Not written anything for a while, but we've been very busy doing all the normal things that normal people do on normal days. I got an interview for a job on Friday and started this Monday, it's an ASP.Net gig using C# so that's definately a good thing. Helen has been having quite a few interviews too.
Everything is going really well apart from a little incident that happened last Sunday - we hired a car and took off down south on the Friday, we saw quite a bit of the country and ended up at Napier - about 5 hours drive from Auckland. Anyway, on the way home I was driving and it was raining, and I lost control of the car. As we turned the corner a car was coming the other way, and I tried to get out of the way. The car completely flipped over, skidded for a moment on the roof and finally landed on its wheels, just on the edge of a ravine which would have meant a drop of 2 metres or so. We were pretty shaken but didn't have a scratch on either of us, we were very very lucky. The police arrived quickly and sorted out contacting the hire company and one of them was kind enough to give us a lift all the way to Hastings, a journey of 90 mins or so. Hastings is about 2 hours away from Auckland, and got a bus back from there. We're still a bit shook up about it, but hopefully we will be able to get in a car and do more exploring this weekend as it looks like it's by far the best way to see New Zealand.

Well, we finally made it - we arrived in Auckland at around midnight on Wednesday, and after getting some sleep at a backpacker place in the city, set about finding sorting ourselves out with all the dull, real-life stuff that we have managed to avoid for the past 5 months - things like setting up a bank account, finding somewhere to live, sorting out tax codes and joining the library. We've found somewhere which has a nice enough room, about 20 mins from the centre of town by bus, and we'll be staying there while we look for work. No luck on that front for either of us yet, although it is early days.... we're hitting the internet every day and surfing REALLY REALLY hard. Some days we even look at job sites. :) I'm using my nice new Versa M320, which I got in Sydney and have spent the past week configuring to my tastes and installing all the software I need to develop, and all the Microsoft Critical updates etc. - I'd almost forgotten how much hassle computers are to set up and just how much time it takes.... and this was on a machine which already had the OS and drivers installed and configured for me! I also need to sort out all the hundreds of photos that we've taken since Yangshou (China) and that I haven't got round to putting on-line yet. Hopefully this will happen over the next few days.