Seasons Greetings

It is the time of the year: Christmas with the all those awful songs, present hunting, tree decorating, cookie baking and drinks...but it is still very hard to get in the mood with 25 degrees. No more homemade cookies made by Esther's mum, so she is forced to make them herself. They turned out rather nice :-)
No turkey or ham this year, but a BBQ, doesn't sound too bad, does it?

We bought ourselves a nice HUGE Christmas present. It is a great lifestyle plot (no house) just south of the village Cust, about 30 minutes drive from Christchurch. Well, the "huge factor" is of course based on the size of the plot: 4 hectares... can you believe that??
2009 will be focused on building our own house, or to be precise: having it build.

Search for "257 Earlys road, Cust, NZ" in Google Maps.
Since a couple weeks Streetview is available for many roads in NZ. It's great to wander around a have sort of a live look at so many places. Unfortunately is was cloudy when they took the pictures in Cust. To prove that we will have mountain views, I attached some pictures. :-)

Have a great Christmas!!

1 YEAR NZ

On 18th October, we passed a milestone: 1 year in New Zealand, can you believe it??
As we are really lazy with updating this weblog, I will upload a lot of pictures so you have at least something to look at.

In the first weekend of October, we went for a walk near Castle Hill. It's about 1,5 hours drive from Christchurch. It's a great to wander around the weird rock formations as you can see on the pictures. Looks a bit like Dartmoor in the UK.









14th November is Canterbury day. It' s a public holiday and we were both off work. The biggest A&P Show (for the Swiss: like the OLMA) in NZ is held in Christchurch on this very day. Many farm animals have their own competition: from chickens, sheep, cows to alpacas and even ducks and pigeons. There are also many farm machines...and they are huge! And of course, there is not just one machine, but lots and lots, incredible!! We walked around for about 4 hours and still haven't seen all of it.
It was a great day out on a hot summer day!




Some more random pictures...

Do you know what a Cicada is ? They are about 4cm long and make a hell of a noise!! It's quite a tropical sound and it took us a while to figure out what the source of that noise is. Those little beasts can produce such an amount of decibels that when walking in Hagley Park here in the city, you almost have to cover your ears.



Still amazing how empty beaches are over here. We really appreciate that parking next to beaches is free, space is available and there are no traffic jams to the beaches...and it's just a 20 minutes drive from home :-)

Enjoying the warm and sunny weather on the deck with a game of table tennis and a gorgeous cool beer. That's the life guys!!


We will update the weblog very soon as we have more news...be did purchase something HUGE!!!!