Welcome to New Zealand!

Hello Family and Friends!

Welcome to The Webers Take New Zealand blog, an account of our two year secondment in Auckland, New Zealand.  I hope to detail our adventures exploring New Zealand's natural beauty, as well as provide hopefully humorous anecdotes that compare the American and Kiwi lifestyles.

First for the nitty-gritty facts.  Sorry, first entry will probably be the longest!  Lance, James and I are here for two years through a secondment program with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lance's employer.  Same company he was with in Denver.  Lance arrived at the end of July; James and I followed at the beginning of September.  During his first month Lance was hard at work finding us a place to live, furnishing it, getting a vehicle, starting work, and overall laying general groundwork for our life here.   He was a busy bee!  He did a great job establishing it to make the transition smooth for James and me.  The furnishing still leaves a little (or a lot) to be desired, but we're working on it.  Right now our only seating is a La-Z-Boy recliner that Lance picked up from the side of the road.  It's like we're back in college.  We picked up a roadside TV stand this past weekend on the way home from church.  It was the neighborhood's 'big trash day'.  Score!  Ah, the sacrifices we make so we can have money for more exciting things like skydiving, bungee jumping, skiing, flights, etc.  Oh, and James's future.  That too.

New Zealand is composed of two main island, the North Island and the South Island.  Auckland is near the top of the North Island.  Just to make sure we are all on the same page here, New Zealand is an entirely separate country from Australia.  I had some people say, "So I hear you're moving to Australia."  When I corrected them, I got, "Meh, same thing."  Nope.  That's like saying Canada and the US are the same country.  Same continent, absolutely.  I think the current teaching is that the continent is Oceania, rather than the continent of Australia of our youth.  So hard to keep up.

It's a smaller country (about same square mileage as Colorado), but since it's so long the drive times are greater.  North Island tip to tip is 12.5 hrs, and South Island is about 11 hrs.  North Island is smaller but the roads are more winding.

A little about the city of Auckland.  Auckland is broken down into neighborhoods, which are included in your mailing address.  The neighborhoods are grouped into four main regions.  There's downtown (CBD- Central Business District) and its surrounding neighborhoods, North Shore (over the bridge across the bay), Manukau (south of the city), and Waitakere (west of the city, more rural, vineyards).  We are living in North Shore in the neighborhood of Northcote.  It's about a 15 minute bus ride to CBD.  I wouldn't have minded living near the vineyards, but maybe next year.

That's the bare basics for now!  More on our actual flight (Air New Zealand was so nice!) and what we've done in our first month to come.  I promise those will have more pictures, less writing.

Love,

Maggie, Lance, and Sweet Baby James