Thursday, April 5th 2007

Well, it's been a very busy first few days down here in Auckland. One of the most exciting things that we found out was that Auckland was voted the 5th best place in the world to live. Wellington (the capital) was voted 12th. No places in the US were in the top 5 which was surprising. Not sure who put out the survey, but I heard it on the morning news.

Erin has had 2 interviews to date, and the one today appeared to be very promising. Grabbing a job in the next couple weeks will be great for our money supply as we have found that food and other goods are rather pricey down here.

A cruise ship was docked at one of the piers today which was kind of exciting, so I hung out around there and read my lonely planet book while waiting for Erin to get out of her meeting.

My past few days have consisted of watching an hour or two of both cricket and rugby. Both sports I'm still trying to figure out the rules (I'm going to see how long I can watch the sports and figure out the rules on my own, before I have to find the rules on the internet). I actually got Erin to watch rugby for 5 minutes today so that was great.

Yesterday afternoon we had a great tour of the city and the nearby surroundings for 3 hours with our first NZ friend and re-location specialist Libby. She also showed us a couple apartments. This afternoon we looked at 10 more apartments. We saw some great places and some crappy smelly ones. We saw some big two bedrooms (1 bedroom for each of you when you visit) and some small studio's. We saw some places in the surrounding subburbs and some places in the Central Business District (CBD).

In the end as expected the place that was right for us was obviously one of the more expensive ones very close to the water. The place was very secure with a large patio on the 5th floor of a relatively new building. It has a "car park" for our car when we get one and some storage space which will hopefully hold our clubs, skis and some other stuff. We feel like we got a good deal with this place as it's in a great area down by the water, close to my work, and it's gorgeous. It's a 1 bed place, but don't worry folks, there will be room for the aero bed to be blown up on the floor and it'll be comfy (or if you want there are nice hotels or even hostels for you to stay in if that doesn't suit your needs...hahah j/k).

Easter weekend is a HUGE holiday down here. Erin and I aren't sure of our plans yet, but most places are closed Friday and Monday. You know what else is interesting is they celebrate Easter on Monday...weird.

As of now we don't have any plans for tomorrow, but we plan to drive to a town outside of the city and spend a few hours seeing some sites. Tomorrow night we plan to go to a rugby game.

Hope all is well back home!