A Couple With The Kiwis

So it's about two weeks into our new lives in NZ and we haven't found a house yet. I had a couple of bits of life admin to do for starting work so I AThop my merry way across Auckland (AThop being the kiwi Oyster card - pronounced A.T.hop). Meanwhile Andy was doing some distance learning work for uni with instructions that should he get bored, he's to look for some of the important things we need to live. You know, a house, a bed, a fridge. That kind of thing.  Life all admin-ed out I return home to find Andy very excited. Having a Y chromosome, and therefore a slightly different set of priorities on what constitutes things we absolutely need to survive winter in New Zealand, Andy had spent the last few hours going on a walk to find our most important and expensive piece of the adventure in New Zealand Starter Pack: a campervan. And he'd found one. We'd been looking for vans for, well, ever since we landed in NZ. Van life has always been a dream of our...

Three posts in and I'm finally getting onto the good bit. Apologies for the delay in this one, life and the realities of working full time (and adventuring whenever we can)got in the way! For those of you who have been following this blog with interest (or disinterest, it's your party) I finished my last post with Andy and I at the airport with three giant bags each, hand luggage, and a travel guitar, not quite the light travelling types we imagined ourselves to be. We would have been stuck at the starting line if it wasn't for my sister; she pulled it out of the bag by ferrying us and our detritus to the airport. We said our farewells through tears a-plenty and moved onto our next task of getting a travel guitar to cross a hemisphere with us more or less in one piece.  Please let me drink in peace. Cheers! Guitar safely boarded, cue a glass of bubbles and comments about how surreal this all felt and we couldn't believe we were actually doing this. Wer...

So this it - the difficult second post! And man has it been difficult to find the time to write. We've been here nearly a month now and I think we've just about settled in to our new Kiwi-tastic lives. So what have we done? Well we've had a couple of adventures that I want to write about but I think it's safe to say the moving your life to another hemisphere is adventure enough for one post. That's what I'll talk about here: how we set up our lives here over the last few weeks, and the successes mistakes and lessons we've learned on the way! The Pre-flight faff Words can not quite describe the amount of paperwork that went into getting over here from the UK. It certainly wasn't just as simple as hopping on a plane, and mine and Andy's unique planning style of "it's okay we don't know how we're getting from Manchester to Heathrow airport in 2 weeks time with more bags than we can carry and a guitar" was probably not the most e...

My name is Mollie. Earlier this month my partner Andy and I handed in the keys to our lovely flat in Manchester. We gave away, donated, stored and generally inconvenienced loved ones with most of our possessions, and had about a thousand and one leaving drinks with friends and relatives all keen to send us on our way to our biggest adventure yet: NEW ZEALAND. We will be living and working in the Southern Hemisphere over the next year and a half, indulging in our love of the outdoors and travel whilst experiencing life the kiwi way, and experiencing the New Zealand healthcare system and what it can teach us compared with the health system we know and love. But wait...? This all seemed to be a typical insta-tastic we-love-adventure-travel-and-here-are-all our-photos-are-you-jealous-yet type of blog. Why on earth am I going on about healthcare? Well it's not because we intend to cause ourselves serious injury and write an undercover blog about our lives as patients. Instead...