Status update :-)

Hello there. Another official announcement: our status is officially changed from tourist-no-work to allowed-to-stay-and-work.
After dropping all the papers and the passports in the drop off box at Immigration, we could do nothing more than wait and see. Fortunately, we got the permit and visa within a week which is really fast. Normally it takes about 4 weeks, but the headhunter has a contact at immigrations who "greased the wheels".
As long as George works at his new job, he may stay and work for a maximum of 3 years (only at this employer at this job). If he wants to work for another employer he has to apply again for a work permit.
Based on partnership, Esther also got the work permit and visa for 3 years, but she may work in any occupation. It is an open work permit which makes it far more flexible to find a job.
Strange rules, but what can you do...
At the same time we also applied for residence. This application could take a couple of months to be checked and approved. The big advantage to have a permanent residence status is that you can stay in NZ forever even though you don't have a job.

So this means that George starts to work at Foodstuffs next Monday (3rd March). It will probably be an intense week as he will be speaking (and listening) to English speaking people the whole day every day. The advantage that a lot of IT lingo is already in English is nullified by the fact the kiwi have their unique accent.

We will be moving to our next home on the 30th of March. After searching the web and the real estate agents for a suitable house (read: insulated and at least one proper form of heating available and also as less draft as possible as winter is coming) for about two weeks, we finally found a really nice house. We will rent it for at least 1 year. It is situated on the lower hills of Christchurch, just check out the view!! It has insulation, gas cooking, gas heating and a very large deck with french doors. And we have our own garden on the slops with a lemon and pear tree, some grapes and some space to grow vegetables, great!

Our container filled with all our belongings is also on the move. It is on a journey from Rotterdam to Hamburg, London and Singapore. There it will be transfered to another ship and continues its way down to New Zealand. We expect the container in the first week of April. We can't wait until it is here, it will be great fun to unpack all our stuff.

Last Sunday we had a nice walk (still 4-5 hours) in the hills of Banks Peninsula with Frank and Jessica. They are two Dutchies already in NZ for over a year now. The fact that our bodies were not entirely happy with us doing the walk, was made clear when it started aching at some places :-(
We are out of shape.....something to work on in the (very near) future.

The quality of the bread is quite different to what we are used (yes, especially the Swiss have high standards in bread). So we bought a bread baking machine. We now can experiment with it to figure out the best combination of flour, seeds and yeast. In the picture you can see our first attempt. It is really compact and heavy as a rock, the dough didn't quite rise as it should, but it does taste really great. A good start to continue the experiment and improve our skills!