Mmmm... Beer.....

Well you knew it would happen eventually. A post specifically about the beer here. Overall, I would have to say I am "pleased" with a bit of longing. Most of the people here have a liking for simpler and less complex beers. They like the lager category of beers and drink pale yellow watery drinks. In my quest for some good ales, I have been all over town and have only found one IPA anywhere. Here's the run down on the major brands, bars and the future.

There are 4 major breweries around here from the looks of it. Lion Red is the BUD style brewery and is very popular. There are 3 others, Monteiths, Speights (Duneden), and Mac's. Monteiths is kind of your run of the mill brew pub style beer. Picture some random brew pub that makes 6 of their own beers. Most of the flavors are good ranging from an Original Ale, to a stout like dark beer and a few others in between. Although they are tasty, they are a bit uninspired and lack crispness and deeper flavors. Also there are very few hops to be found.

Speights is the big south island brewer from what I can tell. They also have a small line of several beers and I would just label them as almost identical in quality and flavor as Monteiths. They do have one brew called Distinction Ale which is quite tasty.

Macs is the crazy micro brew style company here and have outlandish advertising, and their own line of brew pubs around town with cheap (think $5-7) beers on tap. Some of their notable beers are Sassy Red (a beautiful bitter), Mac's Gold, a decent lager that is very popular and the daring Hoprocker which is a super hoppy Pilsner! Mac's is definitely my favorite beer line so far and is available at just about any store and on many taps around the city. Most pubs so far seem to have one of these three lines in them and that's about it. Sometimes they will have Guinness or some other beer to augment it.

As far as places to drink, there are a ton and I have only been to a few so far. Most cafes and restaurants are "licensed" to sell beer and some have BYO. Of note so far is the Belgian Beer Cafe - http://www.belgian-beer-cafe.co.nz/ This place has all the favorites from tons of Leffe on tap to Hoegarden, Stella, Chimay, Delerium, Duvel, Kwak, etc... They don't have an exhaustive list, but rather about 6-10 brewers featured only. They also have very few bottles beyond this. A place like this I would expect to have 100 different bottled beers for what they can't keep on tap, but alas, they don't. Still, it is a great place with good food. Some of the beer is pricey, but if you pick and choose what is on special or less expensive, you won't break the bank. They also have decent food and good atmosphere (at the Ponsonby location at least).

I have also gone to a place called the Cock and Bull. It is styled after a British pub and they had their own line of 5-6 beers. Most of them ranged from a lager draught to a nice wheat beer called Busty Blonde. The real gems were a Belgian style named Monk's Habit which has won local awards. This was $7 for a small snifter but was worth it. The pricey Mayhem was the only IPA I can find on tap just about anywhere unless you count Touys (which tastes like piss and has no hops). $10 bought me a pint of this since it was 6%. The barkeep was super friendly and told me about the local beer scene and let me try everything for free. They were out of Epic Pale Ale which is one of the best beers around here and very hoppy in character. Tastes more like an IPA. I got a six pack on the way home and tried it last night with Jen.

We also found a bar called Shakespeare's which has a custom line of beers from various places. They have about 12 taps and most of their stuff was VERY fruity. Think lambic almost. The stuff was almost sickeningly sweet, so I wasn't overly impressed. The beer did have a lot of character and flavor though and most of the percentages were 6-12%! Most of the beer you buy at the store here is 4% sometimes.
I would go back and try a few more beers here, but if you don't like sweet, stay away.

Jen and I tried out The Bog a few weeks ago which was a local Irish Bar. It was nice enough and is in our neighborhood but only had 1-2 beers from each of the above companies and Guinness. We did see a nice Aussie Rugby match on the tellie though.

None of the beers in Auckland, New Zealand are crazy flavorful, but many are a nice treat for a cold day and there are a lot of middle of the road staples. So instead of seeing a lot of crap on one end and a few good beers at the other end of the spectrum, everything is clustered firmly in the good/competent category with a few exceptions. It's nice to know we won't want for a good a brew when we are in the mood, but I still have cravings for a few brands back in the United States. I think the future for NZ is a slow move to more and more flavorful beers. Over the last few years the trend is starting to show that more people like Ales and more hoppy flavors or bitter flavors. This will hopefully lead to more and more companies like Mac's and Epic being able to take chances on more and more flavorful styles. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Cheers,

Matthew

The high price of cutlery

Greetings all,

Well it has been a whirlwind few days and I haven't had a chance to post much. We viewed a small house in Remuera last Wednesday night and another group was also viewing the house just after us. They wanted it and were even willing to pay more than us, but I guess the landlords thought we would be a better fit for the place so they gave us a shot at it. We had to decide under pressure wether to get it or not. Jen was kind of opposed due to the cost and the pressure and I was a tiny bit leery of the location being down a 4 block hill from the main road and having spotty bus service. The neighborhood is beautiful though and we have a park across the street, a Kwik-e-mart (not the real name) around the corner and a bus stop 1 block away (although it runs rarely and doesn't go directly where we want). If we walk the half mile hill we are about another half mile from New Market which is a HUGE shopping district and if we go the other direction we get to Parnell which is a ritzy boutique style area with cafes and restaurants.

At the last minute we decided to go for it since the place is just gorgeous and deceptively close to everything.

I will post some pictures shortly and address information. We have spent the last few days shopping to get the essentials for the place. Everything is VERY expensive here. For instance we went into a discount plastics store and the cheapest garbage pale was $30. They go up to $100+ We also found a small plastic chest of bins (think Target for $20 to put your kids toys in).....$399. We went to a fancier home store and found cutlery sets for $1000.00+, A $69 can opener (cheapest was $20) and many other things to blow your fiscal mind. For reference the US dollar is only about 21% ahead of the NZD so 21% off $1000 worth of spoons is still $790 USD. Also I am not picking the most expensive things we found at really expensive shops. Everything is this price. For instance a trip to Alaska at one of their discount travel places was quoted at something like $18,000. I am sure it included lodging but still... wow!

If you are moving to New Zealand keep in mind that things are quite expensive here, especially manufactured stuff and electronics. TVs go for $1500 +, nice furniture is about $1000+ per piece and simpl things like a set of measuring spoons can run $20-80. I recommend filling box after box of EVERYTHING you think you might use here. Shipping a few large boxes of small stuff might cost around $300 vs. buying that stuff for $3,000-10,000.

We have found that almost everyone has specials and sales constantly and if you shop around you can find these deals. For instance groceries and meat seem to be affordable and even though cafes are expensive, there is often a special on the menu that is about 1/2 price. Things like paperback books might run $15-30 a piece but you can get DVDs for around $20 I think. We packed all our DVDs in a case logic case and left the boxes in storage and we converted all our music to MP3 and will probably just I-tunes anything new we want. There is a company called www.Fatso.co.nz that we were going to check out and it is like a www.Netflix.com service. We need to get a TV still and a Multi-Zone? (Region Free) DVD player that will play our US DVDs as well as the ones here. We found a used TV/DVD combo for $200 which is amazingly cheap, so we might grab that.

For everything else we have been using www.trademe.co.nz (think www.Ebay.com) and have gotten a nice futon to sleep on until our bed arrives. The futon will double as our guest bed after that. We also are looking for a desk and won some nice kitchen stuff. It is expensive to pick this stuff up without a car and taxi's don't like to lug a bunch of stuff around. We found a company called www.taxitrucks.co.nz that will rent you a burly man and a truck at $60 an hour + $30 call out fee. This is nice for our refrigerator that we need to get still. Also another company is www.moveit.co.nz with cheaper rates but less flexibility.

Our place doesn't have a fridge and although it has 3 bedrooms and a parlour, doesn't have a dining room and the kitchen only has space for stools at the counter breakfast bar. We plan to eat at the counter and get a nice table for our deck to eat outside when the weather is nice. Weather is similar to San Francisco in the winter, so you can still go outside, although this week was really wet and cold and our place was freezing. No central heat here, so we had to go buy our own. We bought 2 oil electric 5 blade heaters which don't do much at all. One is in the hallway and one in the living room. We have our own fireplace though and have been running it a lot. We actually burned a bag of coal yesterday. I feel so old school all of a sudden. We also do not have a dryer, but do have a washer. People hang their clothes out to dry here almost exclusively and we have some lines on the porch for this. It took my clothes over a day to sort of dry in this weather though, so you have to plan ahead and make sure the stuff is out in time for the sun in the afternoon.

Well definitely some stuff to get used to, but some simple shifts are enough to enjoy the lack of glutenous comfort we were used to. Everything here is very conservation based. All the outlets even have on/off switches which people actually use. The toilets have 2 flush modes, half/full. People just generally try to use less, plan out exactly what they need and buy that and schedule things more. We are used to doing anything we want exactly when we want. Need a taxi, there it is, need a bus, one will be by every 3 minutes, need an ATM or a Starbucks, no problem, 2 on every corner. I think in the long run I will appreciate the fact that things are a tiny bit more spread out here and you have to think about what you want to do more and pay for what you use.

Till next time,

Matthew

Today it rained

Today it rained... and rained... and rained. It was quite chilly and wet and basically it sucked. It is winter after all and it is almost exactly like San Francisco winter weather, so not that big of a deal. Hopefully it will clear up shortly. Tomorrow is scheduled to be the same wet mess.

Jen and I spent most of our time today lamenting the high prices, sloshing through the rain and taking occasional stops for some warm up beverages. We found a cute cafe and I had a great cup of hot chocolate ($4) and Jen had a Flat White which I think is half coffee, half milk or something like that.

We walked from Queen street all the way to the end of Ponsonby road which seemed like a long walk. We walked through another neighborhood on a fun street with lots of stores and bars also (I forget the name). At the end of Ponsonby Street we found a cool little food place that served roast meats potatoes and veggies. Jen had fried chicken and sweat potato with broccoli and I had a roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes. I love hand carved meats as those of you who know me can attest to... After a long dreary walk and not really knowing where we would go this was a nice treat.

We also found a place called the Belgian Beer Cafe which we had heard about and were planning on finding. We decided to go on another day however. By now we were really getting miserable from the weather but wanted to hang out in the area for a tiny bit longer. We had passed a few Realtors on the way and got "Rental Sheets" from them. We also looked in the paper to find listings for our apartment hunt. It seems like all 3 places we went and the paper only had a combined total of like 15 listings for the entire city. I guess it is the wrong time of year. We called a few to arrange appointments in the area, but no one really was available. Things are definitely slower here and it could take a few days to have people get back to us we suspect.

We stopped in a Starbucks next (yeah I know). This wasn't out of any desire for something familiar I assure you. It was just a place that was there and I wanted a coffee. It was a bit cheaper than other cafes, had friendly service and my decaf Americano was actually great tasting. I read a New Zealand cultural guidebook and Jen went window shopping.

Finally we went to a few stores (next to each other). One had meats, one veggies and fruits and one was a bakery. After our little trips to each we had a nice meal for tonight and breakfast tomorrow and a few snacks. We caught the bus ($1.60 per person on Travelcoach...one of many bus lines here) and got back to our Hostel area. One more stop before heading to the hostel... Beer! Jen wanted a beer so we got a six back of a local ale ($12.50 NZD) and a few other odds and ends from a convenience store on the way back.

We just watched the Terminator on VHS with some other folks in the TV lounge at the Hostel and finally the Internet connection stopped flaking out. Fun times. Stay in School. Don't blog drunk!

Matthew

Passport update

Here's an update on our passports. It looks like the US has started requiring passports to Canada and Mexico? for flights from the US into these countries. This has caused the time to get a passport to go from an estimated 6-8 weeks to more like 14-15 weeks or longer. They are pretty much on a system of whoever is leaving this week will get their passport, but no one else. You can check status online, but basically there are 2 statuses: 1) we are working on it, 2) it is done and in the mail. Not very useful. They have a phone number to call, but you get a message saying to call back later. We wrote in a few emails saying we were leaving in a week (not true, but we need our passports for the Visa application process), and we finally got ours after like 13 weeks. If anyone is looking to get a passport renewed or a get a new one, make sure to check the current wait times as I think this will go on for a year or more before they get caught up. Now that we have our passports, we have to send them to the consulate in Los Angeles with our application for a Visa. Hopefully we will get them back in time.

Matthew

More currency, banking and credit card investigations

One of the challenges we are going to face is how to get money to and from New Zealand easily. We definitely will need a New Zealand bank account (National Bank) and a currency exchange company (HiFx), but the last piece of the puzzle is US bank accounts. There are a lot of issues surrounding US based and foreign based bank accounts and credit cards. Some of these are tax based, for instance the US Government wants you to report any foreign bank accounts that total $10,000 or more to them since they often have no way of finding out about these due to secrecy laws. They are very big on cracking down on offshore transactions in recent years and will aggresively pursue you if they find out about some money you have stashed somewhere and may not be reporting. I will write up a big entry on taxes soon.

We have a large number of accounts at various places like Citibank and our brokerage firm. We have decided to keep the brokerage account which we will have any US based consulting income direct deposited into or mailed to our financial advisor to deposit for us. A lot of these checks will originate in the US and getting them over to New Zealand is a hassle and will incur currency exchange rate fees. We also don't necsesarily want all our money in NZD. We also have a NetBank account (www.netbank.com) which is used as a US based checking account with a money market savings account attached. This is a nice way to easily manage short term expenses with a great internet enabled site. It is easy to transfer money to other accounts from this account and we also have a Visa check card that we can use anywhere in the world. One word of caution regarding credit cards overseas. Many of them charge hidden convienence fees of 3-5% and some don't even itemize these on your bills. This fee combined with the fact that they don't always give you the exchange rate published in the papers, make it difficult to use most credit cards overseas in an effective way.

We also have a PayPal account that one of our businesses (www.cardshark.com) gets most of its money into. We can use our PayPal mastercard and only get charged a 1% cross border fee and actually get close to the published exchange rate also. We also get 1.5% cash back on purchases due to being in their preferred debit card program. I think they lowered the rate to 1% for new people, but we got it a long time ago. This makes it so that we get about .5% cash back whenever we use the card overseas. We will probably use this for credit card purchases most of the time and experiment with the NetBank card to see how much we really get charged. Since neither are credit cards, but rather debit or check cards, they feed from our balance and also may have different fee structures than full credit cards.

The last piece of the puzzle is to get some spending money for the first few weeks we are there. Almost all banks offer some sort of program for a small fee to get cash in any currency for their customers. NetBank partners with another site that will send you currency to your house (usually in 1-2 days). They usually charge about .04-.05 off the published exchange rate which is about 3-4% or more. Since it is just a small amount of money it is not a bad idea to do this until we can get a bank account set up and get HiFx to transfer a larger amount of money into our local Auckland bank account.

Matthew

Currency, cell phones, and DSL, oh my!

This week we are doing some fun research. Jen is looking into storage facilities and some cheap ways to move funds overseas. I am looking into things like cell phones and DSL and bank accounts. Jen has found that most of the storage in San Francisco is very expensive and almost double the rates of suburbs. Initial quotes are around $85-100 per month for a small 4x5x8 in San Francisco.

Jen found a great currency exchange site called www.hifx.com which specializes in moving large amounts of overseas for much better rates than you can get from banks or other means. They basically have no fees, but charge you a slightly different rate than the published rate. That is their cut. I think it works out to 1%-3% total, but compaired to the other things we checked out it was much better. We can just tell them to place to a buy of a certain amount of NZD (New Zealand Dollars) and they buy it, put it into a special account and we then set up some wire instructions from our bank to pay for it, and another account to put it into (our New Zealand account).

While Jen was looking into currency exchange, I have been researching bank accounts. We have settled on the National Bank of New Zealand which offers a fee free account for international students. It has all the features we want and they can set it up overseas (although we need a visa first). They also have a campus branch which is nice. We have also looked into WestPac and a few of the other popular banks that have Internet sites.

For cell phones and Internet there seems to be a few choices, the big telco in New Zealand is one choice (I forget the name), but we are definitely not going to use them. It looks like the other big alternative cell phone company is VodaFone and they also have services in other countries. http://www.vodafone.co.nz We are going to try to find some service from them. I intially wanted to get phones before we went over there, but now we will probably drop by a store the first day we are there and get phones.

For Internet, we were shocked to not have a single price, all you can use plan. In the United States you pretty much pay a certain amount for a certain size connection. So for instance 6 megabits download and 756 kilobits upload would maybe run $80 USD per month (this is just a sample price). You can use as much as you want, but you peak out at the top download or upload speeds. In New Zealand EVERYTHING seems to be pay for what you use. This is nice in some ways, but the American mentality is often focused around pay a set amount and get unlimited usage. This even extends to things like free condiments when you buy a burger at a fast food restaurant. This is not the same in most countries. For instance one time in London I ordered some toast and I wanted jelly for it or an extra jelly and it cost me another 35 pence. For some reason that kind of thing pissed me off and seemed petty or extreme. For Internet in New Zealand there is one company tring to offer some semblance of unlimited bandwidth but with some restrictions. The company is Ihug and has a very cute site. http://www.ihug.co.nz

It looks like IHug may be owned or affiliated with VodaFone some how now. They have a plan where you can get unlimited usage, but if you use more than a certain amount of download in any three day period, they either charge you or more, or SLOW your bandwidth to a trickle (think 64kbps). This is to stop the apparent rampant use of peer to peer networking. Since importing stuff is so expensive to an island on the other side of the world, I imagine that many people illegally download a lot of movies and music. For almost all applications besides insane amount of peer to peer downloading, they seem to imply this plan is pretty much unlimited use with a small slow down for 3 days or so if you go overboard. I guess if you really like downloading internet porn you might be in trouble also.

Matthew