Countdown

Well, it’s a week today till we head for home. We’ve changed our dates without difficulty from early December to the 24^th November, meaning we’ll be home before the end of the month. That gives us a bit of breathing space at the other end, before we head back into work.

It took a bit of organising to make sure we still had somewhere to stay in Seoul, Korea, on the way home – the travel agents in NZ must have started to tear their hair out a little when we changed the dates not once, but twice. However, everything is all organised now – we just have to figure out how to get from the airport to our hotel and we’ll be fine.

We’re also trying to sell the car, that great little Peugeot that’s served us so well. We’ll be sorry to say goodbye to it, really, because it’s very economical; far more so than our Mitsubishi at home. But trying to take the Peugeot home isn’t within the possible budgets, so it’ll be staying here, hopefully with a new owner very soon.

The only thing I don’t like about it are the bucket seats (typical of most small cars, of course). I get back ache very easily in them, and that, combined with the neck ache I got from the stress of driving on English roads I wasn’t familiar with made life a bit unpleasant for a while. I think I’ve learned how to deal with both, as I’m certainly not getting the problems now. I suspect we’ll find driving on NZ roads a breeze after the English ones.

The joys of owning a car in England

You’ll no doubt remember that we bought a car for the time we’ve been in England. It’s been great, a Peugeot 306 XR, and we’ve done a lot of mileage in it. It’s also been very economical in terms of petrol, probably a lot more economical than our Mitsubishi Chariot at home.

However, we had to pay for its annual registration last month - £63.00 – which works out to about the same as we’d pay in NZ. But we also had to get an MOT – the equivalent of the NZ Warrant of Fitness – and this has been a bit of a shock.

I’m not sure what the current cost of getting a WOF in NZ is. (This is a post full of acronyms, isn’t it?). I don’t think it can be more than $40 or so. That would be the equivalent of around £14.85 in British money. Here, however, the cost for the MOT is £50.35 (goodness knows what the 35p is there for – it’s like the sign in the Italian subways, where they would charge you 50 euros and 5 cents if you didn’t have a ticket). That’s about $135NZ. Good grief.

Worse, because there were a couple of things wrong with the car (two of them utterly minor, and one to do with the brake pads) we had to have some work done on it. This cost another £80 – or $215NZ.

And then, because the people who’d tested the car had to do a ‘partial re-test’ they charged us again: another £25.13, making the total for the MOT about $200NZ. How on earth that can be justified is anyone’s guess. (I happened to look up this garage when I was trying to find their phone number the other day, and obviously I’m not the only customer who hasn’t been satisfied with them. Have a look at the comments section.)

So in the last couple of months our great wee car has cost us over £200, which has seriously reduced our bank account. We’re now heading towards almost nothing in it – gulp! – and we’ve still got another week here, as well as staying two days in Korea. It reminds me of a time when I was young man and went to Australia to see if I could work there as a repetiteur (I’d already worked professionally at the job in NZ). I didn’t get any work, and after a month of swanning around, came home, only to realise when I flew into Christchurch, that I didn’t actually have any money to get the train home to Dunedin. Fortunately the lady I was staying overnight with in Christchurch coughed up the readies, and I was able to repay her later (no doubt out of my mother’s money, since I didn’t have a job to come back to either!)

Introducing Potter

We went to see Harry Potter’s latest outing today. Classy movie, and succinct storytelling. More about it on my other blog.
But it was our first experience of moviegoing in the UK. The prices, as we expected, were pretty much on a par with prices at home. The expensive icecreams were pathetic: two scoops barely appeared above the rim of the cone. And the taste of the mint with chocolate bits in it was unpleasant, rather as if you were eating spearmint and chocolate together. No wonder some shops advertise New Zealand Ice Cream. From now on I'll make sure I buy from them.
But the worst feature was to come. At home we’ve come to endure the ten minutes or so of recycled tv advertising and trailers that come before the main feature. Ten minutes is copable with. 25 minutes is outrageous. Twenty-five minutes of advertising!
And because so many of the ads were played at full bore soundwise, we were nearly deaf by the time Harry and his cohorts arrived. Fortunately the film was worth watching after the interminable introductory stuff, almost fifty percent of which was advertising for cars. Do they have trouble selling cars in Britain? You wouldn’t think so by the number that are on the roads.