The Mighty Tasman

On Wednesday, after leaving Hanmer Springs, we made the 5 hour drive to the Tasman Bay. We went directly to our friends, Mark and Janja's house. There was much we wanted to do in the 4 days we allowed ourselves to stay in Nelson. Firstly, we wanted to catch up with Mark and Janja and see their new baby Felix and give Elinor playtime with Felix's older brother Lucio. We caught up; Mark and Janja live in a lovely comfortable renovated settlers' cottage in a very hip corner of Nelson. Mark is a quite clever and involves himself with curious projects that I'm never quite sure of but he pulls them off very capably. He recently modified an old unused ringer washing machine into a pizza oven. I was skeptical when I first heard about this idea but when I saw it, and watched it cook, I was impressed. And hungry.

Janja is a thoroughly over-educated homemaker and mother who was very happy to see Elinor and Sara again. The two of them are sympatico and their time together was wonderful to observe. Through their stalwart dedication to family diet, we actually ate pizza in Mark's beautiful pizza cooker, instead of just standing and gaping at the unorthodox oven.

Felix is a beautiful baby with a shock of orange hair and his big brother is wonderful. Lucio is 4-years-old and plays very nicely with other kids. A rare gem and a fantastic respite for Elinor who had been suffering from living in our Invercargill home. The last week of living on Venus Street, with a house that was quickly emptying, and spending a few nights with our friends Sarah and Phil in Otatara, was a lot of disruption in Elinor's routine. We were glad for Lucio and glad to be with friends for a few nights, instead of another hostel accommodation.

On the weekend in Nelson we went to visit our landlords when we lived in Mapua. The Waddell Smiths became our friends during my six month secondment to an electrical contractor in Motueka. Now, however, we had something new to share. In May I bought a $50 ukulele with a dolphin bridge.

I played it everyday until I knew 10 chords and 3 strumming patterns. I fell in love, not necessarily with the ukulele, but with learning something new. I felt the same when I was learning new concepts and successfully applying them in my electrical apprenticeship. I feel similarly now studying a new language-- although I also feel fear and anxiety because I regularly have to perform Hebrew in public to meet the most basic of needs. Before we left Invercargill, I invested in a ukulele that sounded nicer and looked cooler than my light blue Makala ukulele.

Ukuleles

The Smith Waddells had a number of ukuleles and even belonged to a ukulele group. Their repertoire, however did not include the many gems that my Invercargill uke group like to bring along to bash through. We spent five hours playing through 'Wagon Wheel,' 'Teach Your Children,' 'Jolene,' 'House of New Orleans,' 'Jamaican Farewell;' we swapped music and had far too much baking. Roger and Adele cook infrequently but their daughter Briar is learning to bake. Adele, however, was the chief cook and we had a beautiful pumpkin soup with a gorgeous loaf of bread. We sang songs and drank champagne until I was hoarse and the floor was covered with tunes and ukulele's as we swapped music and tried everyone's ukuleles.

By the end of the weekend we were exhausted from our 'respite' and we had time for a last dinner with Mark and Janja, Lucio and Felix and our friends Gerry and Nadia and their boy Kingston. A very sad goodbye to our friends in the Tasman district and me looking in the rear view mirror reluctantly delivering my family to the ferry crossing and our last week in New Zealand.

***

First Bath in the Homeland

Before leaving for Israel, we were accepted into an absorption program through the Jewish Agency called 'First Home in the Homeland.' When we landed in Israel we learned that there were a few options available for us; three kibbutzim that housed families making Aliyah. We visited a gorgeous kibbutz situated right on the Kinneret. A beautiful view, but at a cost. We would be living in a very small space, with less than a kitchenette for cooking and one bedroom. The Ulpan was in a neighboring town, there was no dining hall and no work on the kibbutz. The people we met there we very friendly and encouraging but as we had options, we decided we'd better learn what they were before we moved into our first home. The next two kibbutzim were neighboring kibbutzim and really the biggest selling point was one had a similar living space to the Kinneret kibbutz and the other had a caravan.

We opted for the caravan. It has three rooms, a middle size room with shared kitchen/living/dining and two bedrooms. It was also moldy, had a cracked bathtub, filthy top to bottom, needed painted and smelled funky. After visiting Kibbutz Revivim and deciding on making the caravan our first home, we waiting while the kibbutz maintenance painted the walls, sealed the bathtub, treated for mold and fixed leaks.

Meanwhile our 'first home' was a Coleman 4-person tent in Sara's mother's backyard.

First Home in the Homeland

How I am like a Gorilla. With commentary.

2 weeks prior to immigrating. Balancing.

The last week of July we left Dunedin. After a tearful goodbye with my parents we piled into our wagon and made our way as far as Timaru for a night's sleep before Tuesday's big adventure. I moved our luggage into the backpackers, and I sat and played ukulele until Sara reminded me that other people in the world may not like to hear me singing "Teach Your Children." For dinner we ordered a pizza and watched Eli explore our first of many- Many- one night accomodations.

Our pizza (Domino's, not that it matters, as all American pizza outlets in New Zealand are similarly void of everything that makes America great) was undersized and greasy as usual, the leftovers sat at the table at the foot of the bed while Sara and I read books to Elinor until she fell asleep. We stayed up and watched something on the laptop and them tucked in for the night. The next morning, we were out of the campground and Timaru by 9 am. We had a schedule to drive the length of the South Island in 4 days and we wanted to fill our time with hot springs, animal parks and a last weekend with some of our friends we had made when we lived in New Zealand.

Around midday we stopped at Willowbank Nature Reserve in Christchurch. New Zealand has zoos, but really they do the nature reserve thing more often and it's a real feature from town to town. Willowbank is probably New Zealand's best nature reserve. The walk through aviary was large and had keas. Apart from tramping around Fiordland and the parking lot of a ski resort, I had never seen keas outside a bird enclosure.

It was a little intimidating and I kept wanting to stand between the curious clever birds and Eli-- who chose that moment to eat her lunch leftovers thus driving the ornery parrots crazy.

They had an enclosure for kiwis as well. I'd never seen a live kiwi. Before we made it into the enclosure, a Japanese tour group accosted us. Three of the Japonourists approached Elinor, taking pictures and saying things like, "Herroo Kid! You a veri coot keed. Herro" They were cute. We stood there and tolerated them, the Japanese are very polite about their idiosyncrasies and didn't hold us up for long. When we made it into the darkened enclosure where they kept the little fluffy national icons, the tour group was occupied with their close encounter with the nearly blind whisker-beaked flightless bucket of thighs that we had time to give Eli her own unique 3-year-old meets captive wildlife experience. It was special.

After a few hours at Willowbank, we were back on the road in our Holden Commodore family wagon, that rode so low I had to detour around any street with a speed bump, on our way to Hanmer springs.

Hanmer Springs

Our room at the backpackers was a 2 minute walk to the Hanmer's "thermal park" (which is New Zealand for hot springs). It's a water park/thermal spas/restaurant/massage parlor. Kinda a warm aquatic masseur kiosk in a way that only New Zealand can do.

Eli swam and swam and rode on my back in the warm mineral water. And then I took her over to the play equipment and accidentally (well I did it on purpose but I wasn't expecting what happend) blasted my toddler with a tepid torrent of water park canon fun that was not in the least bit fun for Elinor. She erupted into tears and feeling extra thankful that Sara wasn't standing beside me whenI turned the over-sized novelty faucet on full bore on my little girl, I picked her up and asked her if she like to try the water slide. The one with a pool of water at the bottom. I put her on my lap and with a practised "Wheeee" we slid down and I remembered a physics lesson about water displacement and how it was relative to the dimensions of whatever was placed into the water. The amount of water displaced at the bottom of the slide was about that the same dimensionsof my daughtersif she was a gorilla 4 times her own age.

A 12-year-old gorilla

Which means I created a 12-year-old-gorilla size wave that took Elinor from apprehensive mistrust to vehement desire for mommy. NOW.

But not before we tried out the Hanmer Springs' man-made Raging Rapids attraction.

She was fine. Really she was. She may have hated me to the core of her understanding of her fledgling emotional development but hey, kids have a poor memory as long as they get distracted quickly enough. Or if Mommy takes them.

Dinner that night was at a Thai restaurant where Elinor threw a thoroughly disturbing tantrum, ate less rice than a Buddhist Priest near Nirvana, and Sara and I both left way overfed, painfully overfed in fact, and more than ready to tuck into bed.

***

Starting our lives over was never the intent when we decided to move to Israel. As much as our odyssey to the airport and ports beyond Aotearoa seemed like the finish --even in memory it feels like an interlude between two separate experiences-- we kept on with our family life. We sold our home and finished jobs, said goodbye a lot and also 'nice to have met you' which felt kinda weird. But as a persons existence is only measurable as the sum of their experiences, I can't say one life ended or that another began. The string of experiences is contiguous and each day, here as it was in NZ, is different.

Sara is working for the kibbutz in the Dining Hall. We've settled into a caravan on a Kibbutz in the Negev. My language class picks up on Sunday. One thing keeps on following the next. Never has any of this living stopped and started.

The Kibbutz is a wonderful place for us. Apart from the gate, and the fence and the moat, there is a dining hall, a cinema, onsite medical and dental, a laundry service, a 'zoo,' library, market, and childcare. Recently Elinor had her first full day at the Gan (kindergarten) on the kibbutz. Slowly, Elinor is acclimating to an 8 hour day, 5 days a week, 6 hours on Friday. Poor thing. Sara and I are, naively and unwittingly at times, putting her through trauma I expected her to go through in another year or more. She's been amazing.

Elinor eatimg a Sponge Bob ice cream at Kibbutz Revivim

Aliyah.

In the days and weeks to follow, this blog will be updated.

You see, I know people. Not a lot of people. Enough though. Enough for a web log to need updating. Enough for me to correspond my last 3 months in a few picture studded essays.

I recently immigrated to Israel. Recently. This morning. By 12:30 a.m. I had an Israeli National Identity card. My identity is as an Israeli 'Oleh Chadash' or new immigrant.

Previous to arrival at Ben Gurion airport, my family and I were hurtling through the air at a 300 million kilometres an hour, approaching the speed of light and an experience similar to the boat seen in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Well, not quite. Retrospect isn't 20/20 for me, retrospection is like a good fiction. Like a Philip K. Dick book, but not the crappy ones were you'd think you were reading the erotic memoirs of an astronaut on mescalin. I thrive on bullshit retrospection.

We came from Invercargill-- our home in New Zealand-- with 123 kg of luggage in a Holden Commodore wagon. Through Dunedin, my parents current hometown, through Nelson, Wellington, to Auckland via Taupo and Raglan.

Our last weeks in Invercargill, we experienced daily tears and hugs goodbye, farewell dinners and parting gifts. We spent 3 weeks travelling. Three weeks of bittersweet goodbyes and too many pleasure-to-have-met-you's. 21 days of meeting and departing over and over. And now. Now is all I have to truly access these memories-- the now of relief and regret, the now of remember and remittances. Last minutes and spontaneous fun.

I hope to hear from many of you, via whatever media you wish to send. Though I'd prefer electronic and am very open to skype, though check the time zone first.

Speak to you soon, audience of family and friends.

Sun, Beach and Smelters

So today is warm and rainy, a predictable epilogue to the nearly 5 days of sunshine we had in a row that is affectionately referred to as the Southland Summer.

I've been unemployed for 3 1/2 months-- preferring to think I was self-employed while renovating the house and getting it ready for sale-- and now I'm starting a job at the smelter as a maintenance electrician. I'm happy for the extra positive cash flow but I'm a bit nervous about shift work after a long break from working.

We made use of the good sunny weather yesterday and drove out to Omaui beach. I've put in some pictures to illustrate the frivolity that was enjoyed. The sand, where the tide doesn't reach, is very fine and promptly after Sara applied sunscreen and insect repellent to Elinor she had belly flopped into the sand and came up looking like she was dusted with cinnamon and sugar.

The water was still too chilly to swim in but Eli enjoyed splashing around in the soft lapping waves. That only lasted until a sandbar 30m offshore disappeared underwater, then there was nothing keeping the lapping waves from becoming greedily licking lips of the growing tide. Eli was starting to get tired and we decided to come home after a couple hours of play and a bite to eat.

Eli got out another animal costume from the Toy Library over the weekend. This fortnight we'll have to live with a little crocodile. Her bed is crocodile themed as well, now.

The home sell process has been relatively stress free, no serious offers or interested parties, but it's been nice to see the house look like a show home. We still want to paint a few place and put some more gravel down in the back garden, but we trying to think of ways to market our home where gardeners and sustainability seekers would see it. I was thinking of putting up flyers on supermarket skips to appeal to freegans, or putting subtle little brochures in the seed packet displays at gardening stores.

We got a new camera, FujiPix something. It's decent, and our old one had a scratch on the lens and was taking blurry photos, so we needed something functional. The clarity's nice and there's a bunch of settings that allow me to be the r-tard on holiday that wants to take a million night photos because my camera has that setting. Love being 'That Guy."

I received a letter today saying the I'm approved for New Zealand Citizenship. The ceremony will take place sometime in the next 2-3 months. We're waiting to hear about our Aliyah process, we're not sure when/if things will happen on that front.

Hoping everyone's well and looked after.