Randomness from Mary

Yesterday (Monday) was Labor Day here. Make that Labour Day. Everything was closed except for the grocery store.

The mailmen deliver mail on bicycles. Maybe someone has a little car somewhere, but haven't seen it yet.

The teachers are on strike and the schools are closed. They haven't had a raise in awhile and they want one. It's a beautiful day today---sunny and close to 70----and I can hear the kids playing outside and enjoying the strike. Closed schools are a particular problem to parents here because, by law, kids 14 and under have to be supervised at all times. Seems a little old to me to need a babysitter....more of an individual thing anyway. Some kids are mature enough to be babysitters at 12 and others still need a sitter at 25. :)

There's no tipping here and the price is the price because GST (sales tax) is included in everything. That's nice because I'm already doing enough math as it is (see earlier posts!).

NZ is a very "green" place. Recycling is very extensive (nearly a religion) and it has taken me awhile to get the hang of it, but now I am happily washing my trash before I put it in the proper receptacle.

EFTPOS---this is what they call a debit card here and It is pronounced as a 2 syllable words. Stands for something like "electronic funds transferred point of service". This is almost a cashless society here and people use their EFTPOS for everything. Our rent and all utilities are debited from our checking account, which is a good thing, because our checking account came without checks.

We watched Sunday Night Football live (Green Bay vs Vikings) yesterday. Was 1:30 pm on Monday for us.

Ralph reported earlier on Wellington but I wanted to say how much I loved the city. It was so pretty, so clean, and so many interesting things to do. We also went to a singing/dancing show of a NZ group called "The Beat Girls" which was a lot of fun. Pictures above are of Wellington. The one on the left was from a mountain top after riding the little red cable car up. The one on the right is from the other side of the city, from atop Mt. Victoria. The views from there are 360 degrees and spectacular.

Some fun facts: Knoxville, TN has 173,890 people, with a greater metro population of 691,152. Wellington, the capitol of NZ, has 195,500 people with a metro population of 480,000. The entire country only has 4,000,000 people which is not only less than Tennessee but less than the population of about half of the states in the US.

We leave for Lake Taupo Friday morning and will get our first glimpse of Mt. Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom, the star of Lord of the Rings). From there we will go on to Hawkes Bay region, returning Tuesday.

Ralph is doing far better than me with the pronunciation of the Maori names, and there are a lot of them on streets and mountains!

mb