Our arrival in NZ

So where do I start....
I'm afraid this is going back a bit so I will have to be brief!
So we arrived and flew into Auckland at the delightful hour of 4am, but thankfully I have a sister who seemed to miss me and was willing to drive up at that terrible hour just to pick us up. We then got into Hamilton for around 7am just in time for Si to get changed and go to work.

Week 1 was filled with the not so exciting jobs of sorting bank accounts, getting a phone sorted and purchasing a car, all of which were successful in just 3 days! We then headed out at the weekend for some fun in Rotorua. A nice relaxing weekend after traveling 29 hours across time zones saw us bungee jumping, swooping, sweebing and zorbing! After a good sleep that night the next day we headed down into darkness for the 'black abyss' an exciting 5 hour caving experience ran by the black water rafting company (highly recommended)
Much to James' annoyance Sal suggested that in the tighter underground caves, he became our 'whiskers'

After spending an action packed weekend during our 1st weekend it was time to settle down to the more important things of starting a new life in a new country....finding a house.
Traveling up to Auckland and camping out in Jean and John Brandon's beautiful home in Howick, we managed to find ourselves a lovely house in Mt Eden a nice suburb just south of the city centre.


After sorting out a place to live we headed back down to Hamliton to see Sal and Si before heading over to Tauranga and the mount for the weekend, we had a long boat trip 'swim with dolphins' experience which I'm sure would have been amazing if we had seen more that 1 dolphin and actually manage to swim with them, but if they do chose to avoid us what can we do! so we decided to follow it up with a night out and many drinks!
The next day was a great day surfing off the mount where we bought ourselves new wet suits and James had his first surf of New Zealand (and rather annoyingly managed to stand first time!)

The next week saw the start of work ....

So working in Middlemore... Its an interesting hospital with a large and diverse population (among the staff alone there are 81 different 1st languages apparently) certainly makes for a few communication issues! The work isn't particularly challenging but pays the bills and gets me a bit more medical experience which my foundation years back home have lacked. James on the other hand seems to have landed himself a job that has more of the stuff he enjoys, mainly more site visits and surveys, and less time consuming reports (I'm sure he'll add something later about his job, that's about all I've gathered so far!)

The 1st weekend of work saw us off up north to Goat Island, Sal decided to spend the weekend in Sydney with friends so Si, James, Katie (Brodie) and 5 others from Hamilton all headed off for a weekend of snorkeling, unfortunately the weather wasn't the greatest but we still managed to get out in the water and see some amazing fish before spending the night in a campsite with a beautiful view of the bay!

So that was the 1st 3 weeks of our Kiwi experience, hopefully the next posts won't have quite so much info packed into one xx