It's going to be a BBQ Christmas

Well its that time of year again. Everyone is ditching work, sloshing through the sleet and snow and shopping like mad. We're drinking egg nog, spiked egg nog, cruelty free/egg free nog and even fat free egg nog. Every where you go there's
xmas music on the radio and lots of overweight guys in red suits ringing bells on every street corner. Well in Auckland, it's summer and people are gearing up for BBQs, picnics and weekends at the beach. It's a weird time warp to be sure, but after living in San Francisco for 5 years I am kind of used to seasons playing tricks on me.

Jen is off in Tubuia (sp?) French Polynesia doing some field work for a month and I am all alone. I stocked up on some old xmas DVD favorites. Yesterday I bought about 6 DVDs and the clerk got a good laugh, it was like "The Holiday, 50 First Dates, 13 Going on 30, etc..." and then Army of Darkness. He thought the "chick" flicks were for my wife or something but I told him those were mine and the others were more for Jen :)

Well I haven't written in a while and the last big post about our move here is one about Food. I feel we have settled in here really well and it almost seems like Canada or America now in most ways. The food is still throwing me for a loop. There are no traditional restaurants, no diners, no family restaurants, no waffle huts, breakfast restaurants, etc... It's mostly either lunch bars and cafes. The cafes serve breakfast and lunch usually and the lunch bars serve things like fish and chips and pies. There are a few fancy restaurants that serve dinner, but most are expensive Italian or Spanish or whatever. Most people here each lunch at the food courts of malls which actually have better quality food than I am used to. The saving grace is Indian. Almost every mall has amazing Indian takeaway (think Naan and Curry but actually good). For about $7.50 US you can get a really great curry, rice and naan. It is really well made too and isn't super oily or greasy. There are a lot of dinner Indian restaurants as well that are about $20-$30 NZD.

It's weird not having places to go for breakfast where you can get a ton of pancakes, eggs and bacon. You can sometimes piece together a meal out of sides, but it costs like $25 to do so. They have more of a British/Irish focus on breakfast like eggs/toast or bacon/french toast (kiwi) or eggs, tomato, mushrooms, sausage, etc.. Lots of weird stuff mixed together.

My big staple in SF was burritos, Thai and Burgers. The burgers here are OK, but no one has Ketchup usually and Tomato sauce (the replacement) is gross. This is great as I have stopped eating hamburgers and actually lost some weight. I attribute this not to the burgers themselves, but to the high fructose corn syrup in the Ketchup. They do have Ketchup here but it is made in Australia (still by Heinz) but with Sugar instead of corn syrup. I feel a lot better after eating it than I used to after eating the corn syrup version. In America corn syrup is in everything and I think we are all allergic to it and becoming fat from it.

For lunches here I need to find new staples. I found a great/healthy/affordable pan Asian place that does all kinds of good dishes for about $9 nzd. I also found a burrito place, but it costs $16 nzd for a burrito at one and $13.50 for a really small one at the other. Then Indian or pies are other options, but I avoid the pies since they are very fattening. It's hard for me to pick up other staples as when I look at menus I just don't see any "real" food on them. They are filled with weird dishes that are overcomplicated and flashy.

One big thing I noted about food/restaurants is that they are trying too hard to be super cool. I heard all the "restaurants" closed like 10 years ago because no one went and everything left is super fancy versions of pub food. So you might get bangers and mash, but it would be a huge pile on the plate with all kinds of garnishes and sauces and little drizzles on the side. Not quite what you want from a pub. To give perspective you can't get a cup of coffee at a gas station but you CAN get any espresso beverage. It is this rampant desire to be fancy and show off. Every cafe has a top chef it seems trying to make things super fancy. I guess I am looking for "basics" and there seems to be a big gap between the lunch bars of pre-made sandwiches and the hyper stylized dinner options.

To fill in the gap, Jen and I eat at home a lot with fresh foods from the local butcher, baker and grocery stores. We can usually whip up a great meal for very little money that tastes better than going out. Auckland is a major city centre though and does have almost all forms of cuisine, its just hard to find the middle range of food options that are pretty much De facto in America and that I surprisingly miss for some reason.

One thing I have learned in the end is that every city or place has its own great restaurants and food and you have to not try to force an old favorite onto a new city as you may not find a good place. For instance San Francisco has good Ethiopian, but instead of trying to find it here were it just isn't, I am better off focusing on something they locally do good.

Back to the Auckland, finally

Well, its almost time to say goodbye to Sydney, Australia. I have been travelling now for what seems like months and our stuff still isn't in Auckland. I think it is at the shipping yards finally, but needs to be in customs for a while still because the forms had changed since the last time we filled them out, since it took so long. Hopefully we will get our stuff in the next few days.

I miss Jen and Lucy (our cat) a lot. Can't wait to get home tomorrow and settle down a bit.

Sydney has been great and thanks again to Ed and Steve our hosts. It was awesome visiting them and having a chance to hang out with Runi and Walter for such a long stretch since I hadn't had a chance to see them in a long time. I really like Sydney and plan to visit again with Jen at some point and who knows, maybe move there if New Zealand ever kicks us out.

The trip here has been great. The best thing is the slow pace. I saw all the things I wanted to see, and a few things I didn't even know I wanted to see :) Steve is a great tour guide and Ed knows all the cool neighborhoods, so between their suggestions we saw lots of great things. I also get a chance to head out on my own and explore a bit which was great. Finally, I have gotten the Rugby bug and have been staying up late to watch the Rugby 2007 World Cup games. I saw the Australia Wallabies play two games, and saw a few other random partial matches including Wales vs. Canada. I finally saw the New Zealand All Blacks play last night. The hard part for us is that the matches tend to be on at 2-6 AM New Zealand time since most of the other countries are in different time zones and the matches are mostly in France or England. Being in Sydney gave us 2 more hours ahead which made it possible. Also we don't really get any stations in NZ. Its mostly fuzzy, so it will be hard to watch any more games there.

Good on all of you!

Cheers,

Matthew

Selling stuff is hard to do

One of the most time consuming things with this whole trip is suprisingly getting rid of all of our stuff. We actually are the type of couple that doesn't buy a lot of stuff and are very focused on living a lean and simple life. Most of the money we spend is on services, food, rent or entertainment. We might buy something 1-2 times a year. Considering that and the fact that we downsized a ton while moving to San Francisco, we are not sure where all this stuff is coming from! It is really hard to get rid of sentimental things or things that were presents (even if you don't like them). We have accumulated a lot of stuff over the years that we just didn't realize.

Our first pass was to make a big goodwill pile of clothes. We went through all of our stuff and put it into a few piles (clothes to bring with, clothes to ship, clothes to store, clothes to sell and clothes to give away). After making the piles we went through them a few more times over the weeks and kept cutting more and more stuff. After giving our roommates first dibs and making a large number of trips to Goodwill, we were down to about 30-40% of what we started with. We also got rid of a bunch of shoes and other weird things like ski clothes. Jen tried to sell some of our "better" stuff to a resale shop and they didn't want a single thing. This was very depressing, so we ended up just giving that stuff to Goodwill also. Sadly, you have to donate like $16,000 or more to get a tax deduction while married and get above the standard deduction for two people, so there really isn't a tax break for donating.

We are very focused on trying to keep all of this stuff out of the landfills, so we will probably end up giving a lot of it away. Jen has been in charge of the whole selling effort as I have been working a ton and she has some time off since her last classes ended Berkeley. We have been focusing mostly on www.craigslist.com for selling and we have sold a ton of stuff for pennies on what we bought it for. It is also depressing selling something you paid $250 for, for like $10. Also the people that come over always want stuff free or for almost nothing and will argue with you forever. Very discouraging and I am almost at the point to just give it all away to avoid having to deal with the drama of it all. We are going to ship a small amount of stuff and store a small amount of stuff, but everything else has to go. When you start thinging about in terms of, it will cost $3000 to store all this extra stuff, and we can buy it new or used for $1000, then even though it has some "value" still, we just don't have enough time and energy to sell it.

We sold a few thing on www.ebay.com and also I sold a bunch of movies and books on www.half.com which is a cool site for listing things like books, movies and CDs. All of the rest of our books we packed for shipping, storing or donated to the local library. I burned all my remaining music CDs to MP3 and made a backup of my hard drive onto another drive for storage. I also have two RAID 1 drives in my computer, so I took one out to bring with on the plain and the other is shipped with the computer in case one breaks.

We still have a lot of furniture to sell including a futon, some wooden saw horse desks, lots of book shelves, a nice filing cabinet, a big chair, a TV, some stereo equipment, lots of Kitchen stuff, tons of old computers, 4 servers, a few monitors, etc.... We have been selling, and giving away stuff non-stop for like 2 months and we still have a full house full of stuff! Hopefully we can sell a few more of the bigger ticket items, and maybe have a friend or two try to sell a few of the things that don't sell. The rest will probably go on the street for a moving sale or more likely just a COME BUY AND TAKE THIS FREE STUFF notice on craigslist.

Matthew