious shoes. No more freezing toes from two pairs of slops I brought on the plane.

We were told that once our things arrive we will feel more settled. This is definitely true. No more pretending we are on holiday in an empty house once our own pots and pans (and toilet brush!) arrive. I noticed we don't feel the need to cram six outings into every weekend and are more content to get stuck into the garden, or lounge on a comfy bed listening to tuis and other birds singing in the bush. I guess we are becoming Aucklanders.



It is hard to describe the happiness we feel here. The best would be to say we feel we have the power to get and be what we want. There are just "no worries, mate". At the same time, it's been three months, and both Isobella and I have felt the first real pangs of homesickness: a quiet, deep sadness and longing. The more she mentions her friends she misses, the sadder I feel.

A few days ago I was grocery shopping and looked up to see rows of Ceres fruit juices. My mouth hung open. I looked again, and saw shop shelves packed with Freshpack rooibos tea, Ouma beskuit, tins of Koo, biltong, and so on. Instantly my eyes filled with tears, my cheeks started burning and my heart hurt. I also felt so confused. What was South Africa doing in Auckland? I had stumbled upon the South African section in Food Town, and hadn't even known it existed.

But…it will be OK.