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.