The bedroom - complete with 'his and hers' wardrobe areas! Nice.
Tuesday, May 30
Living area from two angles - on the far left of the second photo you can see the bedroom door. As there is no bedroom window, the walls do not go right up to the ceiling - odd, but it does the trick for letting light in. These Kiwis can be cleverer than they sound! There's a small balcony behind the curtains you see and another opposite where I am sitting - lucky us being on the end as it means we have two al-fresco areas!
Hello all! I apologise for my extreme sloth in respect to updating the blog, I have no excuses other than the fact that I couldn’t really be bothered. But here I am at last again, with - finally - some good news (better even than the fact that we were sorting rubbish). So here goes.
Right, we got back to Auckland after a week up north in Whangarei (where we had thought that Nick might have a chance of a job, but it turned out that the guy wanted someone with far more experience, despite advertising for a new graduate). The day after we got back to the big smoke, I went in to register with a temping agency. They found me work pretty quickly, but also introduced me to their healthcare jobs rep, for when my registration came through. And whaddaya know, the very next day I heard that my registration had indeed been granted. So on the phone to the agency guy, and before I knew what was what, I was temping at the Yellow Pages, as well as having an interview for a temporary physio post. They offered me the job, and after having spent two weeks photocopying, entering numbers into a database, and a lot of letter-folding, I started at Waitakere hospital (in the western suburbs of Auckland) doing what appears to be my inadvertent specialist area - elderly rehab. Great. But the important thing is that it is physio, it pays better than photocopying, and I am there on a month-by-month basis, so as soon as I find a paediatrics job I can leave. I am actively looking for paeds posts, and have a couple of things that I am waiting to hear back from, so hopefully I should be looking after kiddies rather than grannies very shortly. The post at Waitakere is fine, nothing very dramatic, but the nurses are really friendly (and much better than many nurses I have worked with in elderly rehab in the UK), even if the therapy team is not that thrilling to work with. I think they are all having some difficulty adapting to my sense of humour - they didn’t seem to be very amused when I started reading out all the “masseuse” vacancies from the local paper the other day (prostitution is legal here), and saying that if I got fed up of the 45-minute bus journey to Waitakere then I might just start “massaging friendly gentlemen” in town, as it would pay up to $14,000 a week and I was sure that my physio qualification would come in handy. So after that amusement debacle, I have mainly stopped talking at break times. I think it’s best.
And the other major news is that we finally are living in static accommodation! Yes, Nick found us a flat while I was Yellow Paging and we have been living indoors for two-and-a-half weeks now. We are still revelling after all that time in having power, running water, walls, flat surfaces… I could go on for some time, in fact listing pretty much everything in the whole flat, as all of it was a bit of a novelty after four months in the van! But not only do we have all those mod-cons (and not-so-mod cons, given that walls have been around for a fair few years, even in New Zealand), we are 10 minutes’ walk from the very centre of Auckland, 5 minutes’ walk from a very desirable suburbs with lovely cafés, restaurants, bars and shops, and near the motorway for easy getaways at weekends. We are hopefully going away for a couple of nights this weekend as there is a long weekend here for the Queen’s birthday, and we feel ready to be with the van again after a break for recovery on all parts!
So the only thing lacking is Nick having a job. He is still finding it hard to find a place that wants someone with less than three years’ experience, but has a meeting this week at a practice that is literally a minute’s walk down the road and we are hoping that something may come of that. Once Nick has a job and I am not granny-bashing any longer, we will be 100% sorted! All of my patients appear to literally have been falling apart today - one was found to have a broken leg, and one a broken neck (no word of a lie, her head is actually not really attached to her neck at the moment), so I have spent most of my day strapping and bracing people up! Hopefully when I get to the kids they won’t havebits of bone falling off them so much…
So, hope you enjoy the photos of our new pad and look forward to hearing from you all with your accommodation bookings!
Lots of love to all for now.
V.
Right, we got back to Auckland after a week up north in Whangarei (where we had thought that Nick might have a chance of a job, but it turned out that the guy wanted someone with far more experience, despite advertising for a new graduate). The day after we got back to the big smoke, I went in to register with a temping agency. They found me work pretty quickly, but also introduced me to their healthcare jobs rep, for when my registration came through. And whaddaya know, the very next day I heard that my registration had indeed been granted. So on the phone to the agency guy, and before I knew what was what, I was temping at the Yellow Pages, as well as having an interview for a temporary physio post. They offered me the job, and after having spent two weeks photocopying, entering numbers into a database, and a lot of letter-folding, I started at Waitakere hospital (in the western suburbs of Auckland) doing what appears to be my inadvertent specialist area - elderly rehab. Great. But the important thing is that it is physio, it pays better than photocopying, and I am there on a month-by-month basis, so as soon as I find a paediatrics job I can leave. I am actively looking for paeds posts, and have a couple of things that I am waiting to hear back from, so hopefully I should be looking after kiddies rather than grannies very shortly. The post at Waitakere is fine, nothing very dramatic, but the nurses are really friendly (and much better than many nurses I have worked with in elderly rehab in the UK), even if the therapy team is not that thrilling to work with. I think they are all having some difficulty adapting to my sense of humour - they didn’t seem to be very amused when I started reading out all the “masseuse” vacancies from the local paper the other day (prostitution is legal here), and saying that if I got fed up of the 45-minute bus journey to Waitakere then I might just start “massaging friendly gentlemen” in town, as it would pay up to $14,000 a week and I was sure that my physio qualification would come in handy. So after that amusement debacle, I have mainly stopped talking at break times. I think it’s best.
And the other major news is that we finally are living in static accommodation! Yes, Nick found us a flat while I was Yellow Paging and we have been living indoors for two-and-a-half weeks now. We are still revelling after all that time in having power, running water, walls, flat surfaces… I could go on for some time, in fact listing pretty much everything in the whole flat, as all of it was a bit of a novelty after four months in the van! But not only do we have all those mod-cons (and not-so-mod cons, given that walls have been around for a fair few years, even in New Zealand), we are 10 minutes’ walk from the very centre of Auckland, 5 minutes’ walk from a very desirable suburbs with lovely cafés, restaurants, bars and shops, and near the motorway for easy getaways at weekends. We are hopefully going away for a couple of nights this weekend as there is a long weekend here for the Queen’s birthday, and we feel ready to be with the van again after a break for recovery on all parts!
So the only thing lacking is Nick having a job. He is still finding it hard to find a place that wants someone with less than three years’ experience, but has a meeting this week at a practice that is literally a minute’s walk down the road and we are hoping that something may come of that. Once Nick has a job and I am not granny-bashing any longer, we will be 100% sorted! All of my patients appear to literally have been falling apart today - one was found to have a broken leg, and one a broken neck (no word of a lie, her head is actually not really attached to her neck at the moment), so I have spent most of my day strapping and bracing people up! Hopefully when I get to the kids they won’t havebits of bone falling off them so much…
So, hope you enjoy the photos of our new pad and look forward to hearing from you all with your accommodation bookings!
Lots of love to all for now.
V.
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