Giedre tyttö Ozista

Far Away from Paradise

Finally the long promised pictures from our surroundings at Titirangi. This is the view from our village street at Landing Road. I just took camera with me one day and on the way home from work snapped all the pictures for this blog entry.

So yes, its this pretty and I often walk this road from the bus stop at the Titirangi village to our home. The area is surprisingly rural considering that it is some 20-30min away from the city centre. Titirangi is also known as the hippie mecca, everyone who lives here is some sort of alternative type: an artist, a hippie, or a European.. :)

And yes, its spring here, although its easy to forget about it, after a long and beautiful summer in Europe it feels really autumny and damp. Everybody keeps promising that the weather will get better. But I still wake up almost every morning with a steamy breath and you the grass outside is silvery, almost frosted.

Besides our 2 heaters, we bought a dehumidifier today (have you heard about something like that? I haven't before moving here...). A dehumidifier sucks all the dampness and humidity out of the air in your house. And you need it because your house obviously doesn't have any heating. At best times I hear it can suck up to 20litres of water a day. So our laundry will dry in some 3 hours instead of 3 days. Amazing?!?

Other news from here are not that cheerful. First and the worst, last Tuesday our car was broken into, while it was parked at Piha beach and while Kaj was surfing. Stupid and blue-eyed foreigners, as we are, Kaj had a backpack full of digital toys and gadgets, including our big Canon camera, his phone, his dive computer, etc etc etc... Our estimated overall cost of that backpack was close to 7000nzd. What a lucky day for those evil bastards who did it. None of the people that we tell the story to seem particularly surprised. Everyone has experienced something like that more than once. Just that they don't leave anything valuable in their cars.. So NZ is not a very pristine/safe place. Like most of the New World, I guess, for the longest time it accommodated all sorts of outcasts from the rest of the world... :)

The damn lucky thing is that we got our house contents insurance the day before (imagine our disbelief and relief that we actually got enough brain to take that damn insurance!). Imagine the faces of insurance agents when we walked into their office the next day with 7000$ claim...

The whole situation looked pretty grave at first. Kaj even lost his pants, so he had to drive back to the surfshop in his dripping wetsuit, call me so that I could cancel all the credit cards, phone contracts, etc. Then drive home and hope that the burglars didn't come to our home with his housekeys and didn't take the rest of the stuff away... And we didn't even know if the insurance would cover any of that, because it wasn't a theft from our house...

Obviously we'll have some financial losses, but if everything goes fine, it shouldn't be too bad. If they sort it out, we'll be devoted and dedicated customers of AMI, that is if they still want our business with them...

And today we're still sitting on our outdoor furniture, because our dining table and the sofa weren't delivered AGAIN. I just can't understand how these people are running their business here. They called us yesterday to tell that our delivery will come today between 4-6pm. At 6pm the delivery guys come in and tell us out of the blue that its only the table that they brought today, because the sofa didn't "make it to the delivery" don't ask me why. Then they walk away to carry the furniture in, Kaj waits for 15min, noone shows up. He walks up to the road, there's no truck, no sign that anyone would be delivering any furniture. He calls the shop and they tell that the guys have left, because our driveway was too long and they'll be coming in a smaller van tomorrow. And noone bothered to tell Kaj that they couldn't make it in with their truck. We're just so upset with this whole furniture nonsense. We called them 4-5 times afterwards screaming different things and we want our money back, so that we can go get our furniture. But they're not very eager to pay it up. So tomorrow there's another driving and screaming session waiting for us... A pack of liers... You can't trust anyone here... :(