A Friendly Test

So, unwittingly, last night I put New Plymouth to the friendliness test. I went out to get some groceries and accidentally left the car lights on! There's no warning alarm beep so I didn't notice they were on. I was in there maybe about fifteen minutes and came out to a flat battery. I had left the phone at home - which may not have helped much anyways since between Dustin and I there's only one phone and one vehicle. I asked someone if they had jumper cables but they didn't. I walked across to a gas station and they didn't have any either, but they really wanted to help there. I walked to another gas station and the guy went digging through the back room to find the jumper cables, even though they had some for $40 and he could have easily just suggested I buy them. He didn't even ask for a deposit or anything and I walked back to the car park. I asked two people for a jump - one said he was in a hurry and the others had one of those Toyota Hiace vans and it was a work van so they weren't sure how to get to the battery (the motor is under the front seats in those vans.) I was standing there with the hood open, holding the cables and waiting for someone else to drive in or to leave the store and then a station wagon pulled in, only got a car length past me before backing up and coming around to the front of the car. Turns out the fellow is a mechanic so he had me hooked up and running in no time! So, all told, it probably was only about fifteen minutes from me noticing the dead battery to it running again. Not bad in my books. I can't remember the last time I needed a jump in the Lower Mainland but I definitely remember Dustin running out of gas on his motorcycle and me needing to help him - the gas station wouldn't even let me take the little gas can without leaving my credit card. And I remember last year when we got back we stopped to help people who ran out of gas right near the Guildford library and that Chevron would only sell them a gas can but not let them borrow one! They told us they were waiting half an hour for someone to stop. Anyways, I was definitely frazzled but I didn't freak out and I didn't even call Dustin. I was mostly worried about it starting again before morning so that he could still get to work.

But unfortunately yesterday just felt like one of those days for me. Not being able to find work is starting to wear me down. At least in Melbourne there were heaps of jobs I could apply for - and sure I got little response but at least I felt like I was doing something. Here, I've signed up with the agencies that do administrative work but there isn't even one job per day on the job sites that I can apply for. So many of them are permanent positions of course and our visas forbid accepting permanent work. (And I've tried seeing if they are open to making it a temp thing but not so far.) Next step is getting out by foot to hand out resumes and it's been a while since that's how I've applied for jobs so it feels like some kind of step backwards. I might get there next week. Let's hope not!

I took the car yesterday and found some interesting stores at least. We are having people over for dinner tonight - our hosts when we first arrived in the city - so I needed some things for dessert: apple crisp. Since we've been spoiled with impossibly low-priced goods in Canada, a lot of things seem kind of pricey so I found a bulk store to get all the things for the apple crisp topping since they aren't all everyday things we'll use a big bag of while we're here. Now, I think if we lived here normally we might not think it's expensive because we'd be used to it since a lot of items need to be imported or they are produced here by people earning reasonable wages. (And maybe if I was working I wouldn't be too worried about the cost...) Plus
since it's winter, produce is of course at the (hopefully) top end of the pricing scale. Some examples of the prices are potatoes for $2.99/kg; bananas for $2.99/kg; capsicums (peppers) for $2 each; cucumbers for $2.49 each; avocados for $2.68 each; and well things just go up from there but we'll avoid things that are super priced up (ie. a $4 head of lettuce.) So I'm sure we'll see those change but I did find a shop with much cheaper produce in an area about a 5 minute drive from our place. Maybe it's psychological and we're just used to prices being per pound so they seem lower. In other products, decent wine is like $6-9 a bottle so it does kind of even out haha. But even with trying to get our car serviced - the lowest priced oil and filter
change we've seen is $160 (and ok our car takes about 8 L of oil but again, we're used to a $40 oil change!) So we're just trying to work out if we can do it ourselves - which will still cost about $100 for the oil and filter. We have to figure out what to do with the used oil though and see if we can borrow a socket set or something. Since it's a Nissan, it's similar to Dustin's old black truck under the hood. As much as I enjoy the fact they don't have Wal-Mart here (or at least I don't think so, not in this town anyways) it does work out better for the consumer's bottom line sometimes.

Dustin went out for a surf the other night! He got home from work and it was blowing offshore so we hurried to get things together and drove a few minutes to the surf beach. There was at least about 20 people out there and although it was pretty chilly he got in. He tried without booties and a hood and he said it was just teetering on needing his boots so next time he'll wear them. Since there's about an hour of daylight left when he's home from work (the sun has been setting around 6 or 6:30pm) he was just out for a short time. It was pretty big and I even watched a guy get barrelled! It was a small barrel but still! The view of Mount Taranaki was gorgeous that night but I didn't bring the camera. I still think I'll need a daytime intro to the surf since I'm finding the breezes are still pretty chilly even though some days it can get up to 14 or 15 degrees. I'm sure I've surfed in cooler or comparable conditions back home but that breeze is cold! The walk to the car was pretty cold Dustin said.

We went out on Sunday for a drive to Oakura. It's about 15 kms from the city and there's lots of surf beaches down there. However it was a windy day and the ocean was a washing machine. So we got a glimpse of the country side - yep even within a few minutes of driving you see livestock and green fields. We had lunch at this bistro where they have a Costa Rican chef we were told so there's a pretty good Latino menu there. Oakura is quite small and seems to be mostly residential with a couple eateries, a gas station, surf shop and a few other shops. I'm sure it gets pretty packed through the warmer weather. Most of the beaches in this area are black sand rather than golden or white. But we'll get all sorts of that further north once we're on the road again.
They don't use craigslist here really but their main trading website is more of an ebay/craiglist cross. The items for sale are all on auction but there's also job and housing postings. So I've been bidding on mobile internet modems and a soft rack to put the surfboard on the roof. It will be a bit more convenient to have internet at home. Dustin hasn't been on his email in like a week since the library closes soon after he's home from work and it's only open late one night per week. I'm just curious to find out how much data things use like browsing websites and whatnot. We already know that streaming video and video chatting will suck up the data like crazy so we'll have to stay away from that. But things like someone emailing us a photo or a document will of course count as downloading so it'll be interesting to see if we are able to keep it to 512 MB in a month. If we just use the first level of data it costs $30 per month but the next one is $60 and up from there. It's a shock considering we were last paying $15/month for unlimited high speed internet.

So it's September now and it feels like it's been much longer than 3 weeks since we left! I guess I should cut myself some slack on the job hunt when I see that time frame. It's just hard to compare to Dustin who has already been working a week and a half! Anyways, I have some cleaning and baking and cooking to do today! So I should get to work. Dustin tells me not to worry even if I don't find work here at all but I can't handle being at home all the time. I mean he gets cabin fever within hours but it takes a couple weeks for it to set in with me I think. Maybe if I had projects around the house or something... or at least a well-stocked kitchen... I'm sure I'll only have to wait another few days before something comes along!