Our arrival in Hamilton...aka Kirikiriroa!

Since our first week in Auckland we have moved on to our new home town of Hamilton (the Maori name is Kirikiriroa, which of course, I think is the best name ever!). It's about 1.5 hours south of Auckland, and although not strictly a tourist destination, it's more central to many amazing parts of the north island and almost everyone passes through it fro Auckland to get anywhere.

 

 It is a nice city, with distinct communities that have their own little "main street" areas with shopping and restaurants. This way you get a small town feel in your own community, but there is a bigger "centre city" area with high rise buildings and big shopping districts with more the feel of bustling city life.

As you drive around, most intersections are governed by round-a-bouts and there are marked bike lanes on most roads. Many many people bike or walk to work, making healthier lifestyles, less traffic, and reduced pollution. The stars here are gorgeous and you can see the milky way every night! No one seems to feel the need to filter their drinking water. Most people grow a veggie garden in their back yard (all year long too!) and hang out their washing to dry. There are free big public gardens and parks scattered all throughout the city with spaces to think, read, exercise, and play. It's not weird to see people barefoot, even in stores.

 The city is surrounded by agricultural land stretching over rolling hills with scattered forest (i.e. "bush") on the peaks of hills. The Shire you say? That's correct, it was used as the movie set for such. Although right now it's a little crispy looking because of a bad drought.

Many things here are pretty much the same and straightforward:

Beer! We found a decent IPA! Although this isn't it, but warranted a photo due to awesome name and sperm-themed glass

People here have dogs and feed them this.

There are grocery stores. Mostly they have smaller carts.

 There are a few things that are different too:

You can buy fish and chips!!

There are giant statues of cicadas!

Eucalyptus trees! Which I think actually belong in Australia...

We have been staying with one of my Ph.D. committee members and his wife. Their names are Daniel and Kara and they are actually from the U.S. themselves, just moved to NZ about 1.5 years ago for Daniel to take a faculty position at the University of Waikato. He is one of my committee members. They are wonderful hosts and we are enjoying their beautiful home while we search for our own place to stay. They completely empathize with us in starting from scratch in a new country and we've found many more things in common besides that.

Kara and Daniel took us to a reggae concert, which was an awesome break from house-hunting, and gave us a peak into the culture here. The arts/music scene is pretty big. People are into peace and love and stuff.
Tough crowd but I guess we'll manage...

We've been driving about Hamilton quite a bit, looking for a home. This is helping us to get to know our way around, as well as meet every realtor and landlord in a 6km radius. There have been some decent options, so even though it's exhausting, we are optimistic.

Some places have pretty small bedrooms though. Actually, a lot of things are smaller here (i.e. roads, portions, shops).

A final highlight I will leave you with is a picture of my lovely self with my new student ID:

So happy to be a starving grad student again!

Awesome Auckland

Downtown Auckland, New Zealand on the horizon

We have been so busy getting settled in our new home that I'm afraid we have already fallen behind on blogging, but don't despair!  My aim is to rectify that now...

Our first week flew by and we had a wonderful time in New Zealand's largest city: Auckland.  A great many people here (both Kiwis and fellow immigrants) have offered sympathetic comments about how hard it is to move to a new country.  It certainly is a challenge - but in our case it has been an amazingly comfortable and pleasant ordeal.  This is largely thanks to the wonderful hospitality of Kiri's Uncle Graeme.

Graeme was a wonderful host to us; providing a comfortable place to stay, wonderful meals, driving us around, and practically re-teaching me how to drive our new car, in the meanwhile sharing good conversation and good laughs.  We also got to spend some really fun time with Kiri's Auckland cousins: Saskia and her husband Lance, and Marius and his girlfriend Courtney.  We had a great time hanging out with them.  We miss our family and friends elsewhere in the world, so it was especially great comfort to be so welcomed here!

Graeme made our transitional first week full of hospitality and humor.

One of the really cool things about Auckland is that the suburbs seem to have a lot of green areas, some of which are interconnected with nice trails, and have been restored with native plants and habitat for endemic animals.  Just up the road from Graeme's house was Le Roys Bush.  'Bush' is what the Kiwis call 'woods' or 'wilderness.'  Le Roys bush was a good place for us to start learning New Zealand native plants and we enjoyed walking and jogging there.  Near the path there were beautiful Kauri trees which can be killed by a disease that is spread in soil, so we disinfected our shoes before entering the bush:

Scrub, scrub, scrub - die pathogens, die!  Protecting native trees.

 The scenery was wonderful, and Tui birds were singing their bizarre, enchanting song all around us!

There are lots of plants, but in NZ it is just 'The Bush'

We saw stick insects, inchworm caterpillars, native wood pigeons, Australian parrots, and even spotted one of New Zealand's native geckos!

Gecko! The 'common gecko' is apparently not really all that common.

Sometimes you just have to catch lizards...

...and stink bugs.

You will probably not be surprised to hear that I was very excited to see some new to me species of Stink Bugs in New Zealand.  I caught the one above on our way into the bank to set up our new accounts.  It turns out that this species has a very potent odor - I think I may have left a strong impression on the ANZ tellers.

Even though we have been very busy getting situated in Aotearoa, this arrival saga feels far less stressful than leaving did.  We had time to watch a few films, do some leisure reading, and cook some meals.  It's nice to be able to cook together at an easy pace, and not be serious all the time : )

Naked chef.

Marius informed us that there was something really special about Le Roys Bush - it is one of the few places on the planet where one can find New Zealand's famous 'glow worms'.  These juvenile flies emit light in a similar fashion to fireflies, but unlike fireflies, the light is constant and stationary.  The effect is very surreal and serene - the photo does not do it justice.  Marius offered to be our guide for a night hike to the glowworms:

Found a weta! One of NZ's charismatic and unique insects.

Stream bank by day...

...constellation by night!  Glowworms!

At the end of our wonderful first week, we loaded up Yousaf and headed South to our new hometown of Hamilton!

New whip!

On Friday, Brian, Uncle Graeme, and myself headed out to go car shopping. There were a few we had selected to go look at and we were excited because we didn't know whether or not we would be the owners of a new (to us) car by the end of the day! We certainly miss our old car, the Honda Civic named "Celeste", but we know she's in good hands now with my brother-in-law Michael.

Turns out, we found a good one! After lots of questions, navigating about, and some deliberation, we settled on one. Many thanks go out to my Uncle Graeme, who is a whiz at getting us around the big city of Auckland (remember, driving on the LEFT side of the road, mind you), and who knows his stuff about cars, making sure we don't get swindled. We would have been lost without him (literally and figuratively).

    Our trip to the New Zealand version of the DMV rendered us the all-important "licence plate"...

    ...and after some paperwork and fees, tada! Our new and beautiful 2005 Honda Fit, with about 50,000 kilometers on it (which is about 30,000 miles). We named him "Yousaf" (pronounced like "Joseph" but Y instead of a J), after the friendly and helpful guy we bought him from. Just the car we were looking for to get us around town without damaging the environment or the wallet too much!

 Notice anything different? Clue: we are going to have to get used to looking over our left shoulder when backing up! We are so pumped about this car, and are excited for our next few years driving it!

We're in Australia!

(In the airport) 21 hours of travel down, only one leg left!

Today is the day!

A light snowfall overnight is probably the last one we will see for a while. Today is the day we fly to our new home: New Zealand!