We haven't been drinking enough

Usually when we have a big move or major change we drink, alot. When I returned to Portland after graduate school gin and tonics were my friend (as well as Dungeon Siege). When we bought a house - ditto. When we moved to Costa Rica it was rum and fruit blender drinks. When we stayed in Portland temporarily we drank a lot of good Portland beers.

I'm not sure why alcohol hasn't been a part of this move. It needs to be. It's been a little stressful. Moving to a new country and having to create a whole new household from scratch. We still don't have a couch and we don't have any heat worth mentioning. You can see your breath in our house in the mornings. Definitly colder than to Costa Rica. Although the tile and towel warmers are nice. We have a fireplace and we are waiting to get the insurance worked out.

Blah Blah Blah

If we drank more we wouldn't have the energy to be snappy with each other. This is what we have concluded.

So we have vowed to start drinking more. Australian red wines and New Zealand white wines are our friends! Beer here is pretty crappy and I've done enough damage to my liver to go easy on the hard alcohol.

Restaurants in Auckland

I have been humbled in the past few weeks about something that I could never have expected. Being from Portland for some reason I thought that it was the epicenter of good quality restaurants. I might have been wrong.

Roberta and I have eaten out probably 18 times since we showed up here. Not one of those meals I would consider even slightly below standards. Everything from the fancy restaurants in foofy neighborhoods to the little cafe next to my office have had wonderful food. No matter how much you pay for a meal it has always been good. For example, spending about $5 NZ (~2.75 US) for lunch at the cafe is filling and very tasty. Vegetarian meals are a side though but still well done.

French toast here is not like it is in the states. It comes as a stack of regular french toast alternated with bananas cut lengthwise in half and baked in their skin and thick slabs of bacon. So you get this towering breakfast of champions.

Mmmm... I just got hungry writing this post.

On a non-food related note. I was worried about how bad the drivers were going to be based on what everyone on the message boards was saying. I told people that I survived a year of driving in Costa Rica and they said that was nothing. Well I must say that they are wrong. I have found the drivers here to be very courteous and kind. They always slow down to let you merge onto the motorway and we haven't seen road rage since we actually learned how to drive on the right(left) side of the road. It seems to be about the same as Portland for drivers. The traffic here is a whole other thing though. Imagine Portland without mass transportation and that is Auckland. There are way too many cars here.

More pictures to come soon.

Quick update - Car, House, Job, Pictures

I have had a fair number of requests for pictures so here we go. We are really getting settled and have purchased a car and are just finalizing the details on a house. Roberta also got a job today with Transit New Zealand. She actually had job offers from two different companies but picked TNZ for a number of reasons. You go girl.

Driving here for the first couple tries was fairly difficult. Completely overwhelming. After a couple weeks of it now it isn't a problem. I don't even think about it any more. Although last weekend we were driving though the country and after about 400 meters I noticed that I was on the wrong side of the road. Ooopppsss....

Here are a bunch of pictures from the past week:

Click here for pictures

Rugby and Rainbows

This weekend I went to a pub with some of Adam's co-workers. Adam was battling a cold, and now I am too.

Rugby is big here, like soccer is in Costa Rica, or like American football. We were watching the championship game of the Super 14. The Super 14 is a league of teams from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Rugby differs from most other sports because it is terribly brutal. The rugby players usually have fifty pounds on soccer player and lack all of the protective gear of American football players. I almost think Rugby players are even more brutal than boxers because there is a big pack of them which adds the herd mentality.

During the first play one player dove into another and a knee made contact with a head. These guys are huge and they move fast, really fast. Apparently Maori genetics create huge fast moving Rugby players (among other very nice people, I'm sure). The player, who crashed his head into a sprinting 250+ pound player, crashed to the ground and passed out face down in the grass. People were stepping on him and the play continued. When the play stopped (I still haven't figured out why the plays stop unless it involves a boundary) some other players just turned him over like a floppy doll. I'm thinking, hello, potential spinal injury don't move him! Parametics arrived and he finally came to and walked off the field. He looked amazingly terrible, was smiling and barely holding it together.

Rugby is the most brutal sport I've ever witnessed. I kept gasping and cringing while watching this game. The headlines in the next day was about the bar fight where the losers were partying. All Black drama of handbags at dawn.

But fortunately this cultural phenomenon is buffered. It is buffered by a beautiful, scenic, bubble wrap of scenery that surrounds the Auckland area and likely the entire country. This blog is going to be consumed by pretty scenic pictures. Fortunately there aren't any pretty pictures worth posting on Rugby players with cauliflower ear.

Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines

I like Truthdig. Here's my new favorite article. Beware, it is long, intelligent and digs into the problem of religious beliefs. It's nice being in New Zealand a country without too many religious fanatics.

An Atheist Manifesto: Imagine There's no Heaven
-A dig led by Sam Harris

It seems profoundly unlikely that we will heal the divisions in our world simply by multiplying the opportunities for interfaith dialogue. The endgame for civilization cannot be mutual tolerance of patent irrationality. While all parties to liberal religious discourse have agreed to tread lightly over those points where their world views would otherwise collide, these very points remain perpetual sources of conflict for their coreligionists. Political correctness, therefore, does not offer an enduring basis for human cooperation. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.

When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One's convictions should be proportional to one's evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn't--indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable--is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.

Auckland Day 3: Job Interview and House Hunting

I'm doing much better. Jet lag takes more than one night's sleep to shake off. I'm feeling normal now, although we still go to bed too early.

I had a job interview with Transit New Zealand, which is similiar to ODOT and FHWA. I'm pretty sure they will offer me a job. I've decided to focus my career towards transportation planning. You can pretty much get a job anywhere if you are a trans planner and the pay is a little bit better. Plus it's where the rubber hits the payment for planning, no pun intentended (haha).

Also I should mention that right before the job interview I had sushi for lunch. And, unfortunately, I dropped a piece of sushi into the wasabi soy sauce mix and a large glob went into my eye. I was seriously blind in one eye for a few moments. Luckily my eye only had a feeling of burning sensation, and it wasn't too red. Wasabi is cool like that; burning but not outwardly red for those special occasions.

On to house hunting....

I looked at two houses, which were too big, but also not too far over our budget. Yesterday I was nervous about not being able to find something but I think I will be able to find something. You just have to check the listings in the neighborhood everyday. Now that we know where we are going to work it will be a lot easier to focus geographically.

More Auckland obersvations:
-There are coffee shops everywhere. I know I said this before, but I just need to say it again.
-There are real butcher and bakery shops where people get their groceries. Definately better than shopping at the mega grocers.
-The light switches are really small. You can't just blindly whirl your hands around to turn on the light, you have to focus the fingers. And there are on and off switches for the oven on the outlets. Took a while to figure that one out.



Four more first day pictures

Mrs. Egan and Mauricio

Today I was missing Mauricio. Mauricio was our good friend in Costa Rica. He was an amazing song writer and musician. One of the best I've heard, especially in the Spanish/Latino genre. He died unexpectedly and it was hard to have somebody close died. It's been a long time since somebody close to me die. That must be the hardest part about growing older are your friends dying.

Now I hear that Mrs. Egan, Trisha's mom, died. She had leukemia and asked to be taken off of support. Mrs. Egan and I use to trade hammocks for beads. About ten years ago when I was living in Mexico, Geth (old boyfriend) and I learned how to weave hammock from the native Indians. Mrs. Egan was a teacher so she didn't want to buy the hammock, but she had beads to trade. Even after so much traveling and moving I still have those beads. Now they are really special to me. Mrs. Egan wanted to give me the rest of the beads after her death, but one of her grandkids was the recipient. It's good to keep things in the family, I'm just happy to know that she was thinking of me, and that she received the hammock I sent her from Costa Rica (even though I didn't weave it). Bye Mrs. Egan.

This is kind of a sad post, so listen to some of Mauricio's music that he recorded with Adam. They are really nice to listen to. Mauricio's Music (and a bunch of other musicians).

Auckland Day 2: Driving and Finding a home

It's been a bit of an overwhelming day. I'm going to write it down to sort it out in my own head.

We obtained a rental car and Adam was the first one to drive with the wheel on the wrong side and driving on the wrong side of the road. When I read about other people's experience I thought, what is the big deal? Ha! It's quite a mental exercise, with the added stress of possible physical and financial disaster and a first day on the job was the icing on the cake. Adam drove to the office, we dropped him off than I quickly got lost on my own for a while.

I made it to a nearby neighborhood and managed to find a few rental listings before calling Clair. We (she) drove around and I got an idea of what the neighborhoods were like. She has been quite the angel. There was a little confusion at the lunch counter, but I regret not insisting on paying for her lunch. I was figuring out the new currency situation.

One thing I noticed about Auckland is that there are coffee shops everywhere. Auckland has about three times as many coffee shops as Portland, and to my knowledge most of them are local, non-franchised type of places. An Americano is called a Long Black here. If you order an Americano it comes with the water and the milk on the side. Just in case you want to manage your water content. I had a quiche and it was really dense in a not so good way. I'm use to a fluffy soft quiche. But, hands down the pastry I had was brilliant. I had a banana nut bread almond torte thingy that was delicious. Instead of a salad with the quiche people were eating pastries. It's going to be a challenge losing the weight gained in Portland.

Rentals are usually listed at local real estate office. Signs are usually not put out on houses, nor are they listed in the local paper. Though there are a lot of listings on Trade Me. This site is Auckland's Craigslist. Adam will likely find a car there as well.

That's it for day 2. Tomorrow is job interview day. I bought some panty hose to go with my suit. Woohoo can't wait!

Pandora.com

My new favorit website is Pandora. Thank you Kearstin for sending me the link, I'm only sorry it took me four months to check it out. You input a few of your favorite songs or artists and it creates an infinite streaming playlist of similiarities. So it's really easy to discover new music while also listening to some known songs. I've been getting bored with my music library and too lazy to update it so, Pandora was my easy way out.

It's otherwise known as the Music Genome Project.

I better get off the internet. I'm not sitting behind a firewall and my antivirus software keeps popping up with warnings. Intersting, this is the first time I've seen one of these pop ups. I guess Adam's firewalls/boxes were working.

Auckland Day 1

First off the ride from SFO to Auckland was pleasant. The plane was about a third full. Each seat has a nifty in seat, on demand entertainment selection. Bradley, Adam's boss picked us up at the airport around 6:00am. His wife Claire drove us around and acted as a really nice knowledgable tour guide.

The day we arrived we opened up a bank account, connected our cell phones, moved into our studio apt AND went grocery shopping. That would have taken weeks in Costa Rica. Here's a picture of a view from our room and our first homemade meal on a suitcase coffee table, if you can call cheese and crackers a meal.

I'm using these blog posts to keep myself awake. I have to stay up as late as possible to acclimate my body to the new zone. So here is some interesting observations:

-Driving on the wrong side of the road. The key is to keep yourself in the center lane. We'll see how well that works tomorrow when we get a rental.

-Drivers are not as bad as we have been told.

-Bathrooms have towel warmers. The US is way behind on this technology.

-Grocery prices are similar to Portland. The yogurt section is about three times as big as any I've ever scene. I guess dairy is pretty big here. Imagine going into a grocery store and seeing items that look similiar, but you don't recognize any brands. It will be hit or miss for a while.

-The local cooking channel was cooking bangers and mash. Why is a sausage called a banger?

-The cosmic connection between Portland and New Zealand is the destruction of the Trojan nuclear power plant near Portland on the day we arrived in Auckland. New Zealand is nuclear free and we discovered the Trojan explosion on the Kiwi local news.

Here's the view from our temporary apartment in the Auckland CBD.

Thank you Portland Family and Friends

We arrived in Portland on April 6th and left on May 19th. The immigration paperwork took about 3-4 weeks longer then expected. We had a fantastic time and want to thank all of the people who housed us, fed us, loaned us their cars and or drove us around.

-Kristen and Darren thank you for letting us stay in your beautiful house. We loved getting to know you and your dogs better. We are cat people, but we enjoyed Buddy and Porter.

-Michelle and Allen for taking care of Vida for the next five months. I'm jealous because they are all very happy together and we may have to file for custody to get Vida back.

-Dan and Amy thanks for letting us borrow your cars. Driving a car with heated seats for weeks on end completely spoiled us.

-Congratulations Monica and Jerry for your new little baby Simone. She's a cute squishy baby.

And thanks everybody else for coming to visit, eat and drink. We hope you come and visit us in New Zealand. The plane ride wasn't that bad.

Here are some pictures of a Gorge hiking visit and a day at the water park with my sister's family.

We got our visa!!!

We have been hanging out in Portland for the past month or so waiting for our immigration paperwork to go through in New Zealand and yesterday we got the word!!! We are officially Kiwis(Not the fruit).

The application process involved getting a series of medical tests and a complete physical. We got chest xrays for TB and blood test for just about everything known to man. We had to get our criminal records from the FBI by sending them in our fingerprints. We had to prove that we were in a long term relationship so that Roberta could get in on a work visa also. I had to prove that I had the qualifications for the job that I was offered by citing work experience with letters of reference and a certified copy of my diploma. All in all it was just hoops, nothing was too complex.

So our next week will be filled with finishing up the things that we have been putting off. Finishing packing, shipping boxes, buying any last stuff that we need, etc.

Portland is really nice right now so it will be sad to go. Our living experience here has been wonderful. It made me rethink my attitude about roommates. Maybe now we are old enough to be civil.

Here are some more Portland pictures:

Click for more pictures

Phil and Maile had their kid

We are back in Portland now and are glad to announce that our good friends Phil and Maile just had thier first kid.

Here are the technical stats:

Name: Ella Virginia Ross (girl)
Weight: 6 pounds 8 ounces (heavy)
Length: 19 inches (long)

Goddess Dawn of Chuckville on the Minam River in Eastern Oregon

We have arrived in Portland OR, introduced Vida to her home with Michelle and Allen, and now is a good time for an Oregon post.

Dawn is my good friend from undergrad at Southern Oregon University. Later we were in the Resource Assistance for Rurale Environments (R.A.R.E.). Dawn and I were placed working for the GIS departments for Wallowa and Wasco Counties. This was our introduction to Eastern Oregon. Eastern Oregon is completely different than Western Oregon. This is where people really hunt and fish. Yeehaw!!

Dawn lassied up with Chuck. Chuck is the type of guy who you could spend an afternoon with and feel like you've been good friends for years. For a while they lived in a little old school house above the Minam River Campground. For a better description of the area read the following article from a fly fishing travel writer. Rat Pack Steelhead In Bing Crosby’s Paradise Part One

So here is a little plug for my good friends Dawn and Chuck in Minam Oregon who own the historic Minam Hotel. The Minam Motel is nestled virtually within the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area, and sits on the bank of the Wallowa River at the confluence of the Minam and Wallowa Rivers.

Since I'm not a hunter or fisher my favorite memory is floating down the Minam River in an innertube then running back up the river and doing it again. Also Hell's Canyon for rafting and hiking is very close by. Good Times in Oregon!

We are currently at the Goat Farm. I've got to get back to my fresh goat milk and coffee! Check out Missdee's French Alpine Dairy Goats.

Hasta Luego

We are in the airport right now hopefully all of our bags will make it onto the plane and to Portland safely. Especially the one with the cat in it.

Amazingly she went into the cat carrier easy at the house, like she knew we were moving. Typically you have to shove her pretty good to get her into the case.

We have 6 checked bags at 50 pounds each, the cat, two carry ons at 40 pounds each, and two laptop bags stuffed to the hilt. We were waiting in line and Roberta heard someone bitching about how much stuff we had. So the next time you are traveling and see someone with an unreasonable number of bags please understand that they might be moving. Before today I probably would have been in the crew that was doing the bitching.

Well, we will be boarding our flight soon so expect the look of the pictures to change. Less sun, more rain, no palms and bananas, and maybe even a little snow.

Our final trip to Puerto Viejo - We are leaving tomorrow

We decided that for our last weekend here we would take a trip to Puerto Viejo and get some beach time in before we leave. We got a rental car and headed out for two days. We stayed at Roberta's favorite hotel, Casa Verde. It was my first time there and I liked it. The room was great and the pool was awesome. My only gripe was that the beds in our room were well past the time to throw them out. The only bed big enough for me and Roberta had a huge divot on my side so I had to sleep in the other bed in the room which had metal springs gouging me in the back. If I would stay there again I would test out the beds before I accepted a room.

We had a great time there. We went down past Manzanillo and probably looked at the Panamanian frontier. Then we just pulled up a spot on the beach and chilled out. We were going to rent motorcycles and go for a mini tour but the guy who was renting them had a bad attitude so we decided not to. We made the better choice as I was able to finish the Culture Shock Costa Rica book. I will write a review of that in another post.

After a couple days in PV we decided to drive back and get into the real world. You know, to start packing since we are leaving on Thursday. I was driving from PV to Limon and I was going fairly fast but Roberta was prompting me to go even faster. We were railing along and I hit this big pothole and Roberta screams because the hubcap flies off into the ditch. We had to stop and try to find it. We found it but we had broken a piece off of it so we just threw it into the trunk to deal with later.

About halfway to San Jose I gave the wheel to Roberta and we continued. She was cruising along at about 60 and came across a car eating pothole. There was no way to avoid it so she just hit it with the front right wheel of the car hard. We made it home and got out and looked at the tire. It was half flat and the rim had a huge dent in it. I tried to put the hubcap back on but it wouldn't fit. I had to go borrow a hammer from the guard in our complex and pound it flat so that I could get the hubcap on.

It was Sunday evening and we needed to find some zip ties to tie the hubcap onto the car. We went to the new Hiper Mas in San Pedro but we couldn't find any zip ties. We asked the guard if he knew where any were. He was like, "No no, we don't have any" And we were like "Oh come on man, help a brother out" Costa Ricans can't stand to help if you act a little sad or aggitated. He went into the back and came back out with 8 zip ties and he gave them to us for free. He was a life saver since we had to take the rental car back at 9:30 in the morning.

We took the rental car back after zip tieing on the hub cap and they didn't charge us for anything. They were pointing at the rim and he called his boss over but there were no problems. Whew.

This will likely be the last post from Costa Rica. Expect the scenery to change and the stories to change. We have had a great time in Costa Rica and would consider coming back but the world is so big and unexplored.

Click for more pictures of the trip

Moving From Costa Rica to New Zealand

Well, I guess it is about time to change the title of our blog to reflect what is happening with our lives. We are moving to New Zealand at the end of April. Keep reading to learn about the New Zealand immigration process, establishing a home in Auckland, and new places we'll get to visit. Adam and I are really excited.

The Ox Cart parade in Escazu.

I went to the Ox Cart parade a couple weeks ago and am finally getting the pictures up. We have had other things, namely moving to New Zealand, that are on our mind.

The parade was an awesome display of meat and wood. The cows and oxen were huge. Everyone was having such a good time.

The pictures best describe the action at the parade so here you go:

Link to pictures

One more....

Our friends Michelle and Allan were in town from Portland and we went out to dinner with them at Jurgen's restaurant. It is excellent and fairly close to our house so we decided to walk there. On the walk home after a great meal I was walking a little bit behind the other three. While walking across a street in the streelight I saw Roberta just about step on a HUGE spider. You noticed how I capitalized "HUGE" right. I screamed and then everyone else screamed. It was basically a screamfest. I was confused, it wasn't a spider, it was a frakkin tarantula, hair and all. I grabbed a stick and poked it a couple times but Michelle looked like she was going to have nightmares so we kept going. Did I mention that the thing was HUGE?

What's that in my shoe?

I put my shoes on yesterday and walked around for about ten minutes and then felt something in my show like a large rock. I pulled my shoe off and dumped out a huge cockroach. Nasty.

Then, as if it couldn't get any worse, we went to bed that night and I woke up half way through the night screaming because a cockroach was running around under the covers.

This is the first time that a cockroach has been in my shoe or under the covers. It must be the season to get weirded out.