Featherston French Fair

This weekend was awesome!

So Hayley was coming, which in itself is pretty cool since I haven't seen her since her housewarming way back on January 20th.

Friday night we went out and played pool, luckily Hayley and I both suck really hard at it so noone really won a game, rather we would take turns losing for pouching the 8-ball too early. After a few games we met up with Hayley's friends and went clubbing until 1:30. When we went home we sort of talked a bit too much and forgot to get off, so we had to walk for 30 minutes to get home.

The next morning we were going to visit Gigi in Masterton to go to a French Fair in Featherston. We got on the train and went to Solway Station where Gigi met us and walked us back to the Copthorne Hotel and Resort. We dropped off our bags and went to the playground for the kids (Gigi and Hayley) to play.

After that we went to KFC, while there we planned the rest of the day: Go to French Fair, go back to Masterton, go shopping for me to cook again, go home and watch TV and drink loads of New Zealand wine. Pretty good plan we thought.

Girls and their bags and hats...

Pizza-machine!

"Market trash"

So on to the busstop, get on bus and go to French Fair. As expected we forgot to get off (again), and so we thought we had to walk but didn't. Because as it turned out, Rick the busdriver (who's going to play a major role later on!), offered to go back that way after stopping at Featherston station, we kindly accepted! 20 minutes later we were at the French Fair and could check out the attractions. Rick said he'd be back at 5-10 past 5 which gave us about 3 hours at the fair.

Personally I don't think it was awesome, but there was a lot of what I would call regular market trash for sale. They did have a fucking (and this is AWESOME!) mobile pizza-bakery! That's like, amazing! A car with a giant wood-fired pizza-oven on the back of it! Oh well. I bought a gift for Marta and the girls went shopping too and got a few things. The coolest thing was probably the Betty Boob coasters that Hayley got. How she can call them girly I have no idea about!

French Fair. That was the name. While people did dress up like stereotypical french people, we didn't meet any. 7-finger chocolate man was from Belgium and the apple-juice man from Romania. The rest were presumably Kiwis.

Eventually it was time to go and so we left, waiting for the bus. Rick did come back, but he was going the wrong way! Well: He had misunderstood us or we had misunderstood him, so he thought we were going back to Martinborough and not Masterton. Whoops! We got on the bus anyways because we did not want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere at a closed French Fair without french people.


We got to Featherston station where we would have to wait for 3 hours for the train to arrive. Rick saw that we were in a kinda sucky position and gave us an amazing offer again:

Featherston

He would go to Martinborough, come back and fuel up, park the bus, and take another bus home and drop us off at Copthorne because he lives in Masterton and Solway is on the way there. We couldn't really say no to such a great offer and got off in Featherston.

Back in Featherston we went shopping for groceries and got an ice cream while waiting for Rick to get back. Rick got there and fueled his bus, we got on, he parked it, and boarded the smaller slightly broken schoolbus. On the way back we had some great discussions on the development of the whole area where he's lived most of his life, spending 18 years in Australia since there was no work in New Zealand.

Bus 199 before departure to Solway

So Greytown, which we passed through on our way back, was the first inland town in New Zealand. It was created when all the rich people had bought the good land along the coasts mostly on the South Island, so poor people had no options for starting up. For 25 pounds they could but 1 acte land in Greytown to build a house on, and get 25 acres of land to grow to grow crops on somewhere around the city. With no money however, they couldn't afford to clear off the bush and start growing crops so after a few years you had a small town with a whole lot of poor people with big houses and no land because it had all been sold to the rich people. Masterton and Carterton which are nearby, were named after the two people behind this seemingly great initiative, Masters and Carter.

Anyways, we got back to Copthorne and thanked Rick many times for being so damn amazing throughout our day (which without him would have gone terribly wrong!). And I started cooking.

Pasta with a sauce made of: leak, carrots, beans, capcicum, tomato sauce and then some fried bacon. The girls loved it and it was truly amazing!

That was my weekend! Tomorrow back to Welly and work on project and relax! It was great seeing Hayley again and we had a great experience just, messing up our entire plan for saturday!

So Anders, what does Kiwis eat?

Fish and Chips,
Fish and Chips, and
Fish and Chips...

No really, that's all I've had this past two weeks, for tea at least (that's what my scottish heritage host family calls the evening meal). The reason being that Callum, the son of the house, has a science experiment going on, testing different types of packaging for delivering Fish and Chips.

So for the sake of science, we've been Fish and Chips. Callum had set up 5 different contraptions for packaging/wrapping the chips

• Pre-heated Crock-Pot
• Aluminum foil
• Woolen sweater
• Polystyrene box (aka Thermocole or Flamingo)
• Control (whatever packaging the shop supplied, a paper bag basically)

Upon the arrival of the Fish and Chips we would sit and wait for 5-10 minutes for Callum to measure the temperature as it was falling in each of the 5 wrappings and eventually we would get to eat and rate the transportation methods and their impact on the quality of our chips.

Consistently, the aluminum foil kept the chips hot, but soggy as there was no way for the water to escape the packaging. The polystyrene box was quite big, and seemed to keep the item warmer, and crunchier than regular packaging, but not a practical solution. The pre-heated crock-pot, would have the same effect as the aluminum foil when closed. However, if the original packaging was broken (happened on one occasion by accident) the chips would stay warm and crunchy, really good. The one solution to win the award of the best solution for keeping chips warm and crunchy however goes to the woolen sweater. While temperature was slightly lower than the pre-heated crock-pot, the chips stayed crunchy and most importantly: It's practical and requires no effort.

The control performed terrible: Crunchy but cold after just 5 minutes.

Those Wellingtonians

So on the bus morning, I noticed something quite peculiar, and since the traffic was slow I had plenty of time to ponder for the reason of it.

All the way in, the areas outlined with yellow stripes for the buses to park in had trash in them. It's most likely trash collecting day, but why would it all be in the bus stop areas?

Well, suburban Wellingtonians probably agree that parking is quite a hassle and also very expensive. The city council recently announced that prices will increase, again!

So to avoid blocking their drive-way or ruining a perfectly good parking spot, people simply dump their trash in the busstops, because these people have a car anyways and don't care about the buses. Smart eh?

Tramping trip to Otaki Forks!

So as I mentioned I'd post about my trampint trip

Mike, our guide

Robyn, my previous host, knows a guy called Mike who has been tramping in New Zealand for more than 40 years, written books on the bush and its huts, held seminars and speeches about tramping and probably a lot lot more. Robyn suggested that I went tramping with him some time ago and I decided that it was probably a good idea, especially considering that he'd do it for free!

Big slid, we had to travel all the way around it!

If he was going to take me anyways, I might as well bring some friends, so I invited all the people from work and quite a few of the interns at companies incubated at Creative HQ decided to come, so Mike, Robyn and I were accompanied by Gunhild, Gigi, Andrew, Gilles and Walker on our tour.

Mike was a great guide, besides being well-equipped with gear and food, he had legs that would make any professional biker jealous. He knew a lot about the bush and was telling us about several different plants and trees, some of them edible, but could cause diarrhea, others good against diarrhea!

Our trip started at 10 in the morning and went from a parking area with a little hut and into the wild where we would go see a boiler, used to drive an engine some 100 years ago, dragging cartloads of wood back and forth. On our way, the parts that hadn't slid away, we would sometimes see iron tracks which were only used for the corners, for the straight pieces they used wooden tracks back then. On our way we would besides steep hills, small rivers flowing down the hills (that we had to wade through) also encounter bridges. The one here is the second longest in the Tararua Forest Park (the area in which Otaki Forks lies).



I can only recommend going on a tramping trip, the most amazing thing was that there are no fences, no must-do tracks or anything. You are on your own and can go anywhere you like. It's not like Denmark or the US where they close everything that's slightly dangerous. The bush is dangerous, not because of it's animals or trees or anything. The big killer is the weather, and not being prepared for rain, snow, sun or anything in between can be lethal if you suddenly get stuck out there. Mike was telling us how these mountains have their own weather and how it can change from one type to another in minutes if the wind starts blowing in a different direction.


I've included only a few of the pictures taken on the trip here, to see them all go to THIS WEBSITE.

But, I think everyone enjoyed it! And I would definitely go again, which I am planning on. Might just take the same group somewhere else if they're all up to it, and Mike doesn't mind leading us :D

Just a warning

Despite the lack of updates, life hasn't stopped down here, quite the opposite actually!

New Zealand is heading towards wintertime and now you may ask me: "Why don't you just say fall?" - Well New Zealand doesn't really have 'fall'. The term describes what happens in that period of time, the leaves fall from the trees. New Zealand however, feature mainly evergreens, meaning that the trees here don't drop their leaves. They do replace their leaves, most often by growing taller and sacrificing the lower leaves to make new ones that are higher up and can get more sun.

So now the weather is more like the Danish, we have days with heaps of sun and no wind, and we have days with with and rain. So while people keep telling me the weather is awful here, I can only shrug and say: "Just like home!".

This past weekend, which I'll describe in detail in the next post with pictures and so forth, Gigi came to visit me here in Wellington where we went tramping in Otaki Forks!

So, it has been a while...

... And not much has happened. Wednesday 22nd I moved to a different place, with a guy called Murray in Miramar. Basically the reason for this is that I was a bit annoyed with the buses to and from Belmont, Lower Hutt. Miramar offers buses all week until midnight, which means I can stay in the city and hang out with people a lot longer than before.

In relation to work it's been moving forward a lot. I've been working on improving our communication with potential customers and the results seem to be great. More people open our emails and more people click our links after we changed the headline and the contents of the emails.
Currently I'm making video tutoriaæs for existing customers so it's easier for them to start using our software, not that it's hard to use at all, but hopefully this means that we will receive less phonecalls with very simple questions.

Other than that I'm doing fine, starting to miss the family at home and the girlfriend in the US. Luckily I get to see all of them over the summer break and after that I have no plans yet.

I wish there was more to tell but as of right now, life is pretty stable here. Summer is ending, it's raining a lot more and it's quite chilly in the evenings. Though the coldest it'll ever get is like 9•C, and that's a cold winter :) It's so windy though that it feels like it's a lot colder.