It is hard to believe that I will soon start my third week here in Christchurch. It does not feel like I have been here long, but nor does it seem like I have been here for three weeks. Adjustment has been easy, probably because I have moved to new countries twice before and because the language is English. Actually, that English is so widely spoken kind of freaks me out sometimes because I grew used to not being able to understand or to easily communicate when living in a foreign country. It is almost too easy, but I am not complaining.
I have not had any really big adventures yet, so I have decided to compile an email of random observations about Christchurch so far.
Last weekend, I decided to point my bike towards the tall hills to the south of the city which separate Christchurch from the Lyttelton Harbour to the south. There is a tunnel under the hills which is some sort of engineering marvel, but I went over the hill.
I mapped out my route on my GPS and just followed the route up the hill. However, the maps that I have seem to think that very steep staircases are roads which was not a problem on a bike, but would have been problematic in a car. Judging by the number of other cyclists climbing the stairs while carrying their bikes, I was not the only one to get caught by the dead end streets that ended in staircases. I was amazed by the number of people out walking and biking along the roads and trails up the
hills. It was the first nice Saturday after I very cold winter (so I am told) and Kiwis love their tramiping (hiking). The parks at the top of the hills offered great views of the city below and the Alps in the distance. Definitely a great place to come if you are new to Christchurch and want to see the whole city at once.
Last week I set up a bank account so that my scholarship money could be directly deposited once a month. I have set up accounts in other countries and usually it takes a few minutes. So I was very surprised when I walked into the ANZ branch at the university to inquire about an account and was asked to wait until the teller could check if the bank representative had time in her schedule to see me. The appointment was necessary because the process took about 45 minutes and I only opened a student savings account. All of the banks offer students great deals with penalty free accounts. However, once you stop being a student, watch out! It appears that there are all sorts of charges on accounts just to put your money in the bank. In addition to the account, I got a ATM / Debit card so that I don’t have to carry lots of cash with me to the grocery story any longer. Nor do I have that harrowing few minutes at the register when I am hoping that the total value that I had calculated is correct so that I don’t wind up with too little cash to pay my bill.
I also applied for a credit card to establish a credit history in NZ. Offering credit cards to foreigners with no credit rating is something new for the bank and I was happy to take advantage of it. However, as I had my letter showing of offer showing my annual income from my scholarship, they knew that I had some sort of steady income. The paperwork for the credit card required the bank representative to determine my disposable income. She had to enter in my rent, spending on food, etc. As I had not been here long, I had not yet calculated what I was spending on food so I told her that. She estimated that I was going to spend $50 a week on food. There was another field for how much I was spending at bars or entertainment. She estimated that I was spending $200 a month on beer which is pretty funny considering that is the same as what I spend on food, but as her final numbers showed that I had enough of an income left after expenses to qualify for a credit card, I did not complain.
Købe the cat has been making his way into photographs around the city. For those of you who don’t know Købe, he is a Beanie Baby cat who I have been carrying with me while traveling. I write postcards to my mother’s second grade class and send them photos of the cat posing in different places. That is one well traveled cat. Last weekend, Købe even made it to a wedding, much to the amusement of the students.
You would be very hard pressed to find paper towels in bathrooms here. Instead of paper towels, bathrooms are equipped with those air bowers under which you hold your hands before wiping them on your pants. Throughout the university bathrooms are signs reminding people to wash their hands to avoid spreading infection. It was not until I saw one sign that mentioned avoid spreading infections like SARs that the other signs made sense.
People here take pride in their gardens (lawns to those of you in the US) and the little houses in this area have nice gardens. The grass is kept really short, about the height of the putting greens on a golf course.
I have not had any really big adventures yet, so I have decided to compile an email of random observations about Christchurch so far.
Last weekend, I decided to point my bike towards the tall hills to the south of the city which separate Christchurch from the Lyttelton Harbour to the south. There is a tunnel under the hills which is some sort of engineering marvel, but I went over the hill.
I mapped out my route on my GPS and just followed the route up the hill. However, the maps that I have seem to think that very steep staircases are roads which was not a problem on a bike, but would have been problematic in a car. Judging by the number of other cyclists climbing the stairs while carrying their bikes, I was not the only one to get caught by the dead end streets that ended in staircases. I was amazed by the number of people out walking and biking along the roads and trails up the
hills. It was the first nice Saturday after I very cold winter (so I am told) and Kiwis love their tramiping (hiking). The parks at the top of the hills offered great views of the city below and the Alps in the distance. Definitely a great place to come if you are new to Christchurch and want to see the whole city at once.Last week I set up a bank account so that my scholarship money could be directly deposited once a month. I have set up accounts in other countries and usually it takes a few minutes. So I was very surprised when I walked into the ANZ branch at the university to inquire about an account and was asked to wait until the teller could check if the bank representative had time in her schedule to see me. The appointment was necessary because the process took about 45 minutes and I only opened a student savings account. All of the banks offer students great deals with penalty free accounts. However, once you stop being a student, watch out! It appears that there are all sorts of charges on accounts just to put your money in the bank. In addition to the account, I got a ATM / Debit card so that I don’t have to carry lots of cash with me to the grocery story any longer. Nor do I have that harrowing few minutes at the register when I am hoping that the total value that I had calculated is correct so that I don’t wind up with too little cash to pay my bill.
I also applied for a credit card to establish a credit history in NZ. Offering credit cards to foreigners with no credit rating is something new for the bank and I was happy to take advantage of it. However, as I had my letter showing of offer showing my annual income from my scholarship, they knew that I had some sort of steady income. The paperwork for the credit card required the bank representative to determine my disposable income. She had to enter in my rent, spending on food, etc. As I had not been here long, I had not yet calculated what I was spending on food so I told her that. She estimated that I was going to spend $50 a week on food. There was another field for how much I was spending at bars or entertainment. She estimated that I was spending $200 a month on beer which is pretty funny considering that is the same as what I spend on food, but as her final numbers showed that I had enough of an income left after expenses to qualify for a credit card, I did not complain.
Købe the cat has been making his way into photographs around the city. For those of you who don’t know Købe, he is a Beanie Baby cat who I have been carrying with me while traveling. I write postcards to my mother’s second grade class and send them photos of the cat posing in different places. That is one well traveled cat. Last weekend, Købe even made it to a wedding, much to the amusement of the students.
You would be very hard pressed to find paper towels in bathrooms here. Instead of paper towels, bathrooms are equipped with those air bowers under which you hold your hands before wiping them on your pants. Throughout the university bathrooms are signs reminding people to wash their hands to avoid spreading infection. It was not until I saw one sign that mentioned avoid spreading infections like SARs that the other signs made sense.
People here take pride in their gardens (lawns to those of you in the US) and the little houses in this area have nice gardens. The grass is kept really short, about the height of the putting greens on a golf course.
Last week, I attended a meeting of the Acoustical Society of New Zealand branch here in Christchurch. The meeting was a tour of a glass plant here in the city which didn’t have much to do with acoustics, but was pretty neat. There isn’t a single glass producer in New Zealand and so all glass is imported. The source of the glass depends on the color desired and the properties such as glass that is self cleaning. A lot of the glass is imported from Indonesia and it is transported in open top, metal containers similar to the ones that you see trucks hauling the world over. Inside of the container are special rigs that hold 8 bundles of glass with ten sheets in each bundle. These sheets are each massive, some of which looked like they were 30 feet x 30 feet. Such large sheets stick out the top of the metal container and therefore when they are transported by ship, the glass containers are put at the top of the stack of containers. This can be a problem if the ship passes under a low bridge in a harbor and there have been cases when whole shipments are shattered when the ship passed under a low bridge.
The glass plant is basically a big distribution center for South Island. Glass is cut by robots into the shapes needed by the customers. They will grind the edges, temper glass (to make it safety glass that shatters if broken) and even make double paned windows. Double paned windows are something new here in New Zealand, but based on the number of double paned windows we saw being loaded onto trucks for shipment, they have taken off. Kiwis tell me that most of the houses here in Christchurch are poorly insulated with only single pane windows. My flat, for instance was only built a few years ago and is cold even now in the spring due to the drafts coming through the large, single pane windows. The theory was that it did not get cold enough to justify the extra cost of building better insulated houses. I wonder too if the idea of inexpensive, plentiful energy from the hydroelectric plants on South Island contributed to this mentality as well. In any case, energy is no longer cheap and renovated houses and new constructions are being built with more efficient materials.
The people in the Acoustical Society are all acousticians working in the Christchurch area. There used to only be one company here, but now there are a lot of one person shops competing for the growing number of projects. I hitched a ride to the meeting with some people who work not too far from the university. On the way back, we dropped off one of the people at his house in the suburbs because he had taken the bus to work which is
easy to do here in Christchurch. There are ample city busses that ply the streets of Christchurch and my flat is on a major bus route. At the bus stop down the street, there are digital displays showing when the next bus is coming. I don’t know how common the digital displays are or if they are something special due to the number of students who use the stop. There are even monitors in the library that show when the next bus is due, maybe so that students can study till the last possible moment before they run to catch the bus. There are frequent busses which is quite a departure from Baltimore where you never knew when the bus was coming if it was coming at all (I was bitten by busses that never showed up a few times in Baltimore).I am usually the first person to be wearing shorts in the spring and the last to be wearing them in the autumn. It is spring here now and I see people wearing short sleeves and shorts, but I am still wearing long pants and jackets when I am not riding. I think that others are experiencing the 70 degree days and relishing the change from winter whereas I am coming from a very hot summer. Either that or people here are like those fabled people in Minnesota who wear shorts in the winter.
Things are still going well here, although I am a bit disappointed to be in town this weekend. The last time that I was in NZ, I had taken the Tranzalpine train up through the Alps. The train stopped at a little town called Arthur’s Pass which is said to offer spectacular hikes. I had hoped to head up there on Saturday morning via the bus. However, the weather in the mountains is unpredictable this time of year with a lot of rain at the low levels and snow up high. The web site for weather only projects the weather out one day which makes planning difficult. So on Friday morning when I saw that the weather was to be nice in the mountains, I tried to book my trip on the buses that cross the Alps to the western side of the island. However, what I had not realized was that this weekend marks the start of vacation for secondary school students and the busses were full. Bummer. I will have to wait till another weekend or until I get a car.
Second hand cars can generally be had here for less than US $1000. The glut of cars is unbelievable and NZ is only second to the US for the number of cars per person. Some days I feel like I am the only person here without a car which I am happy to be except when I can make trips like the one to Arthur’s Pass. I am keeping my eye out and hopefully that will change soon because it will make exploring more fun since I can broaden my range.
I started writing these emails when I was in China over six years ago. A lot of the emails from China and Denmark are archived online on my various websites. One would almost call the sites blogs so I have decided to make it official. I will continue to send out the emails, but you can also find the New Zealand emails posted on my blog at jeffreymahn.blogspot.com. The advantage of the blog is that I also post photographs to match what I am writing.
Cheers,
Jeff
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