Month: October 2018

When the novelty wears off

I remember in the month before we emigrated to New Zealand for the first time, back in March 2012, I used to get such a kick out of telling people we were moving to the other side of the world. The day before we went, I was in Tesco’s and the lady on the checkout asked, ‘Are you doing anything nice this weekend?”. It was so much fun to say, “Yes actually, I am moving to New Zealand.” I loved telling family and friends, because they were shocked, but in a good way. Pleased for us getting to do something so out of the ordinary and curious to see up-close how the whole emigration thing works, not least because NZ is a very pleasant place to visit. It was quite an out-of-the-blue decision.  Neither of us had even holidayed in New Zealand or Australia.  When I was younger, I was obsessed with the States and Gareth probably imagined living in Ibiza, but “down-under” had never featured.  We were going to go for a couple of …