I’m moving into my own place coming Saturday. Tania offered to drive me up there with all my stuff and also to transport the sleeping couch that I reserved at the garage sale. Only problem is that the couch apparently does not come apart and requires a trailer to be transported… I’m hoping Gareth’s car can do the job. Last week he proudly told us of all the things he’s transported in there, so it should work?!
I tried to set up an automatic payment thingie for the rent with my new online bank account, but the bank account number the rental manager gave me didn’t fit exactly in the official bank account number format my bank gave me … panic … well turns out the rental company is Australian and they just divide their account numbers in sections different from the NZ one’s. It is just as confusing as it sounds.
Then I joined, hopefully, an electricity supplier. I’ve always lived in places where electricity was included in the rent so I never bothered with getting power myself. It is also very very complicated. Do you want power “anytime, uncontrolled, controlled, or day/night”. Somehow, even after I understood all these cryptic descriptions, electricity at anytime still seemed like the most logical thing to me … weird eh…
By the way, Kiwi’s say “eh” just like Canadians!
I signed up for some obscure online power-shop and the idea is that through them I can get “local” and “green” energy. Yep, it’s not just kiwis and potatoes that you buy local and organic, it’s also electricity. I don’t know where the other power plants in NZ get their electricity from, but this one generates power from local wind and water and geothermal hotspots … Probably better than Chinese nuclear power?!
I’ve bought a phone (second hand, like I promised to buy most things second hand) over the trade-me website “where kiwis buy and sell”. Unfortunately when I was 80% through a complex and long application form for telephone and internet connections, they asked for my telephone number and I gave the one from work and the form refused to go to the next step because my telephone number was incorrect. Probably they boycott telephone numbers from rivaling telecompanies but it meant that I could in no way finish the process. I won’t be in ChCh for large parts of the coming two weeks either so I can’t even be there for the installation so I suppose I’ll deal with it at a later moment.
But that means that I won’t be blogging much the coming weeks, being both away and without internet. :(
At work things go well. I’ve talked to a lot of people to gather all sorts of information and am preparing two presentations for next week. I’ll show all the different maps and my ideas for field sites to our US collaborators, and what I’ve done in Freiburg and how that fits to this project to my “team” at the informal team meeting. I’m pretty nervous because the team and the Americans are from all sorts of related fields to me, but all different and so there is plenty of opportunities for people to ask crazy and unexpected questions. Plus obviously I will have to prove to all of these people that I am really smart.
Last Monday all new employees were introduced officially during “Welcome morning tea”. Ian had to introduce me (which he hated) and I had to “reply” with a song, a dance, something else funny or a haka
I wanted to show exactly 9 pictures of Amsterdam, Freiburg, Vancouver and me and Thomas, but there was no projector available so I ended up, like most other new employees, mumbling how happy I was to be there.
The morning tea started with a group of people singing a traditional maori song, and afterwards I got an email how the group comes together every week for 30 minutes to sing maori songs and learn about their culture, and I decided to join. I’m not really comfortable with singing, but I figured, it is a group, and more of a cultural learning thing, nothing like a choir or so, all informal and singalong … We had a session today and it was fun. I like the sound of the language and the songs are mostly really easy. I’m a really bad singer though … had great difficulties to stick to the melodies. Perhaps I prefer the haka after all…
So on Sunday I am going to a workshop collecting mushrooms for 3 days. The idea is, I work with certain soil fungi, they produce mushrooms (which I couldn’t care less about), so I should know a bit about mushrooms and especially all the kiwis who study mushrooms. Ian mainly wants to collect mushroom-DNA. Basically we will all go out in the woods and collect mushrooms. Or, the others will collect mushrooms and I will try to identify trees and soils.
When we get back our US collaborators are here and we launch into a week of intensive discussion on experimental design, sampling strategies and field site reconnaissance. I am looking forward to that but I also hope that afterwards I will have time to get a telephone connection, a fridge, a real bed, some plates and bowles, an oven and all utilities to bake heavenly chocolate cakes again.
