Happy Birthday, Mum!

First off, happy birthday, Mum. I hope you have a great day! The card is in the mail, I'm just not sure how long it will take to arrive from here.

I'll tell you one thing, I'm glad we decided against moving to Auckland. The traffic is mental. At just after 4pm this afternoon as we got the bus home from the city centre the traffic was already queued up all over the place. Having to spend an hour a day each day each way in traffic for work would get too much for me quite fast, I think. Sure the tube in London is hot and sweaty and packed but it works (most of the time) and means you don't have to endure traffic jams. Traffic would get tiresome rather fast.

So yeah, we went to town today and spent hours traipsing round one bank after another tracking down all of Joanne's many and scattered bank accounts changing the name on the account to her married name. But at least it's done now. We just have to decide which bank to use for our current account once we start getting paid. And who to use for savings accounts. And who for credit cards...

We also went in to the AA building and got forms for me for converting my UK driving licence, got Joanne's expired driving licence renewed, joined me as an associate member to Joanne's AA membership and also bought me 'The Road Code', the Kiwi version of the UK's Highway Code, so that I can swot up before my driving theory test that I have to pass to get an NZ driving licence.

We also had coffee, muffins and lamb shawarmas.

We nipped into Vodafone to check out mobile phone packages while we were passing too. And then Telecom. We thought they were the only two options. As Telecom don't do sim-cards it means there is actually only one option. Talk about a monopoly. So, if we want to get NZ sim-cards to go in our phones we have to go with Vodafone. And, as you might be able to guess, no competition means it's not cheap. Also it seems the guy in the shop reckons Vodafone has just got rid of their bottom three tiers of gprs data access packages, meaning the minimum level is 200MB a month, way more than I'd use. The Vodafone website would beg to differ, however. It's most confusing.

Being out and about Joanne and I also took the chance to check out cars as they drove past. We were thinking of a Mini for the city run-around, but we now realise they only do 2-door models. And we remember when we had the Hyundai Accent what a pain it was at times only have a 2-door car. So the Mini idea is perhaps out of the window. Discussing it last night we thought about maybe a new-model VW Beetle, or perhaps a Ford Ka. However, it seems, judging by today's empirical observations, that both of those only come in 2-door flavours too. Pants, eh? So now the current thinking includes a VW Golf, a Mazda 3 or a Honda Jazz (following in the footsteps of Matt & Kazumi, Derek & Phong and Davin & Irene!) We'll have a look around once we get to Chch though, and take a few for a test drive or something.

One thing that amazed me today, being out and about in down-town Auckland, was what a high percentage of people there were of Chinese decent. It seemed every second person, especially of those under 35, were either Malaysian, Singaporean or Chinese. I had heard all the stories about the number of young people from these countries coming over here, but it still surprised me to see it today. I don't know why, but I always imagined the NZ population to be mainly Maori and European in origin. In Auckland, at least, there's more to the jigsaw than two pieces.

Finally today, there's bad news on the work front for me. I had gotten impatient waiting for my ex-boss to get back to me regarding that spreadsheet project he had said he'd put my way so I emailed him last night. I got up this morning to find an email from him saying that his partner in the project has discovered that there may well be interal expertise capable of building the spreadsheet model they need after all. Oh well. It was a nice idea, I guess.