Our plans

Hi All..
Things are moving right along here in Nelson. We had a huge day last weekend where we took a couple of hours and removed all of our clothes from our bags and put them in the closet and drawers. After living out of a suitcase for about 3 months, it was a liberating experience indeed. It was also a learning experience as for almost every piece of clothing we put away we asked ourselves "why the hell did we bring this one??"
Anyway, we decided to stay in the boarding house we came to about 3 weeks ago because we like it so much. Plus we just found out that there is broadband available at a very cheap price.
On the job front, we've been doing our time on the vineyard, I also had a promising 2 rounds of interviews with a small ad agency right in town. I should find out about that one within the week. It looks like a cool opportunity with a young company and it should beat the bud rubbing I've been doing (I hope).
We've been doing a lot of thinking about our long term plans and both of us, for varying reasons, are having a hard time thinking about staying for the 2years that we originally thought out. So we've come up with a "Plan B" so to speak. Plan B is as follows..stay in Nelson for about 5 months, hopefully making and saving some money in the process. Then we plan to take about 4 months, taking our time traveling back to the US and be back in time for Gay's sister's wedding in July. It's some what dependant on our job situation and also how we feel about our situation in about 5 months time.

I love smoko...
Our life here has begun to resemble a picture of welcomed regularity. We wake up @ 6:40am, drive about 30min to the winery listening to the New Zealand NPR equivalent along the way. We then get to the winery and do our first of five sessions of bathing in sun block. Work until about 10 where we take our first tea break of the day. Tea break is a standard practice in New Zealand and happens at about 10am and again at about 3pm. We've also heard that some truly unmotivated workers can also take "elevensies", which is yet another tea break at 11:00 before your noon lunch. Roger, the vineyard manager, signals this part of the day by either saying "wanna cuppa?" or "how about smoko?". It baffles me that after coming out of the hot sun people can fill up a cup of boiling hot water and down some tea. Gay has become partial to Milo for her cuppa, which is some kind of chocolate-based energy drink.
Work is made easier by listening to music (thank you Rhapsody to-go service), audible books (10 cds worth of Bill Bryson's Lost Continent) and talking with the fellow workers; mostly a lot of Bush bashing from all involved, also a lot of rugby talk.
We then get home by about 5:00pm, have some dinner, relax after a hard day's work, sleep and do it again. We have had some time to see some live music and a movie now and again.

Pictures!!!
Here are some older pics of our previous help exchange experiences and also a couple newer pics from Nelson and our big day of unpacking. Big thanks to a college buddy of mine, Jeff Kuhn, of the famed Wilburstreet Homepage for ftp access and picture hosting.

First Akaroa Help Exchange experience:
<--prev pic::::next pic-->



Our Second Akaroa help exchange experience:

<--prev pic::::next pic-->



Nelson (view from our place and unpacking):

<--prev pic::::next pic-->

bud rubbing

we have discovered that the only way to find jobs or housing is to just start talking to people. so, oddly enough, through the person that we are staying with, we are working on a vinyard for an ex-san franciscan. It's about a half hour away from nelson, beautiful views of the mountains and right near the ocean. the guy who started it was working in bio-tech in sf, got sick of it, and bought some land here 10 years ago and the rest is history. it's been a little tough on the legs and back and lots of sunscreen is required, but it feels good to be making some money and getting out.

our job is to bud rub and thin, which involves pulling out some leaves and shoots as required, cutting out buds growing on the vine/trunk, then, with a rubber gloved-hand, rubbing the loose bark off. its a lot of kneeling and bending over. there are 20,000 vines. it's not a huge vineyard but big enough to be a daunting task. there are a few others helping though.

we have also found friends! the thing i was fearing wouldn't happen. we looked at an appartment last week through an agent and the guy who lives there now recognized us at the local farmers market, we met his wife (he is japanese she is canadian) and went out with them the next day. they seem to know a lot of people so we might actually have something resembling a social life.

that's all for now. we are both aching and starving from a long day in the fields.

Nelson

After giving our car a new heart, we took the beautiful Lewis Pass highway to Nelson. We even randomly stopped at a lookout where I remember camping 5 years ago.
I do miss Akaroa already and I'm sure Jon misses doing his "bloke work." Instead of guy here they say bloke, so Jon likes to consider himself a bloke. While we were at Mark and Wendy's we never quite knew what we would be doing from one day to the other. Jon asked if he could do some "real bloke work, like chopping down trees and killing sheep." He then proceeded to throw a lamb over a fence later that day, nearly breaking it's legs. I got to do some bloke work as well, hauling logs and burning tea trees. But now it's back to city life.
So far it's true what they say about Nelson always being sunny. It's small beach town at the top of the south island. For the past few nights we stayed in a nice hostel near town and the woman there directed us to her friend who rents out rooms as well. It's up on a hill, overlooking the ocean and hills. We always seem to find the nicest views. So at the moment we are job hunting and apartment hunting. If only there were Craigslist, then it all would have been taken care of within the first day. Hopefully we will have some good news to come in the way of the job search. Jon might be stuck working in the apple factories.

(I promised Jeff Rinkov,Esq. that I would give him a shout out. He goes in to his law office every morning and the first thing he does is check the blog. Good on ya, mate.)

Help Exchange part 2

Hi all,
Well we spent about 5 days doing some “gardening”(and by gardening I mean digging up dirt, pulling out the weeds then putting the dirt back) in a “charming” little house on the Banks Peninsula (and by charming I mean rat/cockroach infested and smoke stink) with a couple of really nice guys and their 2 dogs. It was a good experience over-all, but I was ready to go when our time was up. It did provide for a trip and lifetime highlight which was getting slapped in the ass by a 60 year old gay priest. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

We have since moved on and now we’re staying in a gorgeous farm owned by a fun couple (Mark and Wendy). The minute we came in the door, Wendy nonchalantly told Gay she was having a dinner party for 10 people that night and Gay had to start cooking immediately. They went out to the local store for food while Mark and I drove through the farm to round up some more fire wood. That night was a lot of fun as we had dinner with everybody and it was a rowdy group. Gay cooked up a great curry dish and some asparagus crepes with some kind of creamy sauce. Of course everyone loved it.
The past couple of days we’ve been doing pretty odd jobs; today I washed their cars, and took a look at their website, yesterday I helped Mark with moving some rocks around, then I literally threw a lamb over a fence. Gay has been helping Wendy clean their guest cottages, gardening and making some dinners. Wendy now wants Gay to make up a menu for the next couple of days so Gay is excited about that. People eat really late around here.

DIY…
Doing the help exchange has been great for interacting with kiwis (ass-slapping included) and seeing how they live. As we’ve been meeting a lot of farm-based kiwi’s one of the main themes that comes up, especially in rural areas, is a very do-it-yourself attitude towards things. Everything as far fetched as building your own sail boat and then sailing it around the world, to the relatively more mundane tasks of building your own 2000sqft house (including plumbing and electricity), fixing your own cars and writing up your own legal documents for when you’re selling or buying property. It’s a very inspiring attitude but they typically work very hard, especially if you have a farm and a lot of land to look after.

Our poor car…
Well our car has gotten yet another bad diagnosis. Bottom line is the motor is pretty much dead. We now have to decide whether to just scrap the car or get another motor for it. We still have a bit of driving to do as we wanted to check out a small city called Nelson which is about an 8 hour drive from where we are. I guess we’ll figure it all out and just hang loose until then.

Some good pictures and video still to come, I'm havng a bit of trouble with our ftp site, here are a couple though..