Balmy Palmy

Hello from New Zealand!

Despite dressing as smartly as we ever could for a plane journey, and putting Dr on our tickets and everything, we were unable to persuade NZ air to give us a free upgrade. Apparently they just never give out free upgrades. Useful information for next time. So we just spent the flight in economy, terrified in case someone got ill given that we've identified ourselves as possible healthcare providers, and silently resentful of everyone in Business Class.

We're jet-lagged.

New Zealand is awesome.

Wellington was probably awesome, but we were too jet-lagged to really be sure. Just for the hell of it, we went up in the little red cable car, because damn it I was going to do something touristy if it killed me. Then we mooched around miserably up in the botanic gardens, wishing it was later so we could decently go to bed. And then we went to bed at 7pm and slept all the way through to 8am the next day. Though I did wake up at 3am in a panic thinking, "oh no! Now I'm awake and I won't be able to fall asleep and I won't adjust properly and" but I didn't finish the thought because I fell back asleep again almost immediately.

In Wellington, we sorted out our NZ medical council registration and today, we came to Palmy, and met everyone and checked into our awesome motel, which is as awesome as my description suggests. Balmy Palmy! There's a winter smell in the air, but it's quite warm (12 degrees). It's got a real small town feel about it - a weird sort of cross between the US and UK. The streets are wide, the mountains are tall and very beautiful, subtropical plants abound, and the stores sell mutton bird (apparently not very tasty. Who knew?) There are an abundance of UK doctors around, apparently, and everyone we meet hilariously wants to know why on earth we've travelled all this way "just to come to Palmy" before confiding, "I'm just the opposite - I'm desperate to leave."

Penny told us that another UK couple arrived yesterday to the hospital and they told her that they could never do such a long flight again and therefore they would have to emigrate to NZ permanently. Maybe that is why so many people stay.... We could never do that. We could never move permanently to a country where ribena costs over £5 a bottle. £5!!! Who knew?

We still can't really believe we are in NZ and that this is where we are going to be calling home for the next year. It's still only slowly sinking in, because everything is so familiar, though also in some ways so very, very foreign. Can we really be here? Yesterday in Wellington while we were eating pizza (jet-laggedly - advice: do not drink any wine, ever, when you are jet lagged. It is a serious error), I looked up through the glass window of the restaurant to see someone extremely familiar staring back at me in astonishment. It turned out to be someone in the year below me at Magdalen (we had a hilarious moment where we forgot each other's names) and we both demanded, "What are you doing here??" Still, that only increased the sense of still being in the UK, that disorientating confusion.

It only really hits us in the motel. We're watching some Kiwi TV and have flicked, unexpectedly, to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall in Yorkshire looking for "something delicious for my elevenses, something I can't get in Dorset." Then it hits us. Dorset! Dorset is so far away.