Hello people,is has already been 3 months since our last update. But you know, it's true what they say: No news is good news. We are doing fine, enjoying ourselves and just do what Kiwis do, try to be outdoors a lot!
Winter has come and gone and it definitely turning into spring. Days are getting longer and we will change the daylight saving time in a week. We went for a walk in Hagley Park to have a look at the thousands of daffodils. Everything is in bloom and looks amazing. Unfortunately, spring also means that George is suffering from hay fever again.
Some updates which were long due:
We received our Permanent Residence status and are allowed to live and work in New Zealand. It also means that we are entitled to vote, which we can do for the first time in November for National Elections. It also means that the collection of stickers in our passports grew again by another two.
We also got our refund from customs (import tax) we initially had to pay, but than later was returned to us. Customs admitted that they were wrong and send us a check. YES!Esther is already working more than 4 months again at Davis Ogilvie. Colleagues are friendly and the work load is growing, getting more and more interesting and challenging.
George has a new position within his current company; he is now a Systems Administrator Operations. It is a step up from his previous job and he will be doing more challenging work now. An extra advantage is that he doesn't need to do shift work on a weekly basis (only to fill in for a collegue if he is away). He also get's the opportunity again to administer the much loved *cough* email system Lotus Notes...
George joined a group of people for a friendly pick up game of frisbee in Hagley Park. The grass was rather muddy and wet as you can see in the picture. George soon discovered that not doing any sports for a decade seriously impacts his general fitness!As Esther's fitness level was also not so well, we decided to buy a cross-trainer. The main advantage is that we can exercise at whatever time we like and during any type of weather. It works surprisingly well for us; we use it a couple of times a week, more than we used our rowing machine in The Netherlands.
Rural living training :-)As you can see from this image, we have been training for our future lifestyle outside "the big smoke" (any big city in NZ; Christchurch in our case). From couch-potato to stable-boy in a day! We helped out at the Studfarm of Cathy De Vries, one of George's co-workers at Foodstuffs.
We are starting to look around for a property outside Christchurch with some extra space (between 2 and 4 hectares would be perfect). Buying some land and building our own house is probably not financially possible at this time, so we are mainly concentrating on some land with a good quality house already on it.
Last weekend, we went on our first ski-trip in New Zealand. Mount Hutt ski-field is only a 2 hours drive from Christchurch, so we got up early on Saturday and together with some other Dutch friends drove up the mountain. We decided to try snowboarding and booked a lesson which taught us the basics in 3 hours. The weather had been excellent all day, so we enjoyed it all immensely. 
Snowboarding is completely different to skiing, hence you fall a lot in the beginning. But at the end of the day, we managed to slide down the practice hill without too many difficulties. This years skiing season is ending soon, but we (especially George) enjoyed snowboarding so much that we will take some more lessons next season.
