Today is a day for chilling and catching up with some administrative housekeeping. We have successfullys let one of our flats – quite a feat when we are on the other side of the world – and there is some paperwork to complete, sign and send off to our recently ensconced tenant. There are postcards to catch up on – ones we bought over a week ago when we were in Rotorua. It’s when we come to post them at the NZ PostShop we find out that there is more than one company provide postal services and the stamps we bought with the postcards are not NZ Postie Shop stamps and the cards have to be posted in a blue postbox a couple of streets away.
Another quirky thing about NZ is the provision of internet services. Download speeds are very slow and way behind anything available in the UK. Internet access is very expensive. Monthly subscriptions are over NZ$100 a month (£35) compared to around £18 in the UK and access at holiday parks (and internet cafes) can cost up to NZ$9 per hour compared to SE Asia where internet is widely available hostels, hotels and cafes free. Even more bizarrely internet services on the holiday parks (and possibly elsewhere) are provided by a number of third party companies who act as an middleman between the parks and the service providers – which must go some way to explaining the high charges. Using the internet at different parks can mean having several pre-paid accounts running simultaneously which can start to get complicated!
Phrase of the day: ‘Merge like a zip’ seen at the point where roads changes from two to one lane.