A Change of Planaka (May 31)

Howdy there! So if you've been reading our previous posts, you'll know we've spent the past few weeks in Wanaka, looking for housing and employment for the winter season. On most measures most people would say we were successful, as Becky got offered a ski resort job and we found a relatively cheap place to stay. However, under the surface it wasn't all peaches and cream in Wanaka, and we found ourselves questioning whether we really wanted to stay there for the season. As a result, we're coming to you from scenic Oamaru at the moment, en route to Christchurch and perhaps Blenheim in the top of the South Island for a few weeks. Why? I'll tell you why.

First off, our housing situation in Wanaka really wasn't that good. Though we were just sharing a house with a mother and her teenage daughter, they kept the place a fantastic mess. Dirty dishes, dirty clothes, cat food, and other debris littered all corners of the house, with little prospect of getting any better. Our erstwhile landlord kept promising to clean various things for the week we stayed there, but besides the heap of trash bags making it out of the kitchen nothing got better. Trust us on this one, it was bad, and our impartial friend Rachel marveled that we stayed there as long as we did. And I'm not a stickler for ridiculous levels of cleanliness; this was worse than my fraternity house in college. Becky had a pained look on her face so often in that week that I'm just glad her face didn't freeze like that.

As we mentioned before, housing's incredibly tight in Wanaka, with the rooms wanted to rooms available ads ratio running at about 4:1 in this week's edition of the local paper. In other words, we were extremely unlikely to find much else available, so we felt like it was either a dirty place or no place in Wanaka. We felt slightly bad bagging after only a week there, but our landlord was able to find new tenants within 4 hours of us leaving, as she let us know in an angry text she sent us this evening, charming.

Second, though Wanaka is a beautiful and charming town, there really isn't much to do there if you're not working or skiing. Having made the rounds and learned that the local businesses wouldn't be doing any hiring until late-June at the earliest, we were faced with the prospect of sitting out another 3-4 weeks in the dirty house until we could find gainful employment. There's only so many walks around the lake and trips to the small library that we could take before going nuts, and we were feeling dangerously close to that limit only a few weeks into our stay in Wanaka. Becky's actually lucky that Treble Cone offered a job as quickly as they did. In what can only be described as a terribly incompetent and callous maneuver on their part they kept one of our friends in employment limbo for nearly three weeks before texting her to let her know that they wouldn't be offering her a job. There really is no excuse for it; hiring people to take tickets at a ski resort isn't exactly rocket science.

Third and most important, Becky's sister Marie and her boyfriend Alex just let us know that they will indeed be visiting us here, and will be arriving on precisely the day that Becky was slated to start at TC. They were unable to come at any other time, as they'd been working on their doctorates until now.. With people coming to the other side of the world to visit us, we figured we'd rather tour around with them than say "Sorry, we have ticket-taker orientation today, enjoy the walks around the lake." So we woke up today and made the perhaps rash decision to bugger off from Wanaka and get some temporary work (maybe on the vineyards to fulfill our self-imposed fruitpicking commitment?) until they arrive in a few weeks. If nothing else though, it gets us out of the house!

Thus we're in Oamaru with Rachel, who was also ready to make her escape from Wanaka and was eager to go along with our quickly-conceived escape. We went to see the blue penguins tonight, which was actually really pretty cool. The penguins come out of the water each night to climb onto the beach and walk to their nests in the bushes in the cliffs right off the beach. It's a pretty comical sight to see a pack of little penguins waddling up the bank, honking and quacking all the while. They're cute little buggers (1 foot tall, 2-3 pounds), though they smell awfully like bad fish. Tonight was a full moon, which seems to put penguins in a particularly amorous mood, as the bushes erupted in a cacophony of honks and shrieks as we walked back. Funnily enough, a group of penguins also appears to live in a garage next to our hostel in downtown Oamaru, as we found when we walked past on our way home. Where else can you find penguins living in an alley but New Zealand, fantastic!