it's been one hell of a trip so far...

If you had asked me, about a month before we left, how I felt about leaving our European lives behind, I'd have said, 'easy, no problem', and those that know me well might even have suggested I was being a bit blasé about it all. The reality of saying good bye began to sink in when we popped over to Spain and I had to say adios to some really good friends. Even though we'd left Spain six months previously, it was (is) still home and i had to keep reminding myself that I actually would be seeing everyone again, one day. There's nonetheless a weird permanence about saying good bye that was heart wrenching, and remains so. If I try hard (and I generally try really hard not to, I'm not that masochistic...) i can still feel that same wrench. I went through a phase for the first couple of weeks here of having "saying good bye" dreams every night, really vivid and sad. They seem to have stopped now, thankfully, although it was really nice to see some of you again :-)

Well then, down to the real nitty gritty and the reason i finally got round to writing - school. I know Ive had a couple of years off and despite a couple of months doing supply in the UK will admit to being a touch rusty. However, I'm generally confident that i'm an ok teacher, I do love it and it's all I ever really wanted (and want) to do. I've come in to this school in term 4, at the end of the year, at the end of one hell of a year for the kids I'm with and the school itself. Myself and a fab girl from Wigan called Antonia have been lifted up and dropped into a school in crisis, quite frankly.

An incident occurred in term 3 involving one of the Deputy Principals (who had been sharing my class with the other DP, who is an angel!) resigning for some reason – an argument? misunderstanding? – with the Head who recruited us. The Ministry of Education have instigated an enquiry and staff morale is in the minus numbers. And the kids are something else. Both my class and Antonia's have been messed around a lot; I am my class' 4th teacher, Antonia is the 7th for hers... in one year! My main impression after 2 weeks is that they are incredibly rude, respond more to negative attention than positive and can give it out but are unable to take it. I only have 23 kids but they are such a handful. I'm not teaching, I am trying to control behaviour but so far nothing has worked.

Usually, a couple of weeks into a job, even if you have come in late in the year or as a supply teacher you've "got" the kids and you know how to handle them. In 10 days of being with this class I've had about one hour of it being OK. I usually alternate between waiting for them to settle down, asking them nicely to be quiet and yelling like a blummin' lunatic. It isn't fun. They swear, although not (yet) directly at me, if I ask them to be quiet or to do something I get the blackest looks I have had in my entire life and am generally tutted at at least 20 times a day. Of course, I am a white Pommie female who has dared to enter a patriarchal culture in a position which in most cultures demands at least a modicum of respect, so really, what do I expect?!

Somewhat reassuring, but at the same time entirely depressing, is the fact that I'm not the only teacher there in this position. Staff who have been there for years are sworn at, have scissors thrown at them and are disrespected in other ways. I have been told that not all of the schools in the cluster mine belongs to are the same but find it hard to believe... if anyone has any ideas of strategies I can use I'd be eternally grateful! The remaining DP is wonderful, he has been at the school for about 20 years and is totally respected by everyone. He helps a lot but has a heavy load and also I really don't want (and normally wouldn't need) to be "carried". We don't know the curriculum, have to do all these tests with the kids and, and have to write reports in a couple of weeks?! I've got 9 hours of release time coming up over the next few weeks, can't wait! Aaaaagh!!! Needless to say, the CV is in circulation!

It's a shame, as nothing else I've experienced here is anywhere near as negatively-charged, but it's hard to deny it has seriously coloured my first impressions of the country we're hoping to call home one day. Work is a big part of your life and when it's crap the rest of your life is bound to be tainted by that. I mean, there are some brilliant schools here (Elly's is just one example) and whereas Howick might not be our first choice of town to live in, we've barely scratched the surface of what NZ has to offer. We both know we have a lot to offer, and it's probably just a matter of time before we get the chance to prove it.

Just a quickie...

I forgot to add a couple of links to the last post, most importantly to the latest pics (I get complaints if there's not lots of pics) and also to some odd terminology... "tramping" is NZ-speak for hiking or fellwalking. Walking, especially of the odd exaggerated-arm-swinging variety with optional wiggly hips and sticky-out bums, appears to be mega-popular, quite possibly as an antidote to driving absolutely everywhere. Like round the corner to drop the kids off, as a couple of Elly's schoolmates seem to do. There appears to be no activity in between, unless it involves water. Or gambling.

I dunno, it's really too easy to generalise and I'm probably way off the mark as far as actual facts go... I'm getting this blogging done during my daily caffeine fix at Esquires, who have free wireless access which actually works on occasion. Quite often it cuts out just as I'm posting something up, like yesterday... links are obviously the product of surfing, which is (obviously) at a premium these days. No matter, I just signed up today with NZ Telecom for a big fat broadband deal which will (they say) magically activate itself the day we move into our new place. Until then, you should probably take all my pontificating with the cruet set at hand.

Right. I've fixed the links, added more here and made feeble excuses. Hasta luego! x

Comparative nonsense

Notice anything different about this No Entry sign?

Before we came, we'd chatted with a fair few people who'd already been and there were a fair few more who, despite being very impressed, thought it eerily reminiscent of the UK, especially in & around Wellington and Christchurch. Some even use "Little England" as a synonym for Christchurch. We've not been there yet (not for that reason, but it's probably reason enough..) but I'd kind of expected to find the suburbs here in Auckland's to be a lot more familiar than they are. They're actually more reminiscent of Barcelona's urbanizaciones if anywhere, just definitively down-under, with a lot of things distinctly Kiwi rather than Ozzie in character.

For example, one thing we've done a lot of is grocery shopping. Supermarkets are pretty much the same the world over, although their trundlers are front-wheel-steer only and there are a lot more dairies to compete with. They're everywhere, super-convenient for shoppers and robbers alike, although convenience shopping doesn't stop with them: like Australia, you can get most basics at the servo and there's usually a "superette" (love it) on the main roads in & out of town. It's all about as English as Watties tomato ketchup.

Ignoring some inconvenient facts for a moment, New Zealand is also way bigger than the UK. It took a little over 3 hours driving to get from our old place in Durham to Heathrow airport, a journey which, on the map, seems to traverse a good chunk of the country. Drive from Auckland to the south coast and it will take you nine hours, and that's just the reasonably flat north island... add another nine and you might get somewhere near the southern highlands. For the averagely laid-back traveller, that's at least a three-day journey, and doesn't even account for the ferry between the two landmasses. It's no wonder it took those poor Hobbits so long to get to Mordor.

The thing is, it's so goddam hilly, the roads you see on the map are no indication of distance at all. If you flattened the buggers out they'd be twice as long. Seriously! It's big in a quiet way, like mountains or oceans which seem relatively small from a distance and vast when you get right up to them. We went tramping on Sunday, drove up into the Hunua mountains beyond the Napa Valley vineyards to a locked gate, at which point you have to get out and er, tramp. Looking for a picnic site and sporting totally inappropriate footwear, we followed a mud-laden trail through dense forest, overgrown with monster ferns and sinister creepers, which according to a large-scale map we found would be a kilometer maximum before we reached a viewpoint with fabulous views. It took about an hour. I swear it was nearer 5km... the view was indeed fabuolous (see pics) and the kids were amazing, but we had a classic bus-load of tourists at the top of the mountain moment when we turned to leave and found a perfectly good road round the corner providing an easy 10 minute stroll back to the car...

Anyway, about those inconvenient facts: the Kiwi landmass covers roughly the same area as the UK, give or take a receding shoreline or two (if one of the 48 volcanoes here decided to erupt, that could change quite radically of course) and there are famously more sheep here than people. Like about five times as many, and roughly 15 times fewer people than the UK, but it's really not that obvious until you go to the beach on a perfect sunny day & find there's almost no one there. That same Sunday we drove through Maretai, a really stunning seaside town with beautiful, turquoise crystal seas and spotless beaches fringed with shaded, grassy picnic areas; it was 12 noon and there were maybe 30 people there. The beach, which must be all of 3km long, was practically deserted. Out of the city, you do get this odd feeling of being vastly outnumbered by livestock. Across the road from the beach, a flock of wooly ruminants keep their heads down, hoping no-one will notice.

This is the reason NZ is so high up the chart of "per-capita" statistics; less than a quarter of the population of 4.2 million people live outside of the cities and burbs. The result is that the country has – per capita – more crime, more McDonalds restaurants, more Olympic medals and more dope smokers than almost any other country in the world. Everything you'd expect to find downtown New York is present in Downtown, Auckland City, but it's magnified statistically by the sheer dearth of people living anywhere else in NZ. Having the second-lowest population density in the world really does distort the stats as much as it scares the sheep: the fact is, this is one of the safest countries in the world to visit, it does crap at the Olympics and for the most part you can't find a Big Mac or score a bag of grass to save your life.

Not that we'd want to do either of those things, of course...

Fear and clothing with Los Nemo

We're a week-and-a-bit into the venture and all that jet-lagged, paranoid head-spinning has finally given way to a more relaxed form of bewilderment, as we locate the majority of life's odd necessities & realise that it really is dead nice here and we're not just telling ourselves it is out of a kind of desperate obligation. A lot of things are as you'd expect: there's that typical Australasian blend of colonial and semi-modern building everywhere, although we also have some spanking-new shopping malls round here; it's very green, with a huge variety of flora and some very odd wildlife; the sea is jade green and stunning wherever you catch sight of it; people are super-friendly, mega-helpful, genuine and gregarious. Everything else is like something from another planet, or maybe a parallel universe. I'll get onto that another time, once I've had a chance to check stuff out properly.

The weather is probably the most bizarre thing of all. It can go from UK grey to tropical blue, via monsoon, hurricane and blizzard, all before lunchtime. Ok, maybe not blizzard – it hasn't snowed in Auckland in 70 years – but you get the idea. You can look out the window one minute and it's sunny and calm, look back again 5 minutes later and it's pissing down and blowing a gale. Rumours that it never stops raining in spring are way off the mark: it's stopped raining at least 35 times in the last week alone... I find myself walking along the street, zipping and unzipping my jacket as the temperature goes up and down. It's just weird. And very windy.

On balance, it's too cold for us at the moment, although that's more true of indoors than out, which is basically down to a lack of building insulation. These days it's illegal to build a house without double-glazing, foam-filled walls, etc, but for years they just didn't bother with it here, so if you live in a house over 10 years old the chances are it has none of these things. The little timber-framed, tin-roof cottage we've been staying in is good for keeping the wind and rain out but other than that it basically keeps things the same temperature inside as out. My campaign to wear shorts for 12 months solid, briefly suspended during the UK summer, has lapsed again here in the Kiwi spring – not when I go out but when we stay indoors. What I need here are long pants that retract above the knee when you pull a cord, concertina-style, whenever I go out.

We need to find a car this week, and it's far from obvious what we should be looking for. There's a whole island full of Japanese auto-transmission saloons (or sedans, as they're known here) with an average age of 10 years and a very strong second-hand market supporting them. Or at least, that's what a look at the small ads will tell you. Others tell me it's a collapsing market, due largely to the falling price of new cars; despite the new car market being slowed by the credit crunch (harder to get loans, etc) there's no denying the need for manufacturers to offload their overseas stock, given the state of the US market. Apparently things are so grim for Ford Motor Co. that they've even mortgaged their famous blue oval logo. It's all very confusing. One thing in our favour might be the effect this all has on the exchange rates. The NZ dollar crashed quite suddenly last week and might ever go lower next week... buying NZ$ at the right time could make buying a new car quite a bit more affordable than it was just a few days ago. Not to mention the deposit on our house, and that iPhone I was thinking of getting, and the many other ways of making sure it ends up costing us more than we save.

We ought to be more careful, cos the whole world seems to be in a scary predicament. All those central banks printing wheelbarrow-loads of money, you have to wonder where it will all end. I was just reading that the digital debt meter in Time Square in New York no longer has enough digits to record the ballooning level of US national debt. Although they've moved the dollar sign out to allow it to go from trillions to tens-of-trillions, there's apparently a move afoot to replace the whole thing with one containing three extra digits, allowing for quadrillions and er, even bigger amounts.

And as the poet said, if you think it might happen, it probably will.

Over the rainbow

The kids have been heavily into the Wizard of Oz for a good while now. I've no idea how many times we've watched it since Elly first saw it at school – 50? 100? – nor how long it will take before the "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" earworm will leave our heads. Years, probably. We naturally brought the DVD with us and they're watching it for the second time today as I type. I always loved it but never really scrutinised its "message" before. This morning – very, very early this morning, thanks to the little one's body clock still being on Singapore time – I watched it with them again and it suddenly occurred to me that the pertinence of the film to our current carry-on might run much deeper than its title.

The "Oz" thing lost most of it's relevance when we decided to move here instead (although, as Nik pointed out, it's so very nearly the Wizard of Nz... yeah, ok, it was dead funny at 5 this morning..) and even the no-place-like-home, grass-is-always-greener theme is a bit on the thin side. No, it was the stuff the main characters are seeking that seemed to ring true to my heavily jet-lagged noggin, and the realisation that my head, heart and courage really are all present and correct, despite my faith in them waning at times. Some of the stuff we've seen and done since we got here has tested them all, the last two days.

Nothing serious, just a few incidences of, "o god, what have we done..", starting with the Airport Garden Hotel. What a dump. I mean it was clean and everything, just in the middle of an industrial estate and totally run down, with a sad, derelict ex-water feature at the entrance, weird, dated decor and cheesy cane furniture in the lobby. Big framed posters hang crookedly on every wall, their colours bleached out to an almost monochrome blue. It's all summed up by two big, brass & glass display cabinets in the lounge, both spotlessly clean, one empty, the other neatly laid out with five Mars bars, fifteen packs of Kleenex and a roll of Sellotape. Classy.

Still, that was just a temporary stopover until we got our little holiday let, which is a complete contrast. It's just a timber two-room bungalow set in the owner's grounds but it's gorgeous, like something out of Homes & Gardens. Big, mature plants and trees are set against towering virgin forest, the first blooms of Spring are all around, the long driveway lined with huge wild lillies. At the end, you go over the bridge to the turquoise waters of the bay. This is a stunning country, moreso than we ever imagined, and we've still not even left the suburbs of Auckland. We're actually in the Botany Downs, just on the outskirts of the south-eastern 'burbs, where the landscape goes from flattish to very hilly around the coast. Still very difficult to navigate, never mind describe, so I'll leave it for now...

There's a hell of a lot to take in of course. We had another OMG moment when we visited Niki's new school. It's in Otara, one of the poorest districts, and although it's very low-rise, with broad avenues and gardens, the housing is clearly really basic and there's a real ghetto feel to the place. You can almost see why gang culture is so big there, but I also got a sense of civic pride and community I've not felt since I lived in Sudan. First impressions, nothing more, are a mixture of intimidation and awe. NZ has a famously high crime rate that seems to be heavily concentrated in these urban areas. You get out into the sticks and it's all sheep and seabirds. One more reason we'll be heading out there...

Got to end here and get this posted up – our lovely landlady Lorraine has offered us use of her computer. More news soon from the yellow brick road!

In transit

This was the hilarious state of play on arrival at Heathrow. We hired a nice car and bombed it down the M1 (actually M1 / M42 / M40, should there be any route nerds reading..) arrived bang on time and E & O were just fab the whole way. A good cry seemed to be therapeutic, cos they were just wonderful all through the enormous check-in queue too. We're in Changi airport now, overnighting airside at the Amabassador Transit Hotel. It's... well, it's got two beds, so it's a bloomin' godsend. The flight was no bother, although we're not going to see the best of the place from here.

From my centre aisle seat, straining an envious eye through the window seat headrests, following a 12-hour flight and probably due to having precisely one hours' sleep in the last 24, urban Singapore looks like one of those magic domino exhibitions. Hundreds of apartment blocks become white tiles, a certain distance apart, their dark windows spoiling it slightly by making up too many spots. As we're not going to get out of the airport this time round, that's the way it'll be remembered; a big climate-controlled, bizarrely-carpeted shopping mall surrounded by jumbo jets, with nearby suburbs ready to fall at the flick of a finger. Really must make more of an effort to get out next time ;)

We're all completely fried and need to get some kip, so I'll keep this short. Actually the kids slept quite well – flight took in their normal bedtime hours – and since they've had a bath and spoken to the grandparents on the Skype they're bouncing round the room like newborn lambs. It's one of those places, Changi airport, where a passing glance into the hollow eyes of fellow travellers sparks a vague recognition of yourself: everyone's six timezones the wrong side of zomboid. It's nine at night now, we've got this hotel room til 6am then an 8.30am, second-leg, 10 hour flight to Auckland. Excited beyond belief of course, but it won't be that keeping us awake, it'll be the kiddy bodyclock refusing to budge from UK time...

Next post from New Zealand!