NOTE: I'm lying here, as in telling a fib. I wrote this too long ago, will post it now and will write about Christmas soon. Sorry to be so far behind! Merry Christmas to you all!
Today is Monday, Dec. 20, so we’ve been living in Waitarere Beach nearly a week! Kevin has worked two full days, though he spent more time than that just familiarizing himself with a new system, getting to know office staff, and was able to observe a few of Dr Hull’s visits with patients, which was really helpful. He was able to use their computerized medical record with a patient named Mickey Mouse, who had earlier called in with a pain in his tail. He’s had fun too with the slang here, he had one lady tell him that her son was “a box of birds”….meaning he feels great! If a patient is “crook”, he’s sick, and you go to hospital, not to the hospital. I’ve spent a fair amount of time familiarizing myself with secondhand shops in Levin, adding a few household items to the “bach” to make our 3 months here a little more functional. Kiwis call their vacation homes their bach, pronounced like “batch”, and there are alot of them in our little beach town. I got an “official” population count of about 500 permanent residents, up to twice that in the summer, which evidently hasn’t started yet! There are 2 cafes, a convenience store, and two churches. Our attempt to attend church yesterday was pretty funny, as we intended to go to the 10 AM Presbyterian service. We walked up to the wrong church, Anglican, a block from the intended church, whose service had just ended (seeing all the people out front made us mistakenly think it was before the service) So after chatting with those friendly people, we walked a block beyond to the Presbyterian church. (You need a visual here; the Anglican church actually has a cross atop it’s otherwise non-distinguishable building, the Presbyterian church has nothing to distinguish it from it’s surrounding homes until you get up close and see a Bible verse outside). Inside this building were chairs and a man up front fiddling with a laptop on a table, the only person there and it is now exactly 10 AM. He looked up at us, then looked down, not saying a word. When Kevin asked if there would be church today, he indicated so and that there might be one or two more coming. Hmmm….so we waited a few minutes outside, no one showed, and we decided to give the Anglicans a chance next week at 9 AM! We’ll go into Levin for Christmas Eve service at 7, we hope we’ve got that straight! So far we have seen no Lutheran churches, and had one question about what do Lutherans think, so I googled “Lutheran church New Zealand”. The two closest to us are almost 50 minutes away, there are 17 Lutheran churches in the country. If we get really homesick, we can travel to get to one...otherwise, we’ll go with the Anglicans!
We’ve really been taken under the wings of Dr Alan Hull and his wife Chris. They are just really wonderful people who have helped us out a lot and been so friendly. He took Kevin out fishing and crabbing the other day. They didn’t catch anything, but more importantly he introduced Kevin to some other local fishermen and he got to go out today again; they caught lots of flounder and small crab! Their son turned us on to a 3G T-stick, which we purchased for $100 and turned the world around our computer into a wi-fi hotspot, hallelujah! We will have to add more MBs to it when we run out of internet time, but that is easy to do, and so far way cheaper than the ISPs around here, who were really making it difficult to get internet in the house. Now we don’t need to be tied to the house, as long as we have the laptop and T-stick, hooray! The first night we had it though, we burned through $20 of time, skyping with Jen and Carlos...so now we’re restricting ourselves to free google calls :)
Pics from "home" are at http://picasaweb.google.com/116819527466773721245/AroundHome#
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