More Woofing and Job Hunting

On the other hand, I got a call from a lady that operated “Two Souls Bistro.” She had called me two hours previous to getting the other job and asked if could “work that night at 6 PM?” l said yes, and had a wonderful experience, and continue to work there on Friday and Saturday nights, possibly more soon. Two Souls is similar to the Rosewood café on Sundays except more on the dinner side, and is owned by a fantastic Malaysian family. Every shift you are fed a delicious meal, and it is GOOD, and they foster a very happy, non stressful working environment. On busy nights, you are often given either a fancier meal such as steak, or a treat, like a beer! Last night was super busy so we were all encouraged to choose a beer from the fridge at the end of the shift and enjoy it while we continued to clean and close the restaurant. James was co-worker who has worked there only six months and on Monday (3/15) we went out to “Yum Cha” to celebrate his upcoming trip as he leaves for the UK. Cherry, my manager, does this with and for every employee, and says herself that she likes treating her employees as extensions of her family. Now that is an atmosphere I can live with. ☺ Oh yah, and my third weekend there I was given a raise without even asking for one. Double bonus.

The good thing was while I was getting these jobs, we were still able to balance that with wwoofing in order to keep our finances intact. During the second week of wwoofing, we continued to work on the room next to the garage, John built the chicken coop, I gave the house as spick and span cleaning, turned over the compost and we fed and watered chickens and ducks. Here are Conrad and John building the back door to the coup (which is in the back right of the picture):



Our lives were made more eventful by the arrival of another wwoofer: an American named Becky….



Becky is not to be confused with her friend and Marian’s, Laura Hautula (’01 Bellermine Grad/ XC runner). Becky helped with the woofer tasks, contributed to our job searching ideas and hung out with us.

By the end of the week John’s job prospects had improved. After feeling slightly defeated by not getting an interview at a Thai restaurant and having Starbucks repeatedly deny his applications he had an interview at a bakery and potentially had a trial shift at Wellington’s top fine dinning establishment (a little fact he was unaware of at the time of turning in the application), The White House Restaurant.

During the weekend, I continued my shifts at the Two Souls Bistro and John started looking into finding a place to live. The house search was difficult. Finding a cheap ‘flat’ that allowed a temporary lease of 8 months proved to be as difficult as finding an employer to hire us. Due to this and general financial concern, we decided to find 1 place to live. After John visited 6 places, the thought of finding fun, normal roommates seemed hopeless. This was after the 50 year male IT professional who felt it was necessary to not button his shirt showing off a nice hairy chest/belly and the OTHER 50 year old male IT professional who liked to wear short shorts, a shirt that did not fully hide the belly that needed to use the ab circle in the corner (https://www.abcirclepro.com/) while the children ran around out of control (note both gentleman had requested roommates in their late 20s or early 30s on their adds…kind of creepy I know). So the search continued.

Sunday we continued to look at 2 more places. The first had an angry girl in the corner that must have disliked foreigners or thought they stunk because she glared at us the entire time we were there. The second was clean, had 3 nice girls who seemed like they could be fun and a good price.

Sunday night we went to an outdoor music event in Petone and saw a few bands play. The Adams were running their coffee cart as well.





By the end of the night the kids were pretty tired. Here's Bella sleeping as we packed the cart up at the end of the festival.

Marian’s African Goods Experience…

After the first week, I had obtained an interview at an African goods store. Count on me to find the most random work in Wellington. I applied for the job because the advertisement said they needed a barista/sales assistant. The following day I went in to introduce myself to the manager. The following day I got a call to come in for an interview. During the interview I was told that they were hiring a store manager to run the operations of the shop. I said I would not be here an incredibly long amount of time considering I only had a working holiday visa that would last until January. I was then told that perhaps the position would be part time and flexible for me instead, and they would continue to look for a manager. I arrived for my first day and things went fine. My boss lady gave me a stack of discount vouchers which were good for one free coffee, and told to go advertise them to people on the street and that hopefully, I could “get 100 new people in there” that day. I did as was told and at four o clock, boss lady called to see how the day went and asked if the shop was slow enough for me to go home. I said it was and she allowed me to leave then.

Returning for more work the following day, I was told by boss lady we (the staff and boss lady) would be having a small meeting. This is when the madness began to ensue. Boss lady basically went on a two hour “female not nice person” session. Ten points if you can figure out that last sentence. We were told the day previous was the worst day of her life and the worst and slowest Sunday we had ever had in the history of the business. The business had been open six months and we still weren’t making enough money to support the rent, we had horrible customers in the day before, she is so sick of people telling her what great causes she supports and not buying one thing and going down the street and spending $400 on a facial. She needed ideas and needed them now about how we were going to make this place survive. She proposed these questions to me, another sales assistant, her personal assistant and her accountant. We offered some suggestions, but my nerves were pretty racked after that meeting. But the most disturbing part was that my free coffee vouchers that I had been given away should have been distributed with this offer, “With this voucher you will receive 10% off your first purchase and a free coffe.” Hmmm……I was only told to get 100 new people in the door, and that the vouchers were good for a coffee, not to mention that there was nothing to indicate on the voucher that they were good for 10% off! My doubts were continuing…..

All day I was therefore very nervous as boss lady would come out and watch us interact with customers. She had told the other sales assistant that he was too friendly, and I thought he did a great job, so I felt nervous to try anything other than, “let me know if you need any help” with everyone that walked in the door. I spent part of the day looking for web designers in Wellington to help us get our retail stuff online, and told her I would report back with a list of my favs, we could narrow down her favs from those and then I would call these people to set up appointments or obtain quotes. At 3:00 I emailed my list to her with my favorites highlighted. She asked me to come in for a meeting and I was told that she didn’t think I had the experience she needed for a store manager and as her marketing manager.

WHAT.

At this point, I was nearly ready to turn in the towel. I just was a bit nervous to do so, since it was one of two jobs I had gotten in the last few days (I’ll tell you about the other shortly). However, that night mama and papa Ladenburg came to the rescue by calling and we all decided that she was CRAZY, and I promptly called her the following morning to resign. She called me back and sounded very relieved that I was resigning so she could then go search out a more qualified store manager and marketing manager that could prove to her in less than 12 hours that they knew how to save her business and run her store. GOOD RIDDANCE.

Wwoofing in the Hutt, Baby

We are so sorry it took so long to get this blog about whats been happening for the last month, but here it is in all its glory! So we arrived into Wellington on February 10th, and camped the first two nights in a park just outside the city, and in a top 10 site. Pretty uneventful – an uncommon event in John’s life occurred as we spent many hours in the library! We were busy looking for work and trying to pay my credit card bill.

On the 12th we arrived dirty, tired and hungry at the foot of the doorstep of Wendy and Conrad Adams. Actually, we met them at their shop in nearby Petone. The dynamic duo own a cheese shop that serves espresso as well, and also a coffee cart that they tote around and sell wonderful coffee from called, “Espresso Rescue.” If you know me, you would know that coffee + Marian = pretty darn happy. Needless, to say, we went back with them to their house that night to have a wonderful fish infused paella and shared some sparkling wine. Altogether, an incredible meal and sleep after living in a tent for the previous month, and mostly eating pasta and salads; I was pretty excited when I got to go to the restroom in the middle of the night without having to cross the lawns or step out into the night cold! Here are their businesses:


Henry the son (the boy in the blue) is in front of the cart begging for money for a 'roti'. Yes parents children behave the same everywhere.



Just a quick reminder: WWOOF is an acronym for Willing Workers on Organic Farms. In exchange for food and accommodation, the Wwoofers (us) work for the hosts for an arranged period of time. In our case, it was Tuesdays through Saturdays 9 – 1. As we found out later, these are pretty good working hours for Wwoofing.

The day after we set up shop, we woke to find their son Henry ready to show us and take us to the weekend market. Our task was to find Conrad at the coffee cart to obtain funds and shop around for that week’s groceries. Conrad, not being used to our need for specifics, just told us to buy whatever is in season, fresh and local, and hopefully cheap! Not knowing what is fresh or local, or what the family consumes on a regular basis, we felt like we were grasping at thin air. So we made a few purchases and evidently did “okay.” The rest of the daily tasks were to basically keep an eye on Henry while Wendy and Conrad ran their respective businesses.

On our days off following (we arrived on a Friday night), we explored Wellington a bit and continued to look for work on the local craigslist/ebay type site trademe.co.nz. We both basically looked for work in service industries in cafes, restaurants, etc. We were able to meet up with our friend Justus that first week, who had been in Wellington for roughly a year and a half. He let us know some tips on finding work and good places to live in Wellington. As far as our wwoofer duties went, we did things like add grass clippings to the compost, turn over the compost, hose down the pathways in the yard (which routinely collect duck and chicken poo), weed, cut down a fig tree, help out in the shop and coffee cart, and help get a room ready for demolition adjacent to the garage. The Adams call their wwoofing experience “urban wwoofing” because they don’t have a big farm, but a few veggie gardens, a greenhouse, some fruit trees, ducks and chickens for eggs, and compost. At nights we enjoyed getting to know the family and asking them about how things are done in kiwiland, and getting to enjoy some really nice food.

At the end of the week was the Jackson Street Fair. Wendy and Conrad’s shop happened to be on Jackson Street and we helped serve Ice Cream to all of the festival goers. Here is Marian serving the local organic ice cream with Conrad…



I also started these series of books, the Millenium series, which are quite addicting murder mystery novels and the family and John had a good time poking fun at my obsession. I had to have Conrad check the book out for me at the library because I was so involved!

Sorry its been so long! More tomorrow!

Hello again!

Let me just say that we are so sorry we have been neglecting our "followers." Truly, that makes me feel happy to have people writing me about the blog (Joe, my mom, Jet, Steph, Mary and Steve). We are sorry we have kept you waiting so long.

However, right now it is LATE. I just spent all night watching TV - can you believe it? We are finally settled in (sort of) in Wellington. I just basically used part of tonight to allow my brain to go on braindead while I just relaxed and did nothing. I intended to write the blog, but you know how these things go.

However, we are both doing well...healthy, happy, roof over our heads, food in our bellies and jobs! Yet I am tired, and will have to write all the news from basically the past three weeks tomorrow. Just know that we are safe and miss you all very much. Looking for work while wwoofing and finding a place to live has taken a lot of our time out of our days and being in stationary places in not nearly as involved as traveling non stop so there is not a whole lot to tell, but I will write more manana. Until then, besitos and I hope you are all well!

Back to the North Island (won’t be blogging for a little while)

After walking around Picton for a little while today, we took the ferry and arrived in the North Island. Marian had signed up as to WWOOF (willing workers on organic farms), which provides food and accommodation in exchange for several hours of work during the week. Marian had written a host about 10 minutes outside of downtown Wellington who owned an espresso cart and made cheese alongside of having a garden, a greenhouse and a few animals. She and her husband have two kids. Anyways, long story short she found out that Marian was traveling with her boyfriend and said that having the two of us would be great, so we are staying with the family starting on the 12 while we look for more permanent work. They sound like a great family, so we are looking forward to it! Marian hopes she can help with the espresso! Actually at this point, free food and accommodation – she’ll do whatever!

We will be working Tues – Saturdays from 9 until 1, and then using our free time to job search. We promised her a stay of at least 10 days. Please keep your fingers crossed that we will find some good places soon!

From here on out, our blog will be much more sporadic. Essentially, we will write when we have something more exciting to tell about, or a weekend trip, or an observation. First we need to get jobs and places to live! We will have our hands full with that. However, if you would like to hear from us or want a call, just write an email and we will be in touch. We love you all and hope you have had fun reading so far! We will keep you posted! Oh and one more picture for Marian's dad: Hoff, Marian wanted you to know that your 20 year old sweats have been all over New Zealand and she wears them all the time! Here she is showing them off.

Kaikoura to Picton

Today was our last full day in the South Island. We were very sad. Seems as though our plans never to work was all just a big fib we told ourselves! No, we thought about it and all this traveling can actually be pretty wearing! Moving around a lot, toting your house and groceries and pots and pans. So we are actually pretty excited to find jobs in Wellington and get settled in with hopefully some fun people up there.

So first we drove up the coastline and were just amazed at how beautiful it was. Its like if the Northwest had big forests that met the Carribean. The beach wasn’t necessarily white sand – but deserted and still pretty nice. Here is a picture of a beach we saw on the way up.





Then we stopped off at another Seal Colony. This one was the best one we have seen because there were all of these babies playing in one of the rock pools! It was cool to see them scooting their bodies all over the place and flopping on each other. Here is great video of what we saw....to be posted later when John can figure things out.

Across the street, we did a short walk out to this waterfall.



The coolest part about this waterfall though, was what we heard from another lady who happened to stop by as we were leaving. Evidently, when the fur seal pups are born, the mothers actually cross this highway and snake their ways through all of this bush to have their babies there and teach them to swim and such! This is quite remarkable considering that the waterfall is about a 10 minute walk from the highway (which borders the coastline). The lady said that in the early spring (November time frame), she came out and saw the babies playing and that they will shimmy their way up the rocks and dirt and dive off the side into the pool! Marian can’t imagine what that would be like to see, but it sounded pretty wild.

Then we headed into Marlborough Country again, which is famous for its wines. Here is where Marian thought of a lot of my Ladenburg relatives and how they would want to be there (particularly Aunt Kathy, Uncle Jim, Uncle Cory, Aunt Nadine.) We were a little timid to try wines because we didn’t want to buy any. However, it became pretty obvious as we went through that people could pretty much care less if we bought something – they were happy for the exposure, and we thinks they seemed pretty confident that we would buy stuff later on. We went to Montana (which goes under a different name in the States), Mt. Riley, and Te Maera Wa. Marian’s personal favorite was a sparkling savingon blanc at Mt. Riley – was SOO good. Actually, the lady there was awesome – told us when we could get it on sale at New World (grocery store) for a better price than her employee discount! Here is Marian tasting wine with her (no staging I promise.)





Oh and one John, because we always want more pics of him



All in all, we had a much better time in wine country than we thought we would. We arrived safely into Picton at another holiday park. While making dinner we struck up a conversation with a guy from Liverpool, UK. He invited us to watch a “horrible” British soap opera in the next room called “Courtney Street” or something along those lines. He said he would be the one cringing in the corner. He was fairly hilarious, as were the other individuals from the UK and Ireland in the TV lounge with him. They all took turns making fun of the show, and we talked with them for a few hours. Then two of them, who had been in Picton a few days, asked us if we wanted to see the glowworm colony. We followed the couple up a little trail once it got dark to see the glowworms. We had a running joke about glowworms because they are advertised nearly everywhere in the South Island but we had neither paid to ever see them, nor ventured out at night to a place where they might be. We felt it was our last major tourist thing we needed to do in the South Island. So there we were. Glowworms! They are pretty cool looking – reminded of never never land or something! On the way out we spotted a NZ opossum! There are 80 million of them in NZ and a big threat and pest control problem! However, the NZ opossum, we have to say, is much cuter than the oversized rats we have at home. You will have to look up a picture on your own. We were shocked that it was such a cute looking predator/rodent, and the guy from Liverpool told us a funny story. Evidently, when he was camping somewhere else with his girlfriend in the South Island they ran into some guys from Denmark, who asked him if he had ever seen the big cats in the New Zealand. The guy from Liverpool had not, so the Denmark guy got out his camera to show him. Evidently, there had been some drinking going on the night these pictures were taken. The guy from Denmark showed him pics of himself holding an opossum in each arm! Later in the film, there were ones of him sleeping with them cuddled up and so on! He kept telling the Liverpool guy, “He was like a big monster! But SOOOOO soft! I kept petting him!” and the Liverpool guy was just shocked and said, “I was like ‘yah, they are actually quite dirty’ I mean I couldn’t believe I was seeing this guy showing me pictures of himself cuddling up with a rodent!” So pretty funny night.

Kaikoura

We decided to treat ourselves with breakfast out and went to a beach house café. Because we are top ten holiday park members we get 10% off! Here is a picture of John outside the café looking goofy (according to him), looking fine according to Marian.



Marian ventured to the I-site and much to our awareness discovered that a lot of the tourist activities were out of our price range. Our price range at this point, pretty much being whatever is free. : ) We had gotten tips from the Scottish couple that the whale watching (something Kaikoura is famous for) tours are good, but they only really saw the whales back and fins for about 10 minutes of the entire tour. There was also swimming with Dolphins, but we had taken care of that in Akaroa! So we opted for a scenic walk/hike instead. Along the way, we ran into a lot of “fur seals,” which are actually sea lions. We felt bad for them though because the tourists were sort of getting in their business trying to take pictures….idiotas! There were signs all around to maintain your distance, but nothing was registering. Anyways here is pic of one.



We walked around the Kaikoura peninsula which was very scenic – it was great. We saw egrets and imitation penguins (also called shags), as well as some wildstock poo! Fantastic.







Back in town, we need sustenance. See, we hadn’t eaten a ton that morning and figured that we would be okay until a late lunch. Not the case, we were very worn down. So we were able to get to our cooler and have some apples, laughing cows, crackers. Marian saw a seagull regurgitate its food to either its baby, or just a really good friend I guess. Then Marian bought a coffee (the first that Marian has seen that is made the same way in the states – filtered, not espresso), and John bough a lime raspberry milkshake. We made dinner and used the internet before calling it a night. Here is John walking to the city at night..



We started watching another creepy movie called “the happening” but said enough to those shenanigans pretty quickly.