At long last, moving day has come and gone and we have finally got into the house. It is a little weird, still feels like we shouldn't be there, but very cool. We have to keep pinching ourselves as we can't quite believe it's real. We've managed to acquire the essentials as far as furniture goes, bed, 2 sofas, washing machine, fridge, TV , dining room table and chairs. The wood burner is fantastic, it's a 'Magnum P100', which with a little doctoring will become 'Magnum PI'.

Darren and Nicole helped us on the first night with a fush, chups and champagne housewarming. We'll hopefully gradually fill the place up with more furniture as and when we see it over the next few months. After the house at Borley we don't know what to do with all the space, but I'm pretty sure in science at school we did something about 'mess expanding to fill an available vacuum'.

Sunday we had a pretty fun day. Heathers friends Ros and Rich were in Christchurch before they fly home after spending 5 weeks on the South Island. We took them up to Amuri ski field just outside Hanmer for the day. The access road was quite exciting, basically a ledge hewn out of the side of the mountain for 7km, but Big Al handled it with ease. We got our first taste of the fabled 'nutcracker' rope tow lifts. I would say these date from around the time that handlebar moustaches were in fashion and are popular in the smaller ski fields in NZ. For folks like us pampered with a European snowboarding education they are a shock to the system.

The lift consists of a rope. Thats it, just a rope. The rope rests on top of rollers positioned at about waist height at intervals along its length to stop it dragging along the ground. The victim of the lift wears a belt around their waist with a device attached to it by a short length of rope that looks a bit like a nutcracker. The victim clamps this onto the rope and then allows themselves to be pulled up the hill from their waist via the belt.

Here's a theoretical depiction of this operation. A more realistic description of a typical encounter with the beast goes like this.

1. Victim shimmies up to the lift. Being a regular footed snowboarder, the victim realises that the rope must run behind their back and starts to ponder how they are going to even stay upright.
2. After grabbing the rope, the victim realises that how they are going to stay upright is 'not at all'
3. Victim repeats step 1
4. Victim manages to hang onto rope this time with the grace of a swan ... on water skis. Victim then flounders trying to get the nutcracker attached to the rope for a few seconds before repeating step 2. At this point the victim is free to start expressing profanities.
5. On the 3rd attempt, the victim manages to get the nutcracker attached and get relatively comfortable. At this point, the victim finds themselves hurtling towards the first roller. The literature has instructed the victim to 'keep hands, loose clothing and long hair well clear of the roller'. The victim would love to, but is having enough trouble staying upright. Thankfully, only the nutcracker takes a spanking as it travels over the roller.
6. On approaching the second roller, the victim accidently pulls the rope off the roller and falls off again. This causes the rope to drag along the ground and all the folk behind the victim to have to squat down to reach the dragging rope. Most of them teach the victim some new profanities as they pass.

This continues in a similar vein for the rest of the afternoon. Thankfully there was also a button lift which offered a slightly less punishing ride up the hill.

After this, we were gratefull for a soak in the Hanmer Springs thermal pools on the way back to Christchurch.

A rough guide to Kiwi speak.

As an outsider, Kiwi's and Ozzies sound pretty much identical. Now we've been here for a while, we are beginning to pick up on the subtleties that make them different. To the natives the differences are blindingly obvious, to the point where a member of one nation will sometimes have to fight off tears of laughter listening to the accent of the other. Here is a field guide to the song of the Kiwi.

Pronunciation - Somewhere along the line, the Kiwi's have got mixed up with which vowel is which.

• 'i' becomes 'uh'. The classic way to identify a Kiwi is to get them to say 'Fish and chips'. If it comes out 'Fush and Chups' ... bullseye!
• 'e' becomes 'i'. The 'e' sound, as in 'ten', becomes 'i', as in 'tin'. Central Surf surf shop is currently offering 'Tin persint off in the sintral surf sale'.
• Rolled 'r's, just with a single roll, like Shaun Connery would.

Words - Heres a few choice words and phrases.

• Choice - Exceptionally good. 'Thats choice bro'
• Bro - as 'mate' in the UK. Females can also be, and often are, bro's.
  
• Sweet as - Perfect, marvelous, jolly good. The '.. as' suffix is often used, 'that's funny as.' or 'it was hard as, getting up that hill'. The only time anything seems to follow 'as' is with the much used 'good as gold'.
  
• Eh? - Perpetually added to the end of sentances. 'Reckon it was hard as getting up that hill eh?'
• Togs - Swimming kit.
• Jandals - Flip-flops, 'thongs' in Aussie.
• Pants - As in the US, are trousers. Pants are called undies. The potential for embarrasing mix ups with thongs, undies and pants are almost endless.
• Thanks Driver - Always say this when getting off the bus.
• Bach - 'Bachelor pad', traditionally little more than a shed out in the country somewhere. Seem to have been used in the same way as sheds in the UK, i.e. as a refuge from 'her indoors', except for the whole weekend, so with a bed, cooker, heater etc. Now more likely to be a million dollar home somewhere in the Marlborough Sounds with boat only access.
• Manchester - for some bizzarre reason, bedding, towels, etc is collectively known as 'manchester'.
• Rudeness - The 'rude word' threshhold seems to be considerably higher than in the UK. There are anti litter campaign's requesting that you 'Don't be a tosser', and milder beepable words feature heavily on the TV. Parliament / polititians offer up regular ammusement as arguments deteriorate into f'ing and blinding contests. The news recently featured footage of one MP 'giving the bird' to another out of sight of the speaker.
• Hoon - Boy racer
• Tramping - Walking / hiking.

Got anything to add to the lexicon? Leave a comment!

The past couple of weeks have been fairly eventfull. First off, a weekend snowboarding trip to Mt. Dobson a few hours drive south of Christchurch ended rather abruptly when Darren busted his foot. After a snowmobile trip off the slope and the long drive back to Christchurch and x-ray revealed there was nothing broken, just a severly sprained ankle. He is still hobbling a week later but went back to work today.

Overall it was a good weekend, we stayed in a really nice cottage just outside Fairlie which only cost $85 for the night. It was lovely to wake up in the middle of nowhere with just the sound of the birds outside. Until Darrens little misshap Mt Dobson had been fantastic, with the luxury of a chairlift, hardly any people and beautiful weather.

Sadly the weekend just gone was not such great weather and we didn't make it up the mountain. Most of saturday was spent hunting for clothes for Malc's mid-winter christmas meal, a 50's themed murder mystery. Malc was a mafia bodyguard and Annie the hosts maid. A pretty fun evening in all, sadly neither of us was the perpetrator or the victim.

Its now less than 2 weeks till moving in day and we still don't have any furniture! We spent Sunday looking around and fainting at the price of stuff. We have put priority on a bed and sofas, other stuff may have to wait!

Stay tuned, the next installment may well be from our new surf shack.

Sold! Well, thankfully the house sale has finally completed. We had a couple of issues to sort out but nothing major. Our posession date will be the 25th August, just over 3 weeks from now ... woohoo! Got plenty of spare rooms for any pommie visitors.

Now there is just the small matter of getting furniture, a bed, fridge, washing machine ...