Hello and good afternoon

we are live broadcasting from the wonderful capital of New Zealand to give you some new about Alex and Laura. Important things first: Alex accepted the Trainer job with ACE and will start really really soon!!!! Laura is still looking, but we are sure we will find the perfect match soon :)

Now looking for apartments didnt become as easy as we imagined it. Setting us a limit we wanted to pay per week we were strolling around looking at the different options and had to admit that our limit was not our limit after all, seeing what we would get for that money. Tell you loads of dusty and mouldy houses and apartments we have seen. Most of them with some fluffy (probably still from the 60's) old carpet where we dont know what lives in it!!!! yuk! But after extending the limit a bit, look what we can find lovely sunny, dry and clean apartments..... living is not cheap over here! Still we havent found THE apartment, the one, you know, looking at it you directly know that is it... but we keep looking. Having made some statements in our flat share it is slowly but surely getting acceptable with some, not so much with others.. but hey that's life isn't it?

Now what has happened since the last entry? Actually quite a lot, apart from the above mentioned apartment and job hunts. We went for a little weekend trip to the South Island to see all the beauty everyone is telling us about........ we are not quite sure we have really found what they meant..... but we have found some beauty (see the pics). To get to the South Island we took the ferry really early in the morning, which is a 4 hour ride, and enjoyed the onboard facilities (not as great) to its maximum extent. Arriving in Picton we relocated to the train and took another 5 hour trip through the country. Now people might wonder why would we take a whole day trip if we would get to Christchurch much cheaper and faster by plane? Well you see its all about the nature, isnt it? The train ride is actually a SCENIC (!!!!!!!!) ride so we can see the upper half of the south island while riding through it. It goes along the coast and some salt lakes and loads of sheep and cattle, small villages, some mountains, grass.... more grass.... trees. trees, sheep, trees, more trees, sheep, seals, sea gulls and it goes through rain, wind, storm, sun, storm and clouds and of course sheep. Have we mentioned sheep yet? Oh and we saw rabbits...and probably one emu although we couldnt really decide if it was an emu or not. So you see this was quite some exiting trip, actually it was, cause the train also had this nice open part where you can actually stand in the storm and rain and try to take pictures while going through 21 tunnels and inside we had those rather astonishing little notes from the train staff telling us about the surroundings, adding their own ...."balck"(??) humour to it. Altogether something everyone should do at least once in their lifetime!!! Seriously!!!... ok back to the story, we arrived in Christchurch and checked into our nice Copthorne hotel (ha Winter deal! yes!! the one time you can afford a 4 star hotel). Being to exhausted from nothing we decided to just have some nice dinner in the hotel restaurant which was actually quite astonishing good food. On Saturday morning we took a stroll around christchurch which is really a lovely small town (around 300 000 people) and took a ride on their traditional trams, that they decided to reimplement and that actually give the city some nice flair. We also strolled over the market near the museum and through the beautiful botanical gardens where all the daffoldils are in blossom. Only disappointment we had was when we wanted to watch the tram parade that ironically took place exactly on this day and was supposed to be THE event with balloons and music and such like. Well it wasnt, honestly, the tram with the band was passing you so fast you couldnt even hear a single note and then it took around 10 minutes for the next tram to come and another 10 for the next, etc. Not very touristic, we would say. Still we love Christchurch :) We also took the gondola up the mountains for a 360 ° view over christchurch by night and to have dinner there. Our luck, of course there was soo much fog we didnt even see the city (check out the pics), but food again was nice hehe.

For Sunday we had booked a special trip to see where the scene "the land of Rohan" from the Lord of the Rings was done. Although it was freezing cold, windy, rainy, very windy! this was an amazing trip with a 4wd and through some rivers (and when we say through rivers we MEAN through rivers (almost diving there) with our hasslefree tour operator. Ok as it was raining (typical for winter) we didnt see the whole of what we were supposed to see but still it was quite astonishing.

And on Monday we took the train back with seeing loads of sheep, cattle, sheep, trees, mountains, grass, sheep, cattle, rabbits, ocean, seals, seagulls, tunnels, sheep and Picton, then the ferry and arrived safely home in our flat share without having been missed for so much as a second hehe.

We updated the picture album, so you finally can also see some of our nicer pictures from Wellington, by the way its a pain in the a** to go in the Wellington Botanical garden as someone planned it in the way that from the entrance the only thing you can ever do is walk up.... WALK UP! Do you really want to stroll around the gardens while panting upwards? still there is a nice duck pool (on normal level) where we met a nice German Kathrin with her kiddy who could give us loads of tipps for living in Wellington.

Thats from us at the moment, apartment hunt and Laura's job hunt still on the go, so there is news to come :)

Oh and what about our poor lonely guestbook? And anyone who wants a postcard has to send the address through....

Cheers mates, take care!