Beaches, birds, boats, and other B things (not necessarily in that order)

Five days worth of blog seems like an awful lot to catch up with: and to think I initially thought I would only post every week.  If I remember rightly (actually I've cheated and read my last post), we had just experienced "Windy Wellington" and were trying to arrange house viewings.  We were delayed in our first house viewings by "Waitangi Day" which is a public holiday.  We used the day to take a trip round the suburbs and get our bearings on where we wanted to look at houses.  It was a beautiful sunny day (you'll all get bored of that phrase eventually) and we even managed a walk up Mt Victoria to get a view over the city.
 

Having had a good look round the city we have decided, to start with at least, we would like to live in the Island Bay area, approximately 6kms south of the city centre.  It has a fantastic little bay with a sandy beach, fishing boats and good local facilities.  It is also good for buses to get the better half to work.  The best bit is that it has plenty of flats/apartments with views of the sea.  The down side is the slightly inflated rents in the area.  Looks like I will have to knuckle down and find work quickly.

From Thursday through to Saturday has mostly been taken up with viewing houses.  We have seen good, bad, ugly, cheap, expensive, damp, cold, hilltop, beachfront, and a whole load more.  We have put in two applications in the Island Bay area and are still waiting to hear back.  The whole rental process is more straight forward than the UK (at least it seems that way) and tenancy agreements are very standardised.  Fingers crossed we will have news early next week.

Today then, has been a day off from running all over the city and the better half found a Ship 'n Chip deal which included a morning in the Wellington City and Sea Museum, fish and chips lunch, then a boat trip to Matiu Somes Island in the middle of the harbour.  The island is a wildlife sanctuary.  They have managed to eliminate all the rats and other invasive species and now a number of endangered endemic species area flourishing.  We had beautiful sunshine (there's that phrase again) all day and enjoyed walking around the island looking at the birds, plants, insects and reptiles.  On the way back we took the ferry that stopped off at Day's Bay and then Seaton before returning to the city.  This gave us a good look round the harbour and a different view point on Wellington.

We are slowly settling in then.  It will feel more like home when we have a house.  There is still a long list to work through before we will be set up here.   We are trying to stop ourselves constantly performing mental currency conversions and adding up each days costs.  After all, you can't put a price on sitting down at the end of the day, beer in hand, looking over the harbour and listening to the sea.