My sister is going to be so proud of me when she reads this one. This morning I was on my usual quest “to get fresh air” with the children and had Jackson in a back pack and Minnie in the pushchair.  As I was walking along I could see walking towards us, a lady probably in her seventies smiling, no beaming at us.  So I stopped.  Yes that’s right Bud I stopped to talk to an old person in the street. I am so glad I did.  Turns out she was gorgeous.  A doctor who had never married but had spent twenty years of her life working in hospitals in South Africa.  She owned a house out there and was going back for a year.  This angel also owned a house in Kent and Christchurch and best of all, she thought my children were lovely (first way to my heart). We swapped names (Mary is hers) which led into a long conversation about the Scottish, Welsh and English.  Mary said that the Scots (from …

How do you prepare yourself for disappointment, without just bringing forward the feeling of disappointment? Gareth and I are still trying to buy a house in Christchurch.  After a huge search across the city, we settled on a lovely house on a pretty street in a not so desirable area of town (due to liquifaction not crime rates). In New Zealand there is quite a formal procedure to put in your offer, you have to sign a contract that awards you two weeks to get all your ducks in line for a definite sale.  Once you get to that point there is no going back. HOWEVER if in that two week period your building inspection flags up a bundle of problems with the house, then everything stays not so definite.  Oddly the issues on this house aren’t earthquake related and are more to do with the age of house.  Maybe New Zealand isn’t so different to the UK.  Tomorrow is the 14th day so decisions must be made and I fear we are going back …

Today I took Minnie and Jackson to register with the library local to the house we’re buying.  I am trying to get a feel for the community we will be living in, making sure we’ll fit in.  I realised it’s actually the small things that help you to feel comfortable in a community. We were crossing the road to get to the library and as we waited at the lights and the green man appeared, the little old lady stood next to us, took Minnie’s hand and guided her across the road.  And Minnie held her hand all the way.  That to me, says we’ll like this community. So even though there are bumps from liquefaction caused by the earthquakes at the end of our road and some of the houses on nearby streets are a little scruffy I think, I can live here, because there are little old ladies who take your child by the hand and make sure they get to the other side safely. As I write this I also think, choosing …

In New Zealand there is a Bank Holiday for Anzac Day (their version of Remembrance Day).  And it is a holiday that falls on the date rather than the day, which sucks if it is a Saturday or Sunday because they don’t “carry it over” to the following Monday.  Thankfully this year was a Wednesday so Gareth got a cheeky day off in the middle of his second week of work in Christchurch. We weren’t sure how the day goes for locals, i.e. did they have a sombre day of reflection?  We went to the beach with some friends. There were New Zealanders there so hopefully our day of fun wasn’t being hideously disrespectful.  Even though it’s their Autumn now the weather is warm and sunny so the children just ran around the whole time and I crouched under a sun tent feeding my 10 month old happy. Now that we have the children in bed and I am sitting on the couch drinking a cider, I can reflect and remember what generations before us …

Last night Gareth and I watched the DVD, “When A City Falls” which basically tells the story of Christchurch’s earthquakes. It’s very simple and real.  You get a good insight into how people were effected, which really is the story you want to learn when you move to the city. We wander on Sumner beach like the picture below and you get no notion of what Christchurch citizens lived through. You realise why people are selling their houses and moving North.  If you experience a 7.1 in the September, dust yourself off, mend what’s broken, celebrate a Christmas, see a New Year in and then wham get thrashed (literally) by a 6.3 in the February you are going to really struggle to forget and just carry on life as normal.  If it were me I would be always suspicious, always thinking about the chance of another, working out the odds of whether I’d fair as well as the last time.  I’d want to leave to. I still haven’t even felt a tremor so I have …