And now it’s already more than two months ago that I arrived in New Zealand – time flies! We’ve been mainly busy with all the practical aspects of settling in, getting the boys ready for school and camp (Birk), going to a garage way too many times with our car (Søren already vows to never buy a Japanese car again), and, of course, also work (yeah you’d almost forget about that…).

Bike – ferry – walk

My new commute is rather fun (mostly) and good exercise at the same time. It’s about 3km by bike to the ferry, then a 10 minute ferry ride, and then a 25 minute walk uphill to the university, through the central business district of Auckland and a very nice park. On the way back from the ferry I take the long way by bike because that’s much flatter (and much more picturesque too!). The Devonport area used to be a few islands that are now joined together by draining land, so it indicates a bit how hilly it is here. Happily, my bike has 7 gears, so I am able to manage most of the hills.

Ferry cancellations

The ferries are a bit less reliable, however. I had seen in the local Facebook group that ferries are sometimes cancelled when a cruiseship arrives, and that also happened the day before I wanted to be early in the office because I had my first webinar about my book at 8am (so Europe could be there for it too). So I planned to take the 6.30 ferry, and checked the transportation app the night before. But then when I was cycling towards Devonport I could already see a cruiseship arriving and thought ‘oh no’… and indeed, they had cancelled the 6.30 ferry that day. So I could go back home again and use the home office for my webinar – happily Søren had a cable for me so I didn’t have to rely on the somewhat shaky Wi-Fi that we have. It’s been interesting to follow what’s happening with the ferries – they have shortage of personnel, which is why they are not running more often in peak times. And I figured out now too how to get notifications of cancellations in the app – the other day I got one that said that two ferries around 16.00 were cancelled because of ‘too many passengers’. Right, not sure how cancelling a ferry helps for that though…

Working from home

Søren is very much enjoying his home office, saving a lot of time not having to commute regularly. He has a busy day – getting up, making lunch boxes, getting the kids up and ready for school, working a full work day, doing laundry and iron school uniform shirts (they use one per day especially in the past weeks when it’s been quite warm), and make dinner. As he jokes – he’s the stay-at-home dad (who is also keeping up his job in Denmark). His colleagues are happy he is taking the calls in their evening and most of the night, though, of course, they do miss him for the regular dealing with incidents that occur during the day. But it also means that he gets more quiet time to actually get some work done, so that’s nice too.

I have also been planning some weekend trips – we are leaving on our first trip later today to the Bay of Islands!