Saturday, December 19, 2009

It was a really busy day today. First, at about 3am I said goodbye to the canadians. They left nz and who knows when we see each other the next time...
We had a good time and its kinda sad that they left. But there are some 3 other canadians arriving in january who will work at Trimble too, which is good.
Then in the early morning I picked up the campervan, that will hopefully help my family and me getting around well in nz for the next 3 weeks. In the afternoon I picked up my parents and my brother at the airport in Christchurch. Apart from the fact that they arrived 2 hours late, it was good seeing them again. The funny thing was, that they saw me first, and guess how? Emirates has got a feature in their entertainment program (=every passenger has got its own screen, on which they can watch movies and stuff...), that shows the live picture, filmed by a camera that sits right at the front leg of the plane. So i was bored waiting for them and went outside to watch the arriving planes... and in fact, the plane i was watching while docking to the finger, was the plane my family was sitting in, and they were watching that live picture... so they could see me on the screen... they were quite excited :-)
Tomorrow we are gonna leave Christchurch and we will head north to Abel Tasman, then the north island (rotorua), then coming back to the south island, heading west to the westcoast, cruising over the southern alps, seeing some nice lakes, and then finally cruise back to christchurch by driving along the eastcoast.

I whish everybody a nice christmas time! - enjoy!
...and "en guete rutsch is neue johrzent!"

Saturday, December 12, 2009

3 weekends of intensive travelling


Finally i managed to write another blog. I kinda new right from the beginning, when I started the blog, that its gonna be hard for me to update it regularly. But at least i managed to upload some pictures from the intense travelling on the last few weekends: http://picasaweb.google.com/chbischo.

Even before I came to New Zealand the human resources manager of Trimble wrote me in a mail that there will be some canadian interns at Trimble. So Tobias and me arranged to meet these four canadian guys after a few weeks at Trimble. They are really cool and they were very keen to explore New Zealand on weekends, so Tobias and me joined their weekend travels. It turned out to be quite expensive, but it was really good fun and we saw quite a few exciting things, like wild animals you normally just see in the zoo (penguins, seals, sealions, albatros, tuis).










In the meantime I moved out of the old flat because the girl who rented the house had to move out and nobody of the other flatties wanted to rent the house on its own. Fortunately the kiwis aren't really complicated and a mate of my manager from work agreed to rent out one of his spare rooms to me. The house is a typical one story kiwi house. The style of the house is completely different from the 'old' house, in fact the style is much more kiwi like, not too modern, but really nice in its own way.

Tomorrow I will do a skydive with Usman and Tobias. I am really excited about that and I am sure its gonna be awesome! :-) ...although it was quite expensive. But I think that you need to do either bungee jumping or skydiving once you are in New Zealand because bungee jumping apparently was invented over here, hence these extreme sports are kinda traditional over here.

next blog will feature some information about my work over here!
take care