Hi, Family and Friends! Brandon and I are once again in our cozy little hostel room. It's Saturday night here and we have had a rather productive day. Actually, as I'm writing this Brandon is sitting to my left watching an instructional video on youtube because we bought a manual car today and neither of us really knows how to drive stick shift. But, no. I'm skipping things.
So, we got engaged on Wednesday. That was amazing. On Thursday we ... we... that was a really long time ago. We looked at an apartment in a suburb south of CBD (Central Business District [of Auckland]) called Mt. Eden. It was raining, and neither of us packed an umbrella, so we clung to buildings for shelter and then took a bus to somewhere near the apartment. The people here are adorable. On that first bus there were two little old ladies competing over who could give us more thorough and accurate advice on how to get where we were going, where to live, what to buy, who to talk to, etc. On the way back we caught another bus back up to CBD, where Brandon got some sort of meat pie and a chocolate square thing. Then we walked around that area, finding a supermarket and taking pictures of apartment advertisements of all shapes and sizes. Oh, and we bought an umbrella. We finally made it back to the apartment, made ourselves some dinner, and then basically crashed for the night after organizing our agenda for Friday.
An interesting note about Thursday: The woman who was showing us the Mt. Eden apartment thought we might be worried about the length of the commute into the city, which was only SEVEN MINUTES away by car. I mean, Brandon and I could have walked that distance in 45 minutes. Basically, New Zealanders know nothing about commutes.
Friday we met up with a rather questionable kiwi real estate agent who took us to a few different studio apartments in the Mt. Eden area. It is so bizarre to have the driver on the right-hand side of the car. I basically just have to close my eyes whenever we're moving.
[By-the-way, now Brandon is reading an article on how to drive a manual car.]
After looking at those studio apartments Brandon and I headed out walking toward Parnell again. We crossed through a little corner of a large park just south of the main city area. It was a gorgeous park, and there was a path that was advertised as taking us back to Parnell. Unfortunately, we must have been so enthralled with the scenery that we missed a turning point, because we ended up walking along some train tracks in what might be called a "bad part of town," if such a thing even exists here.
We looked at another apartment - all on foot - and then decided that we needed to rent a car, which we did today.
So, this morning we woke up and designed our agenda for looking at other apartments. There were two on rather polar edges of the city that looked interesting. One in Remuera and one in Point Chevalier. And another in Ponsonby.
We drove away from the rental place very very cautiously (I was practically hyperventilating - very embarrassing) and headed east toward Remuera. The apartment was really nice. It had a bath tub, which was potentially a major selling point for me, and it was the only legitimate one-bedroom apartment we'd looked at besides the first one. More interestingly, the guy who was showing it to us (B and I have forgotten his name at the moment) once worked in the film industry, and he and his wife ran a media business from home, which would have been upstairs. Anyway, it was all looking quite promising until two women walked up the hill and said that they were also interested in the apartment. The moment the man saw them he said, "Sorry, it's taken." As they walked away looking rather confused he said to us, "I don't want her pulling tricks downstairs, now, do I?"
So here's the situation, and B and I don't know exactly what to make of it: one of the women was white and a bit frumpy looking, but the other was a very pretty black woman. Actually, she was the first black person I've seen in New Zealand. What Brandon and I were wondering was if the man was a racist, a chauvinist, or somehow certain, via some kiwi clue we'd missed, that she was a hooker. He also spent quite a bit of time explaining where the "bad parts of town" were. Anyway, he seemed to take quite a liking to us. He and his wife know some director of New Zealand soap operas, who is stationed in Auckland, and they said they'd have us all over for drinks or dinner sometime soon so we can profit from their connections. They were both almost weirdly nice... to us.
After that B and I were torn between liking the apartment, liking the idea of living below industry people, and a sneaking suspicion that they were... not the best. Luckily, everything was sorted out after we saw the next place.
To preface this next bit, as Brandon and I were headed over to the West coast he said,
B: How about we just decide to take whatever place we see next?
Me: Okay.
Now, anyone who knows the story of how we got to New Zealand in the first place will recognize that the conversation was fairly similar to that. So, here's how it went:
We drove up to the place (2/4 Hawea Road) and I immediately loved it. It was in a very normalish part of town, with kids in the yards and nice streets. The house immediately seemed lovely. Inside was extremely clean and put-together, and it was the most spacious place we'd looked. And it was the cheapest place to boot! $220 NZD per week, including water (and potentially internet). It's a 15 minute walk from the coast, with a vegetable garden in the backyard, and trampoline, and a lovely family that we're renting from. The thing that was nagging at both B and me was the idea of those potential connections from the other couple, but we both had such a good feeling about the Hawea apartment, and it was in such close proximity to a market called "Organic World," that we decided to take it. We looked at one other sort of dingy place, which only furthered our determination to take the place on Hawea, and then we headed back there to put down the two weeks rent.
So, we got to talking to our new landlords over a cup of tea (catered to us by their adorable daughter Eleanor) when we learned that the man (Jay Dwyer) works in theatre here in Auckland. As a matter of fact, one of the people doing set changes for the Opera got sick at the last minute, and while we were there signing the papers he was making a few calls to people trying to locate a replacement. We told him we wanted to get into the industry, that we'd produced some small-time theatre in Los Angeles, that I was a writer, that Brandon's an actor, that we both have theatre degrees, and we both would LOVE to work in theatre in Auckland, and he said that we could come in someday so he could "put us on the books"... whatever that means.
At that point it was almost 4PM, and we were looking at a car shortly, and we'd each only eaten a banana all day, but we went back to the hostel, met with the car guy (Grant), drove around in the stick shift, which Brandon took for a somewhat tentative test run, and then put down a deposit on the car. The guy was going to get the back windows looked at (because they don't work at all), so he and his wife drove us home. He, too, made some weird comments involving racial stereotyping, which made Brandon and me a bit uncomfortable. They seemed nice enough... to us.
So now here we are, looking up used furniture auctions online, learning how to drive manual cars, starting to turn our attention to our glaring lack of employment, and generally pooped out... in the very best sort of way.
Love to all,
Brandon and Jenny
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