Expat Life: New Zealand: Welcome to New Zealand

"It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone, to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist."

-John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

I married my best friend and fellow adventurer a few weeks ago in Georgia, United States. Josh and I then left our friends and my family to travel to Costa Rica for our honeymoon and then on to Josh's home country of New Zealand. It is here that I begin this photo/travel blog to record the adventures of this new chapter of my life from underneath the Southern Cross, surrounded by Pacific ocean and snow-peaked alps.

We arrived a week and a half ago to Timaru, New Zealand, a town of about 27,000 people. I grew up in Jakarta & Manila -a city of 12 million and recently lived right outside Atlanta -a city of 8 million. I attended the University of Florida for the last three years and its population was around 60,000 students. To say I have entered another world would be an understatement. I live in a house with one bathroom and four boys, my husband and his three best guy friends, three boys I have grown to love as brothers over the last few years. Our street is at the edge of town and at the end of our street are beautiful cliffs that drop off into the Pacific Ocean. From the living room window, New Zealand's Southern Alps line the entire horizon, freshly topped with snow from this week's storms. Across the street from us is a pasture full of cows, steer and sheep whom Josh and I have had the pleasure of meeting -and running from on a few occasions. It is quiet here, except for the quacking of Steve and Allen, the boy's pet ducks and the occasional faded screams of pigs from the slaughterhouse up on the cliffs.

The light is magically different here and I cannot figure out why. Perhaps it is the fact that the ozone layer is thinnest over New Zealand or perhaps it is because we are at the bottom of the world, our closest neighbors Australia and Antarctica and a few lonely islands. There is something about the light and the clouds here that make me feel like I have walked into a wardrobe and out into a dreamland Narnia.

This is a country where you hang your clothes on the line to dry, you learn to chop firewood to heat your house, you don't have to worry about snakes or bears or any predator animal at all and you are guaranteed the majority of the year will be cold. I have been here five times, although this is the first time I will be here longer than two months as I am on my way to residency, but I have yet to see a gated Pleasantville-like neighborhood where every house is the same like every other neighborhood I have lived. Nothing is the same here, everything has age and personality and individual craftsmanship. The only Western companies here are McDonalds, KFC, Dominoes and Starbucks -but even they are not on every street corner like in America. There are mom and pop shops everywhere, little hole-in-the-wall fish and chip shops who serve fish and chips the right way: beer battered, chicken salted and wrapped in newspaper. The tap water is not only drinkable but glorious. As someone who spent most of her life drinking purified water in fear of disease, I bask in the ability to drink straight from the tap.

The earth rumbles constantly here, the earthquakes are fierce and the aftershocks are frequent. The city of Christchurch is only an hour and a half from us in Timaru and driving passed the fenced off parts of the CBD is devastating, knowing that so many memories lie in what was once our favourite bars, clubs and shops and is now rubble & graves. The love that has surrounded Christchurch after every quake astounds and warms me, I have felt a part of this place since I first visited with my family when I was nine years old and it makes me so sad to see what has happened to that beautiful city and its people. Fortunately, the fault lines lie beyond Timaru and will hopefully not affect us too much besides the occasional minor rumble.

I am here on a 12 month working holiday visa and will hopefully have residency in New Zealand at the end of this visa. In the mean time, the job search is both hilarious and without reward because I am neither a milk-harvester, calf-rearer, carpenter, farmer nor escort. It will be interesting to see what work I pick up in this crazy little town but mostly I am excited about getting my photo business off the ground and running and seeing what becomes of it.

As I type this it is 4:30pm and 48ºF (9ºC) on a wintery Thursday evening in July. I am watching the sun set over the snowy alps from the warmth of a blanket on the couch while I anticipate Josh's work truck speeding up the driveway. He comes home from work covered in cement, mud and/or fiberglass most days after a long day of being a foreman, building million dollar homes for a well known building company. He has this incredible creativity that rises from beneath his skin and his eyes light up whenever he gets a brilliant idea. He is the single greatest adventure of my life thus far and over the years has lead me to the child-like revelation that there really is that one person in some corner of the world that shares the very same soul that you do and believes in every single one of your dreams like they are his own. He reminds my entire family of the greatest man we've ever known, my late grandpa Jim Stowe. They are both builders, carpenters, innovators, wonderful husbands, dreamers and blue-eyed gentle giants with tender calloused hands. Sometimes I think the powers-that-be lifted my grandpa Jim from the earth in order for fate to lead me to a man just like him. To put into more poetic words how my wanderlust and Josh intertwined and changed my life when I first met him at eighteen years old in a crowded house party in a town of 4000, twenty minutes away from where I sit at this very moment, here is an excerpt from the amazing book I am reading right now.

"The best kind of travel-the kind I wanted to experience-involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one's life changed forever by a chance encounter."

-Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents by Elisabeth Eaves

Needless to say, these first few weeks of marriage, airports, airplanes, Costa Rican beaches and my new life as an expat in New Zealand have been a fantastic adventure. I hope to update this blog frequently with stories and photographs of my new life so that my friends and family around the world can see how happy I am in this winter wonderland and hopefully are persuaded to visit me in the near future. I love this country and my new life here and cannot wait to see what lies ahead for Josh and I in the future.

The following photos are from our recent travels in the last few weeks and my new home.