Ok guys, this is my first unreserved recommendation! If you come to Auckland, you HAVE to go to Tiritiri Matangi! The ferry is 1h30 each way and return costs the equivalent of £35. The whole island is a bird reserve (again with no pests, vermin etc.) and is just bursting with birds! There are little wooden walkways that wind through the trees and forests, arching over the little streams. Amazingly, there were no mosquitoes! I suppose there’s too many birds eating them.

I saw two different types of parrot and so many birds that I have genuinely lost count. It was really magical – blue skies and topaz waters then thick forests teaming with all these bright birds. And it was just so much fun to walk through it spotting them all! I have to say that I didn’t spot that many – good job my friends were much better at it!

I think words really can’t say how awesome it is … you’ll have to come visit me and try it for yourself! 😉 You can also stay overnight and if you do that you may well see some wild Kiwis (this is now on my Bucket List).

In the afternoon we went snorkelling in the bay and there were fish two foot long with bright blue fins and spots. AND I saw a jelly fish that was the size of my hand! In the shallows, when you opened your eyes under water (and I can tell you right now that prescription goggles are an absolute game changer) you could see that the waves were full of all these tiny weeny jellyfish smaller than my little finger nail, settling on my arms and legs and swimming around me! (they don’t sting by the way). Sadly I don’t have any pictures of the underwater stuff and that is a real shame as there were some amazing things.

So, a lot has happened since last week. I set fire to my fume hood in a big way (that was yesterday so pretty big in my mind at the moment!), went to life drawing, did some volunteering and in general made the most of the change in weather for the better.

Since “The Incident Of The Fire” I’m now a bit less confident that I’m on the right career path! But I suppose that if A-level has told me anything it’s that I can not get put off from chemistry by a little fire (or big fire, as it turns out) and I’m sure that after a relaxing weekend I’ll be raring to go again! To answer the FAQ’s I am enjoying my PhD so far apart from that, my fellow PhD’s have been really supportive and nice (and real demons with the fire extinguishers!) and I am completely unscathed (apart from my pride). I am sure that I will have filled out more than one incident form by the end of my next three years.

The most exciting news since last week is that I have bought a  small tree for my room! Unfortunately for me I misjudge the times with the busses, so came out from the garden centre with a 2h wait for the next one. Luckily though, I had my back pack and the pot just about fitted inside so I was able to get back home with my tree and big bag of compost I bought for the hour and twenty hilly walk. I’m glad I did it as I now have a tree! I am never doing it again.

I went to the Drink n Draw that I mentioned before. For $20 I got free pizza, several glasses of cider and … a nude model! I had thought when I signed up for it that we would be doing landscapes, or maybe a bowl of fruit. Nope! It wasn’t really full of very serious artists which is lucky because part way through he did a lying down pose which reminded me of that bit in Titanic where she goes “Draw me like one of your French girls Jack”, after which I couldn’t stop giggling whenever I looked at the model. Who knows if I’ll be going back? Probably if I need a laugh!

Tomorrow I’m going to do some conservation work on some of the volcanic islands in the bay – tree planting and weeding etc. which I’m quite looking forward to. I’m hoping to see some great birds which I’ll hopefully take pictures of, although apparently it can get very hot with the sun reflecting off the lava fields so we’ll have to see how it goes . Also, I found out that they have wild possums in the parks here! Apparently they only come out at night so at some point this week I’m going to do a night time walk to go possum spotting! Hopefully I’ll have more pictures for next week!

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This is a Sunday-evening edit after coming back from the volunteering on the island.  We landed on the volcanic island of Rangitoto, which is an island reserve where no rats / stoats / mice etc. live, meaning that flightless birds such as the Kiwi still live and thrive in the wild! After all bundling into the back of a small truck we bumped and jolted our way along a dirt track across the island and causeway onto Motu tapu. The planting was hard work but enjoyable and I was really rewarded when one of the regulars beckoned me over to see a real wild Takahe! They’re native, flightless birds to New Zealand and a lot bigger than the photo does justice to. As you can bet I was really excited to see one in the wild in its natural habitat as the conservation work I was doing was all to help restore and protect its habitat which has been destroyed over the years. They were actually thought to be extinct in the early 20th century which somehow makes it even more exciting when you see one in real life now. It’s so awesome when you get to catch a glimpse at what your working to protect!

I was amazed at what these volunteers have managed to do. They started in 1994 planting trees and now a lot of the hills and valleys on the island are covered in forest. Imagine being able to look at a forest and say “Yeah, I made that.”.  I think I am a very small cog in a very big machine!

Hey all!

Ok, so it’s official – I love fencing! That’s now going to be my weekly Wednesday thing. It’s good because it’s not as strenuous exercise as I was fearing (not yet at least!), it’s mostly about foot work at the moment, being able to stretch and bend in the right way and keeping your sword in the right position. I felt fine during the lesson but the next day (and even the day after!) my arm was aching like crazy! I’m sure once it really gets started I’ll be struggling!

I’ve also joined an archery society and will be starting lessons in the next few weeks. All I need is horse riding and then by the time I come back after 3 years I’ll be a medieval bad ass! Well, that’s if I actually get good at any of these things which I kinda doubt!

I’m gonna learn to dive too which should be pretty fun – I’m sure I’ll be kept busy!

My first week and a bit of work is done and I’m enjoying it a lot! The people I’m working with are great – really friendly and helpful. At the moment I’m spending my time trying to make a compound that will be used in some biological tests to test out a hypothesis one of the biologists has about how one of the enzymes I will be targeting works. It’s really handy for me as it means I get to find my way around the lab and do my reading in the first few weeks to prepare myself before really discussing with my supervisor the details of what I want to do for the next three years.

As ever there’s a few differences working in this lab compared to ones I’ve worked in before but the main one (at least for those of you reading that went to Southampton Uni) is that WE DON’T HAVE TO DO COSHH FORMS!!! (Basically, we used to have to fill out forms on the health and safety, what we’d do in the event of a fire or spill etc. for each toxic compound we’d use (which was practically every one)). Here we just have to read that stuff, but not copy it out into our books for each experiment. This might seem like a small thing but it saves HOURS and means I’ll be able to get a lot more done which I’m really happy about. On the down side, ordering chemicals can take ages. I didn’t really think about it before coming here but of course, it has to cross quite a lot of ocean and some of the things are too dangerous to come by plane. Apparently the longest wait has been over a year!

I had an impromptu introduction to Kiwi sweets last night. I was chatting with with my housemates at dinner and they mentioned some sweet that I hadn’t heard of that apparently struck them with horror. So we all walked down to the supermarket to buy their cookies, Squiggles, hokey-pokey, Groovy Gumdrop icecream, weird coconut squares whose names I’ve forgotten, TimTams etc. I gotta say, the Squiggles were pretty good.

Less photos in this post because it’s been raining a fair amount (and I’ve been at work rather than out exploring 😉 ) but hopefully next weeks post will be a bit more colourful.

So! Not only do I have a room, I have also got a bed! Rooms come pretty much universally unfurnished here so for the last week I’ve been buying furniture and putting it up (somehow I seem to have had at least one screw left over for every single item of furniture I’ve put up…). Their bed sizes are different over here (something I didn’t know), so I’ve bought a “King Single” which is longer than a double bed and much wider than a single in the uk. It’s the perfect blend between giving me loads of room, and not making my bedroom seem too small 😉

I haven’t quite finished decorating yet (you know how much I love plants!) and I have a trip planned to the garden centre this weekend to hopefully pick up a cheap indoor tree 😀 Unfortunately, as I lost my drivers license when I lost my wallet I can’t hire a car so I’ll be bringing it back by bus. For those of you that doubt me though, never forget that time in Belgium when I cycled a good forty minutes home uphill with a 4ft palm tree in my bicycle basket! When it comes to buying plants that I don’t really need I can become surprisingly determined and perform athletic feats I would never dream of doing normally!

In the spirit of exploring the local area I went to one of the beaches not far from my new home (30 mins by bus – 5 if I had a darn car!). I hadn’t realised that the beaches would have so much volcanic rock! All the cliffs are bubbled and pitted with holes like a sponge and beneath them the sand shimmers like black glitter. It’s a shame that it really doesn’t show up well on camera just how glittery it is! There were also weird things on the rocks and I can’t decide whether they are fossils or living sea creatures … what do you think?

I’ve had 2 days at work now. The other PhD students in my group seem awesome. We went for drinks after work on Friday and one of them brought the cutest dog ever – half poodle and half springer spaniel! A dumpling shop has also opened on campus selling some of the nicest dumplings ever so my lunches have been great for the last two days! Dumplings and sushi and other Asian food is really cheap over here which is awesome for me! Car insurance is also pretty cheap, but dry shampoo is mega expensive!

I think next week I’m going to start joining societies in earnest! Tomorrow I am going to go to a tree-climbing society meet up! I used to love climbing trees as a kid but then I was always great at going up and terrible at going back down. It’s going to be kind of epic to join a society where they teach you to climb trees properly, and you never know – it might come in handy if I’m ever chased by wolves! Then Wednesday I’m starting fencing (it’s $10 a night which seems pretty awesome) and Thursday there’s one for painting and having beers which seems pretty much right up my street.

I’ll let you guys know how it all went next week!

I HAVE A HOUSE!!! It’s been kinda stressful finding a place so I cannot understate how happy I am!

As you will have no doubt seen on FB, last Friday I decided on a house and so toddled off to the bank to get out $1000 (bond, deposit and first month’s rent). On the way from the bank to the house I wanted to look at I left my wallet on the bus (only realising 40 minutes after leaving the bus when I got to the house) but fortune was smiling on me (or so I thought) and my application was accepted even without the deposit.

Roll on to Tuesday when I go to the place to sign (or so I thought) but there were four of us there (and only 3 rooms to rent). Weird. Turns out he hadn’t decided and we were all there in sort of competition. When I got back that night, he rang me and said he wanted to put the price up $30 a week and he was assuming I was still ok with that. I wasn’t. :p

But after some more frantic searching I’ve found the perfect place! It’s me and three other nerds (but the perfect sort of nerds, into star wars and lord of the rings and board games but ALSO into BBQ’s and beers, walks and weekends away). The commute is a little long (40 minutes door to door) but the bus is all along the coastal road and the bridge over the harbour so it’s beautiful views of the sea and volcanic islands. It’s even $30 a week under budget so in celebration I’m buying a bed!

Now just need to sort out buying bedding and pillows and the rest of that jargon. Plus none of the houses round here seem to have furnished bedrooms to rent so I’ve had to buy a load of furniture – you can call me the Queen of Flatpack Cupboards! I’ll do another post showing you my house once I have everything set up in a few days time 🙂

It’s been so crazy hot here in the last week that I almost envy you your winter (I said almost!). It was 34 / 35 here today and that’s not so bad compared to how humid it was! I feel like I’m suffocating! Luckily though, apparently this is not normal and the Kiwis have been complaining about it too – thank God as I’m not sure how much I’d enjoy this on a permanent basis!

Now I’ve had a bit longer in Auckland I’ve been able to properly look around and it really is a great city. There’s so much beauty surrounding it in the countryside that people often seem to miss the awesome stuff in the city itself. Luckily I’m new so everything seems awesome to me, and I’m enthusiastic to explore all the local parks. The picture below is taken from the summit of Mt Eden, one of the fifty-odd volcanoes that make up the city suburbs. From the top I saw the city scape just littered with all these green hills that I hadn’t quite realised until now were dormant volcanoes. Kind of awesome right?

I just want to show you a few pictures of Waiheke island (40 minute ferry from the city centre). To call this place beautiful is to give it an insult! Yorkshire is beautiful, this place is a shard of heaven! To think that this is just a £9 ferry ride away!

The island is lined with crescents of sandy beaches and studded with vineyards (it’s where a lot of good NZ wine comes from apparently). They also have a kind of sea bird I haven’t seen before.

We also have these cool black and blue birds. I’m not sure what they’re called yet (I’m totally going to have to buy a book or something) but they were all around the park and apparently are really common (everyone seems a bit bemused by how enthusiastic I am getting over their equivalent of a dove or blue tit). It’s a bit like the excitement when you go to a new region in pokemon and discover new species you hadn’t seen before, except it’s even more awesome and exciting as it’s real life!

Yes, I can see myself being very happy here…

 

 

 

 

 

The flight from Singapore to Auckland went very quickly. I have to confess that I fell asleep pretty much as soon as we finished our accent, and woke up two hours before we landed, so it felt like the flight took about the same time as to get to Rome! It was pretty darn awesome too to be greeted by a giant statue of a dwarf lord in the    arrivals hall! Immigration was a lot easier than I thought it would be (though soooooo slooooow) and it wasn’t long at all until I was at the Airbnb and able to shower.

I gotta say guys, this. is. AWESOME! Just on the taxi ride from the airport I saw loads of trees I hadn’t seen before, AND some strange birds! That said, I did spend a good ten minutes this afternoon watching the beautiful fluffy grey bird that I’d never seen before, only for it to turn round and reveal itself to be a small pigeon with its feathers ruffled in the wind. I’ve rather started to doubt my ornithological knowledge after that.

I’ve been here three days now and I’ve got my phone contract sorted (yeah, please don’t text my English phone because I won’t be checking that sim very often), bank card, bus card and enrolled on the course (yaaaay!) but still no house.

The housing market here is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, it’s so fast! I emailed an add 48 minutes after it was put up only to get a reply back that they already had 20 people booked for viewings and weren’t taking any more for the moment! Luckily, as I’m not working yet I can just sit in a cafe overlooking the harbour with a beer and refresh my screen every half an hour. I’ve had one viewing and got three more tomorrow so with any luck I’ll have found a place by next week. One of the places even has a dog <3

I’m particularly keen to move out having found that the Airbnb I’m staying in doesn’t have a lock (on my bedroom door OR the front door) so I’m having to carry everything of value with me everywhere I go. It also doesn’t help that when I was taking photos of the sky yesterday evening, my Airbnb host pointed out all the local drug dealers in the alley and told me not to go out after midnight as the criminal gangs congregate there and it isn’t safe to let them see you. Next time I probably will be suspicious if I see an accommodation so conspicuously cheaper than anything else, but to be fair I haven’t actually had any problems.

I haven’t done much sightseeing yet (unless you count going to all the different residential areas) so you’ll have to wait for more pretty pictures.

Auckland is a beautiful city though (apart from the one dodgy bit where I am 😉 )! It does have some very busy roads which I like to try and avoid, but it has a huuuuuge park full of a lot of trees I don’t know, and the harbour is nice. Ferries to the local islands are pretty cheap too (ranging from £4 – 20 return) and I plan to visit a few of them next week.

Right, I’m update you in the next few days, as soon as I’ve found a house. Most places are unfurnished too so I’ll need to go bed hunting. Any tips are definitely welcome as I’ve never done any of this before!

 

 

 

 

 

So to pick up where I left off, I finally managed to get my suitcase closed after a bit of juggling, and headed off to the airport. I had promised myself that I would keep my British Stiff Upper Lip and not cry but I failed somewhat and as I went through security one of the guards actually had to come over to me and ask if I was OK!
But I heeded Remus Lupins advice and a big bar of chocolate later and I was ready to go again! 

The flight was really good – I love those A380’s! With a good book I can read until dawn anyway so staying up wasn’t too tough.
I arrived at 7 pm their time, just around sunset, and was through security about 15 minutes later. I have to say I have been super impressed by how easy everything has been! It really has been a doddle, even travelling on own.

I decided that it was probably best to grab some food before bed so in true tourist fashion I set out into the monsoon in my shorts and t-shirts looking around for “a likely looking place”. I had a really tasty bowl of brown (beef? with … ginger? Maybe?). In hindsight, I should probably have looked up places to eat before I arrived.

Singapore is really pretty by night but I have to admit I didn’t want to wander to far from the hotel on my own. So after a quick poke around I went to bed and had a beautiful 7 hour sleep.

Less fun, was walking to numerous texts from the Airbnb guy I was meant to be picking my keys up from in New Zealand (Where are you? I’ve been waiting.) and poor Kelly who had given up her Sunday morning to come pick me up from the airport (are you through immigration yet?). I forgot about crossing the date line … not my finest hour! Easy to see why I didn’t choose to study maths at uni!

After that was sorted I hopped into one of the tourist busses and had a nosey. I’ve got to say that Singapore is a weird city, in parts of it you feel like you’re lost in a forest of skyscapers that go on forever, so close together that the streets become quite dark and the sunlight really has to fight to reach you at the bottom. But a lot of it is so green, and you might imagine you weren’t in a city at all.

There’s also a lot of different cultures, little India (where I was staying) had a lot of Hindu temples and markets selling saris and incense and the streets smelt of spice. But then China town was completely different, kimonos and dumplings and those annoying waving cats. I think I preferred China town to little India (where people seemed to think that you could substitute leaning on your horn for obeying the rules of the road), but the gardens by the bay was my favourite bit! It was a lot more relaxed and peaceful and those giant trees are really something.

My flight was at 9.00 pm so I left the city at 6 for the airport. I would definitely recommend Singapore for a stop over; it was easy, broke up the journey and one day was enough to see a lot of the city    without wearing yourself out.

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve decided to start this blog so that my friends and family can keep up with what I’m doing as and when they feel like it, and also to use it as an opportunity to address any questions I get asked a lot from people in each post so I don’t keep repeating myself 😉

Friday evening I’m flying to New Zealand to start my new life (for the next three years) researching the design and synthesis of a drug that will hopefully be able to kill Tuberculosis when in it’s latent form, i.e. before any symptoms have arrived. Approximately a quarter of the worlds population has latent TB, with 5-10 % of them going on to develop the disease if it is untreated. So the PhD is in a really cool area of research with the potential to help millions of people if everything works out perfectly (which in scientific research, is never the case)!

So to answer the question that a lot of people have been asking me, I am not moving to New Zealand just because the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, although, if I’m honest, that was probably a good 30% of my reasons. But the opportunity to work on a really cool project that I can get excited about was just too much to miss out on!  If everything goes perfectly then I’ll be doing something that could potentially save millions of lives all over the world, and if it doesn’t then I get to have a working holiday whilst experiencing a totally different part of the world. Plus, there is so much geography there! So much to see! Sulphur fields and volcanoes and sharks and Hobbiton!

I have to say, getting a bank account organised has been a lot easier than I expected. I’ve sent them proof of my address here in the UK, scans of my passport, my offer of Scholarship and filled in a really simple form and it’s done! I just need to pop into a branch with my passport when I arrive to pick up a card!

I haven’t got accommodation sorted yet, I’ve got an airBNB for the first two weeks and then I’m sort of winging it. I’m figuring that two weeks will be enough to try sort out the house viewings and find somewhere kind of nice to share, especially as I don’t start work until the 1st of Feb.  I’m hoping the house will be somewhere within a 30 min commute to university by bus, and preferably around NZ$200 a week (~£110, not including bills). Yeah, rent is kinda expensive round there compared to home, but at least it will be cheaper than Switzerland was!

I fly Friday at 22.05 pm, arriving in Singapore 13 hours later at 19.00 Singapore time. Plan is to try stay awake through the flight watching box sets then when I arrive, go straight to the hotel and get a good nights sleep. My next flight doesn’t leave until 20.50 so I’ll have plenty of time to explore Singapore, especially with the help of one of those Hop on, Hop off busses. It’s monsoon season which I’m quite excited about (I’ve never been in a real, genuine monsoon before!). Then, it’s only a 9 hour flight to Auckland (about the same as we had driving to visit Anthony (my brother) in the Alsace. Fingers crossed I’ll get some sleep on the flight, as I’ll be arriving in Auckland 11.45 am. Luckily for me, one of my Professors at Uni has moved to Auckland himself this Christmas and his wife Kelly has been really super kind and offered to give me a lift from the airport to my airBNB.

So that’s you up to date on my plans. I’ve had a really crappy cold for the last week so annoyingly haven’t got as much done as I would have liked, re seeing people to say goodbye. So if I haven’t seen you or have been a bit slow replying to messages, sorry about that! From now on I’ll be starting to pack (and possibly panic) and trying to fit as much home food and cooking in me as possible! It’s a little inconvenient going straight into summer and bikini weather 2 weeks after Christmas but at least if I don’t look my best, it’s not as if anybody will know me! >:D