The Trip to the Antarctic (Centre)

The third and most recent trip was to Christchurch's International Antarctic Centre. There we learned a number of things, including how close we really are to antarctica. In fact, a relatively large portion of the entire center is the base for the United States Antarctic Program. There were several large exhibits regarding the brutally cold temperatures there, the explorers who had been there (as early as 1820!), the climate changes there, but really we were there to see the penguins.




Ryan got a front-row view of the feeding of the penguins. These were little fellas, which reminds me of how large the bigger species are. I should have taken a photo of Ryan beside some of the stuffed emperor penguins. I am not sure which was taller.


While chasing Ryan around, I did take a couple of photos of some really interesting facts about Christchurch. I hope they come out legible.

Today's post is basically to give some more views of Christchurch, in particular the house. The first photo is from the street corner. As a welcome change from the past 7 years, we have a garage! Wasn't all that handy without a car that first couple of weeks...

The second is of the backyard. I am standing in the bricked area designed for a barbecue pit. Really only half of the building shown is ours; that second rooftop is the other half of a duplex.

Our final photo of the evening I took while I should have been studying. It is taken from the medical school library, located downtown on the sixth floor. Not a bad view. Somehow your thoughts drift off to plans for the upcoming weekend.

Hitting the slopes in the colonies

Okay, I realize we have been talking a lot about the country, some about the people, when all along you have really just wanted to know how the kids are doing. So some new landmarks for the little ones: Ryan and I had our first full phone conversation two weeks ago. Twice since then she and I have talked on the phone. It turns out occasionally when Ana hangs up, Ryan says that she wanted to talk to Daddy, so Ana hits redial and hands her the phone.

She seems to be able to understand over the phone, which is a big step. She can also answer questions atonomously. The last time she answered the phone herself when I called. After a little chit-chat, I asked if I could speak to Mommy now. Very matter of factly, she replied, "No." Long pause. Where does one go from there?

She also surprised Ana yesterday when they were getting ready to go to the mall. Ana was climbing out of the shower when Ryan marched into the bathroom, declaring herself ready to go. She was fully dressed, with dress, tights, shoes, jacket. Ah, the motivation of shopping for these girls....

3-dog is also growing. Ana laughs at all the facial expressions he has. Dry and subtle they are. He also started crawling last week. I don't know how many times we have turned around to find that he had migrated, or worse, to bump into his noggin with a foot or leg. So far no permanent marks. You could tell that he was wanting to crawl for quite a while, likely due to watching the older sibling.

I went snowboarding yesterday, so I can mark NZ on the list of places I have skied. The views are incredible up there. It plays with your mind to be on a mountain top and look out at the ocean. In the other direction, just more and more of the jagged mountains. But it is all above treelines, so when the clouds rolled in later in the day, it caused snow blindness on the the top half of the mountain. No contours, no landmarks. But the snow base is the best that they have had in some 15 years. It even snowed down here in town today. Didn't stick here, but the hills on the south side of town got more than a dusting. The buses didn't run up to those neighborhoods today.

I can't wait for the spring skiing, when the weather is more predictable.

The photo to the left is when you "turn off the paved road," a sign that you may be a redneck if you were in the U.S. From here, we are only about 10 km from the moutain. Notice the one-wayness.

This is the view from the top of the mountain, looking west. They call it the Southern Alps. Who knows why.

The view from the same spot, looking east. Not too shabby.

First night on the town

Tonight we go out on the town. Though it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, I think it is the first time that we have done so in the six weeks we have been here. We went to a surprise party for a colleague of mine who was accepted into the plastic surgery program here. One of greatest differences between medical education in the states and in the UK system, as is followed here and in Australia is how we get accepted into the training program. While at home, we go straight from medical school into a residency program, here you apply for jobs as house officers. You do what would be considered “scut work” designated for junior residents in the U.S., such as doing the admission or discharge paperwork, following up on lab results or radiographs, then reporting these to the higher-ups. The difference is that junior residents still get to operate (presuming we are talking about surgery). Here, that is all they do. But a house officer may do surgery for four months, pediatrics the next four months, and internal medicine for the “run” after that. In addition, a U.S. resident will matriculate each year, barring disaster. Here a bloke could opt to stay as a house officer indefinitely. And why not? The pay is good, most are young and single and in a position to do a lot of fun things with that money. Relative to the Americans, they are very well traveled and have done a lot in the way of adventures, such as skydiving in the USA, hiking in the China, or snowboarding here.

Then there is the next level, where they work like what we used to call interns. These days in the U.S., it is a term synonymous with rookie, for the most part. But junior registrars are basically trying out some of their favorite specialties, then trying out for senior positions. The advantage is that they have the opportunity to know they like the job they choose, and that the programs hire people they like. They down side, a significant one, is that you can potentially be stuck in this level. How long do you keep trying to get into a specialty before giving up and moving to another? Or maybe you need to change locales to get some face time with another program? It is a difficult game.

So there was a good deal of significance when Kasia got accepted to the program the last week of June. Suddenly her next six years are mapped out for her. And not just for her, but her family, as well. It is a big accomplishment. So her husband rented out the top level of a nice bar in City Centre, with open bar and hors d’oeuvres, for a surprise party for her.

She was indeed caught off guard. Her gestures and face said it all; I wish that I had had a camera rolling. She walked in gabbing then gestured to her friend that she recognized one of the other people in the bar, as if to pardon herself to go say hi. But before she could make a step in that direction, she realized she knew the person behind the previous. Looking around, suddenly she realized she knew a lot of people; in fact, all. After recognizing about ten faces, it became clear. It was clear that the surprise party was a success.

The Olympic Opening Ceremonies

I am kicking back on the couch a little after midnight, watching the ceremonies on Kiwi national television. First, it must be interesting to know that you have just witnessed dawn while we are in the middle of the night, all the while perhaps watching the same spectacle. Beijing is four hours behind us, so they are on the same day as the U.S. while we are in your tomorrow.

Some interesting information:

• The New Zealand TV crew consists of 120 people in the basement of the media broadcasting building.
• NBC: 3000 people in a 7000-square foot space, including its own coffee shop and McDonald's.

The sports with realistic medalist hopefuls from New Zealand:

• Two-man scull
• Individual canoe
• Windsurfing
• Three-day equestrian event
• Men's field hockey

The flag-bearer for the Kiwis: Mahe Drysdale, a rower in his third olympics, but one of the few returners who has not won a medal.

I am looking forward to watching the games from another country. Probably equally biased to their own, but with fewer competitions in which their own are competitive for the medals. So how will they cover these events?

Several other sports have already been touted in the highlights. Among them:

• The Redeem Team in basketball
• 100-meter dash (Gaye from USA, Bolt, and ?)
• Michael Phelps' chances of winning more than Mark Spitz' seven gold medals

Other odd facts:

• Beijing population: 17 million
• Capacity in the Bird's Nest stadium for the opening ceremony: 91,000
• Demand for opening ceremony tickets: 2.3 million
• Bhutan is present for the games. The only sport in which they have competed: archery

Highlights of the ceremonies:

• The fireworks simulating 30 footsteps along a major thoroughfare in Beijing, covering the length of the city in 30 seconds.
• A thousand people with lights, running to form an image of a dove in flight. Impressive.

Well, these ceremonies are likely to go on forever. 204 teams to march in. We are planning on going skiing this weekend, weather permitting.

Let the Indian guy talk

Just a quick blurb tonight and a couple of photos. It made me laugh and I wanted to share.

Ana found a great Indian restaurant just a couple of blocks from our house on the edge of the University campus (another edge besides the one our house is on). Indian restaurants are more plentiful here than Mickey D's are there, but the food is so good.

So we picked some up for takeaway (Yeah, we speak Kiwi.), ordering from the only Indian guy in the place. Clearly he was the manager. I mean, by the way he composed himself and his dress a step above the white folk. So when the food was bagged and brought to the counter, the obviously Kiwi girl stepped up with it and started rolling off some jibberish, Maori or something. Neither one of us could make out a lick of what she said. "Doesn't sound like our order," I said.

The manager overheard and came over, took the receipt from her hand and read off the exact four things that we had ordered! Now how the heck does an English speaking Kiwi sound more foreign than an Indian?! Apparently when reading Indian terms...

I think the take home point is that Kiwi is not a good medium for translation into "Amerkin."

Now for the obligatory photos:

Just us boys getting some work done in the kitchen.

Ryan out in our little "front yard".

The added photos

Our first views of the South Island. Notice how close the snow is to the shore. We may have been looking at Kaikoura here.
Close to Akaroa. The town is in the background, but you have to go through this pass to get there.












Lunch in Akaroa, bay in the background, where you can swim with the dolphins. Perhaps when it is warmer!

Address and... A NEW CAR!

Okay, so it sounds all fun, like the Price is Right. It's not.


First, the practical information. The Lolos reminded us of the need to disperse our information.

Address: 83 Waimairi Road
Ilam
Christchurch
8041
New Zealand

Secondly, in hopefully our most definitive step toward settling in for the six... five remaining months, we finally bought a car yesterday. I need to post photos of the tike. It is a 12 year-old Toyota Camry. It will fit in well with the rest of the cars around here. Very few cars are new here; most are older and come from Japan, where there are tight regulations on the permissible age of cars. Here, in complement, there is no import duty on cars, so they are cheap! The price of the thing: NZ$2200, slightly less than US$2000.


Just getting to the car auction was an escapade which emphasized our need for the car. The auction would only be 5 minute drive from work, but I rode my bicycle 15 minutes home so that we could go get it together. I hurriedly changed clothes, and we grabbed the car seats, the two kids, and the stroller to board the bus. It was just our luck that this one would be piloted by a fellow from India, who had enough trouble with English, and I would propose that my accent posed even more difficulty. In addition, I don't think that he knew his roads much better than I, because when I asked him if there was a stop at the intersection with Lincoln Road, he made me repeat it a couple of times then said he was going down Barrenger Road. Later he added that I must mean Lyndon Road. I think this is a road nowhere near our proposed destination.


When we got to the right area, we pulled up to a bus stop. I asked if it was the closest stop to Lincoln, to which he replied that it was a long way down Barrenger Street. So we waited until the next stop.

As we walked the 10 minutes back toward the previous stop, we began to worry that we would miss the auction of our preferred vehicles. Long story a little shorter, we didn't get lost, but we had to reroute because the road the map appeared to show as a through-street dead-ended into a fenced-in set of railroad tracks.

Well, we weren't too late, despite the auction being half over by the time we got there. No one else even bid on our car. Maybe it was our determined looks. Or the car seats, little children, stroller, and our dinner of PBJ's while we sat out in a cold auction that evoked sympathy. Or maybe it was the car.


The longer we had the car, the more I leaned toward the last hypothesis, beginning about 45 seconds after the auctioneer's gavel came down. And the lean became more of a scrum-like lunge. Our ticket to freedom is being towed to a garage tomorrow for a new battery, the new inspection sticker, and the inspection we should have asked for a couple of days ago.

More photos soon to come

Three weeks in...

We have now been here almost a month. It seems like no time at all in most respects, but when you are here only six months, a good chunk of it goes by each month.

Aunt Bettye's last question to me was regarding work. Yes, it has been underway quite some time. As you may recall, we got in on a Saturday. Monday and Tuesday I had little logistical meetings (read: little necessary things that could have been done the morning I started work). But Wednesday I officially began work. So I have logged 2.5 weeks to this point.

It has actually been great. I operate more, more people defer to my judgment. The work hours are even better than the Kleinert fellowship (which, in turn, was a good bit better than residency!). And I am making more money. All of this in a new land half way around the world. Not bad!

To this point we have only seen a couple of things. Last weekend we just did a day trip to Akaroa. Check it out on the map. It is a nice little coastal town settled by some French fellas. I need to look into how this isolated place was the only, or one of the only, French colonies here. The streets are in French, and the French flag flies over the doorways of a few hotel doorways.

Matt will appreciate that it is a popular site for morning rides from Christchurch. We saw plenty of bicycles initially en route, but I doubt that they were going anywhere close to that far. But the bikes with motors ripped by with regularity. Several of them were there in town.

This weekend we went to Hamner Springs and spent the weekend at a wonderful bed & breakfast. In fact, the accommodation was better than the site. It is a wonderful natural phenomenon to have hot water bubbling up in the wintry mountains, but it was really, at least for me, more of a pain to get out and run for the open-air changing rooms, children in arms, and try to dry off and get warm again than it was to soak in water a little cooler than a hot tub.... especially when the B&B had a hot tub available.

The next morning, being today, we went to Kaikoura (Maori for "fish food"). Like most places, it was kind of sleepy due to the season, worsened by the drizzle. But it was beautiful. I don't think either of us has ever been able to see surf and snow in the same view before. The highlight, though, was the visit to the seal colony just outside of town. Ryan loved it! We strolled down a dirt path around the corner to see a handful of them just a few meters away. While taking a few photos we heard grunts and snorts from the bushes behind us. Looking more closely, we realized they were everywhere! Under each bush tended to be another one looking to get out of the wind and take a nap. Wow, maybe we don't have our senses tuned enough to be out on any walkabouts yet!