8 posts tagged “home”

A question for the New Zealanders among us:

I've recently decided to move back to New Zealand after almost a decade living abroad in Canada and Costa Rica.  And I wonder how much New Zealand has changed socially, culturally, economically since I left.  What differences (large and small) will I notice after 10 years away?

My New Zealand is frozen back in January 1999.  When I left, Jenny Shipley was the prime minister, 91 octane petrol was 80 cents a litre, and the average house cost about 50% less than it does now.  My home town, Dunedin, was a fairly sleepy, but funky, place with some good restaurants and great clothing stores and a good (although declining) live music scene.  It was a safe enough place that I could accidentally leave my back door not only unlocked but wide-open for a whole day with no ill-effects. 

I've heard that going home is in some ways more of a culture shock than moving away.  When you emigrate, you expect everything to be strange, but when you go home you expect to be home which makes any unfamiliarity harder to deal with.  After such a long time away I think it's likely that I'm in for some surprises.  What do you think?

We had such a wonderful time in Canada that it has really thrown into relief the difficulties of living here in San Jose. 
I've enjoyed my time here, but it's time to go.  Things that didn't bother me before, like the damp, the omnipresent bugs, and the language barrier are now annoying me.  And few weeks spent with friends and family makes our current isolation here and the fact that San Jose is not conducive to our lifestyle (no outdoor activities for Travis, no bookshops and libraries for me, no nice walkable neighbourhoods for either of us) much more apparent.

Until now I haven't minded this year's lack of company because Travis and I have been very busy getting to know Petra and getting to know ourselves as parents.  But Petra's bigger now and we're all ready to go back out into the world, or in Petra's case go into the world for the first time.  I want Petra to have lots of new experiences and know lots of people.  So we need to be where our people are. 

I'm also keen to have a real settled home base and to stop living like a student with temporary belongings in temporary homes.

We've decided to move to New Zealand, to Dunedin where most of my family are.  I'm a bit trepidatious about it because I've been away for nearly ten years and a whole lot will have changed in that time.  And of course some things, some of the reasons why I left in the first place, won't have changed.  But mostly I'm excited.  I imagine houses, gardens, cats, small children running around - a whole domestic idyll - and New Zealand's a great place for that.

Now that we've committed to leaving, I want to go right now, but Travis wants to leave his job in good order and we have to get rid of our car and furniture and work out how to ship what we want to keep.  We also have to go back to Vancouver to deal with the storage locker full of stuff we have there.  We left a lot behind when we moved because we weren't sure how long our stay here would last.  At the moment, therefore, we're planning to leave here mid September, spend some time in Vancouver and maybe Saskatoon, and be in Dunedin by mid October.

Travis will be able to continue working at his current job remotely from Dunedin.  He'll just have to be up at odd hours skyping his colleagues in South Africa and Costa Rica.  That's a relief because Dunedin, with its population of 120,000ish, is not a hotbed of high-tech jobs.  It's a university town, not a corporate centre.

Petra's eaten and fallen asleep on my lap.  I think she'll wake up if I move her, so I'm stuck in my chair for the moment.

I'm watching a replay of last night's Australian Open semi-final.  Djokovic played Federer.  Djokovic is up 2 sets to love right now - if he won, it's a real blow to Federer's dominance. 

And I'm listening (whether I like it or not) to Luis, the condos' guard, singing along with Joe Cocker's version of Help From My Friends in a shaky falsetto and even shakier English.  Fortunately, Luis tends to play things I like, so I just sing too, joining him in butchering whatever it is.  (Today though I kept quiet to help Petra sleep.)

Here's Joe Cocker at Woodstock, doing a much better job than Luis and me.

After yesterday's paean to the quiet life, things got a bit noisier here this morning.  Someone started hammering on the steel of the tennis club fence at around 8 (mercifully late by Costa Rican standards), making a variety of hollow booms and boings as he worked.  And someone else got his or her weed whacker out to beat a nearby garden into submission.

The weed whacker woke me from a nap I didn't intend to take.  I'm not sleeping quite as well at night now, but if I lean back and put my feet up during the day, I slip seamlessly into sleep and wake up an hour later wondering what happened.  Since I need to put my feet up regularly to keep the edema at bay, these unexpected naps are getting more frequent.  I slept a lot during the day in the first trimester - it seemed the only way to deal with the nausea - but not much in the second trimester.  Now that I'm in the last stretch I'm sleepy again.

Thankfully, my brain works better now despite my sleepiness.  It was just off for the first few months of the pregnancy, taking a vacation somewhere warm and soporific.  I could barely remember my own name, much less things like birthdays or phone numbers.  I couldn't even talk or write fluently because I'd discover, half-way through a sentence, that the word I wanted had drifted away.  Most disconcerting.  But my brain moved back in a few weeks ago and I was very glad to get reacquainted with it.  I'm still not exactly brilliant, but at least I know what my name is and can write a semi-coherent sentence again.

From my lounge at Brisas I heard engine brakes at 6 in the morning.  I heard the two-stroke engines of the local scooters labouring up the hill.  I heard horns, sirens, and the occasional crunch of crashing cars.  The traffic noise was constant and sometimes so loud that we had to pause conversations until the racket eased.

From the lounge in my new house I can hear wind in the trees, birdsong, and rain on the roof.  I hear the guards' phone ring.  I sometimes hear the guards' TV broadcasting local soccer matches ("gooooooooooaaaaaaallllll de Saaaaaapriiiiisssssaaaaa") and the guards cheering or swearing as the match momentum dictates.  I hear the odd car or siren in the distance.

I love my new house!

Here are a couple of pictures of our courtyard in the morning sun.  The sun vanished abruptly a few minutes after we took them, and now we're in the middle of the regular afternoon thunderstorm, but it was nice while it lasted.

Morning Sun

Courtyard

Here I am in my freshly-delivered maternity wear, standing on the stairs and in the courtyard of our new house.  It's a two-for-one deal.

Dry season rainstorm

I did some boasting yesterday about the weather in an email to a friend.  And, of course, just after I'd finished saying that the rainy season had ended, it poured down.  C'est la vie.

The rain caused the holiday weekend traffic to slow to a crawl all the way up the hill.  I took photographs, trying to get better pictures of car lights than I did of the Christmas palms.  I rested the camera on the balcony railing to minimize the camera shake and tried a few of the different options on the camera.  I have to confess that I've never read the instruction manual (it's just too dry - my eyes glaze over each time I try), so my choices were pretty random, but some of the pictures worked out.  And here they are....

Traffic movement

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Traffic lights

Traffic Lights