Lobo's in San Francisco

A few fun days ...

2008-10-27T05:02:00.004+13:00

The past few weeks we've had incredibly great weather in San Francisco (and the bay area). Not sure who to credit/blame for this, but we are enjoying it as much as we can. We had a great outing on friday (after school) and Saturday with the kids and a few friends. Friday after school we went to Hotel Nikko swimming pool and swam for some time. I took the opportunity to use the gym and did the elliptical machine for a mile and a stationary bike for a mile. The kids then warmed up in the sauna before we continued on our adventures. We took the powell street cable car and were headed toward ghiradelli square. After China town the cable car goes via Russian Hill (Hyde and Union), which is also the location of Zarzuela, one of our favorites tapas bar. It was early enough that we decided to jump out and have an early dinner with the kids.

The meal (tortilla omelet, patatas bravas, goat cheese in tomato sauce, grilled calamari, crab bisque soup) was quite good along with some excellent sangria. Maya was quite adventurous and tried (and liked) pretty much all the dishes. PJ pushed her boundaries a bit and tried a few more things in addition to her favorite food of bread with olive oil :). It was getting late so we headed back home. The first couple of cable cars were full, we managed to get on the third car and then took the underground to castro where the car was parked.

On saturday we headed to Muir woods to take the kids on a short hike. Our friend trish had an extra credit project out there and hence the outing. The extra credit was a bit lame (she just had to take a photograph and a receipt of the visit along with a short writeup), but we did get a decent hike in. Its quite amazing that even though the place is super crowded at the entrance, most of the crowd does not venture past the second bridge. We made it close to the end of the boardwalk trail with multiple snack stops and visits to big trees along the way. On the return, Tan, Trish, Nick and I took the hillside trail back to the visitor center. Towards the end of the hike, we lost sight of Nick and Trish. Tan was a bit flustered and we split up to find them. Trish and Nick were waiting for us at the entrance and did the wise thing of staying put. Since it was quite a hot day, we decided to head to chrissy field and spent a couple of hours at the beach. I went for a short 20 minute run along the beach to give my knees/muscles some more exercise. Nick and Trish wanted to eat at Cha Cha Cha, so we had an early dinner there. We had a large group so we got a taste of most of the dishes on the menu. Most of the food at C3 is mediocre, but it does have a few excellent dishes (potatoes, cajun shrimp, jerk chicken).

We had a nice long uphill walk back home (helps to get sober from all the sangria) and had a one spoon dessert of yummy salted-malted ice cream from Bi-rite Creamery. The kids (and us) were exhausted at the end of the day. My knee was quite sore and achy which meant i was fast asleep by 8:30 pm (kinda amazing how the body reacts to various things). I've been sleeping much better the past few weeks, but still not as good as I used to. The temperature difference between the two knees is quite amazing (you can literally feel the heat from the fixed knee. this is expected behavior and should slowly disappear as the knee heals)

Anterior Crucial Ligament (ACL) Reconstruction Rehabiliatation Guidelines

2008-10-26T06:07:00.005+13:00

(Since i did not find a good physical therapy schedule on the web, i'm typing out what my PT gave me)

These notes are from Health South Doctors Hospital, Alex Lau

Post-Operative Week 1:

VMO quad sets with biofeedback
Straight leg raises
Gentle patellar mobilization/scar mobilization
Theraband ankle exercises
EMS especially important if patient unable to initiate quad sets of independent SLR
Prone extension
Gastroc/hamstring streching
Cryotherapy
Manual/self ROM zero to 90 degrees

Post-Operative Week 2:

Continue previous treatment
Isotonic program (hip abduction/adduction, leg curl)
Mini squats 0 - 30 degrees
Wall slides 0 - 30 degrees
Posterior tibial glide joint mobilization at 30 degrees and 90 degrees if ROM problem persists especially in ext
Bicycle ROM 1/2 arcs progressing to full ROM

Post-Operative Week 3:

KT-1000
Continue with previous treatment
Heel walking, toe walking
Balance/proprioception training on flat terrain
Reformer single leg press
PROM/self ROM zero to 120 degrees sitting. Upon obtaining 110 degrees of flexion proceed with prone ROM
O/C brace and crutches if ambulating without a limp

Post-Operative Week 4-6:

Continue Isotonic program (hips, hamstrings, leg press)
Continue with previous program
Treadmill forward and backward walking
Step ups
Trampoline - single leg standing
Balance board (lateral tilt, A/P tilt)
Weight shifting (modified lunge to 30 degree flexion: forward, backward, sideways)
Continue biofeedback for neuromuscular VMO re-education
Aggressive patellar and soft tissue mob, post-tibial glides
PROM/self ROM zero to 135 degrees seated, prone zero to 120 degrees
Interval stationary bike program

At the end of 6 weeks, patient should have between zero to 135 degrees ROM, good patellar mobilization. Normal WB and gait. Minimal pain and swelling. Biofeedback can be included in closed chain activities

Post-Operative Weeks 6-12:

Continue with previous treatment
Isokinetics limited range (90-45 degrees), high speed above 150 to 180 degrees/sec at 10 weeks (If painfree and no patella femoral problems)
Isotonic squats - Smith Machine bar weight only (feet forward, tibia perpendicular)
Lunges
Stairmaster
Slideboard
Sport cord walking (forward, backward, sideways)
Trampoline (Single leg bouncing, stepping high knee, weight shifting forward, sideways, diagonally)

Patient should obtain full ROM between 8-10 weeks. Self ROM seated and prone should be continued for 6-8 monts to allow full harvest site tissue maturation.

Post-Operative Weeks 12-16:

Continue with previous program
Isotonic terminal kne extension, low resistance high repetition
Theraband slow running low intensity
Controlled slow forward and backward jogging on level surface
Trampoline jogging
Low intensity impact activities (In absence of patella femoral pain or general knee pain. Patient should also have full ROM at this time.) (double leg jumping, sideways jumping, forward jumping, running on spot)
Functional closed chain evaluation
At 15-16 weeks, Isokinetic evaluation (In absence of patella femoral pain or general knee pain)

Post-Operative Weeks 16-20:

Continue with previous program
Running program if 70% quad stregth per Biodex test and asymptomatic function evaluation. Test speed dependant on sport specfic and symptomatic basis
Sport specific activities
Plyometrics medium to high intensity (broad jump, single leg jumping, vertical jumps)
Agility limits
Isokinetic evaluation and functional evaluation on a monthly basis until discharge from formal medical care. Patient will be discharged from formal physical therapy with a home program at 20 weeks

ACL Surgery: 3 week report ..

2008-10-21T03:55:00.002+13:00

So its been a bit more than 3 weeks since i had my knee 'fixed'. I had my first PT (physical therapy) appointment at the 3 week mark. Seems like I'm progressing quite well and have got a fair amount of flexibility back. Did not lose a lot of muscle strength in the quads / calves since i was not out for too long and have been fairly aggresive on stretching and walking and putting load on it etc. My PT, Brian, gave me a a pretty good post-op exercise worksheet, which i'll put on the next blog post (since i could not find anything good on the web).

I've started taking long walks up and down the hills of San Francisco. Can pretty much go for 90 minutes (with a small coffee break in between) with no significant issues. Also, I can walk as fast as the kids which is a big step forward :) The kids school had a walkathon yesterday. I walked a few laps with the kids and also jogged a bit. Jogging is a bit more difficult, but i suspect it streches the skin and flexes the knee more than walking. So will incorporate this into my daily PT exercises. There is still some amount of swelling around the knee, but this is normal and will be around for the next few months.

Its quite wierd how the knee flexes differently in different directions. Sitting on my bottom, in can pull my knee quite close (125 degrees or so) towards my bottom. However lying on my stomach and trying to bend my knee (hamstring curls), seems like i can just bend my knee a wee bit past the 90 degree mark. mari had a good idea of flexing my toes while doing it, which would get me a few more degrees. Maya helps me out quite a bit and does most of the exercises alongside me and is very curious about what each exercise does etc.

We've been swimming once a week and that seems to help too. Our latest swimming find is Hotel Nikko which has a nice warm pool (86 degrees) and is quite reasonable ($10 / adult, kids are free). This find was due to an excellent blog post in the chronicle. The kids are becoming pretty good at climbing at Mission Cliffs. As an incentive, i've promised to get the chalk bags when they can climb 5.4 and climbing shoes when they climb 5.5. I hope we'll do a lot of outdoor climbing this summer (along with some rafting and lots of biking). I was able to belay the kids with my brace in week 2 and did not need the brace last week. I'm hoping to start climbing in the next few weeks

Vote for Larry Volpe for the Intel tech makeover awards ..

2008-10-10T17:37:00.004+13:00

Larry Volpe is an awesome teacher and a long time San Jose ICO volunteer. he's in the running for an Intel tech makeover award. To vote for him click here

Voting closes soon, so do it NOW :)

The Food Exchange

2008-10-06T17:05:00.004+13:00

After almost two years of living in Nelson, we learned how to cook good, tasty, healthy food. I used my two "Greens", Cook book most times, and tried recipes from epicurious.com. I also learned about the cook book, "Nourishing Traditions" from my friend Kath. Lobo used epicurious, cooks.com and Sukies Indian spice packs.

Kath, Lobo, and I were always exchanging our left overs. Lobo made curries, I cooked things from the Greens cook book while Kath cooked from Nourishing Traditions. It was great to taste Kath's delicious cooking while opening my eyes to her favorite cookbook. Our friendly food exchanges became regular. Our good friends Niluckshi and Tamiko also joined in the exchange using recipes from Jamie Oliver. We started to drop off food at the school and place the food under our children's coat hooks. Having all this wonderful home cooked food meant more time at the playground with the kids.

A month or so before our return to San Francisco, I asked two good cooks if they wanted to be in a food exchange. Lisa and Jill both said, "yes!" Our first exchange took place on Tuesday September 8 at Rainbow Grocery Store. Jill and I carpooled together with Maya and Pj. The food exchange entres were:
Jill: Polenta and Fish Soup;
Lisa: Veg and Sausage Lasagne
Mari: Cheese and Nut loaf.

The food has been healthy, wholesome, and delicious. A lot of work went into those three dishes and were appreciated by all the families. Maya and PJ are pretty adventurous already and were agreeable to trying food that Jill and Lisa cooked for them.

For the past month Jill and I have been able to exchange dishes once a week, while Lisa exchanges once every two weeks. Jill and I live less than two blocks away from each other so dropping off food on each other's porch is very convenient. We try our best to deliver the food before Tuesday dinner. It has been great to have the refrigerator full of great food. There's definitely extra food which we eat for lunch or give away to our other food friends.

The second week entrees:
Jill - chicken cacciatori
Mari -dahl vegetable stew
Lisa - fresh pasta sauce from her garden

The third week entrees -
Jill - vegatable goulash
Mari's mom's - arroz caldo -

4th week entrees
Jill- green beans and grilled chicken
Lobo chole, chicken curry
Lara (guest cook) lemon risotto

We also had a pot luck on Saturday -
Arielle cooked a nicaraguan dish with masa and chicken
Lobo cooked a lamb curry
Mari: savoury bread pudding with mushrooms and cheese
Lara: Swiss Chard Greens with garlic
Cecile: Chocolate cupcakes with chocolate and caramel ganache- best cupcakes ever
Jill - Lemon Bars - they were perfect

Cooking has become fun and exciting when shared and eaten with friends and family.

Day 8-10 post ACL ..

2008-10-06T08:27:00.003+13:00

Had a doctors appointment on thursday. The doc was quite pleased with the progress (and his handiwork) and suggested that I continue pushing hard and learning exercises from the web. He showed me a few new things to try out and I'll incorporate those into my thrice a day PT. (knee bends and hamstring curls)

Have stopped taking all medication (i.e. the tylenol). I'm able to put a fair amount of weight on the knee and can walk around the house without the ace bandage or the immobilizer. I use the cane to provide a wee bit of support if needed. Not having those two things really helps me a lot (since it caused a fair amount of discomfort). I've enlisted the kids to help me with PT. So they press on the knee and count to 20 or so. They also do the leg lifts next to me. So thats kinda fun.

Had a pretty long day outside with mari, lara and the kids yesterday (farmers market, dolores playground, tacubaya and then oakland airport). Was quite exhausted at the end of it. Figured that 3 hours or so outside is my limit before which i need to just lay back and rest for some time. Hopefully this number will go up this week. The food at tacubaya's was quite good. We had the veggie tostada, banana tamales, chicken tostada (for kids), chips and guac and menudo. Would be good to have a place like that in the city. Unfortunately sketch was closed for the second time a row at 5:00 pm. Need to send them mail :( Luckily the kids take it in stride. We had a chocolate cake (with some spicy mexican chocolate sprinkled in there) at tacubaya's instead. Was wolfed down by the kids (and mari and lara) at an amazingly fast rate (i.e. i managed to only get one small spoon!)

Day 6 / 7 after ACL surgery ..

2008-10-03T07:07:00.002+13:00

Fortunately day 6 was more like the first few days after the surgery rather than like day 5. Was glad that day 5 was over and done with. Realized that I'm in a bit more pain towards the end of the day, and it might just be the fact that the body is tired etc

Got the PT drills down quite nicely. So doing more reps and for longer periods of time. Realized that the brace and compression bandage are a significant part of the uncomfort, so now I remove them when not needed. It helps that the swelling has reduced significantly. However, this means I need to make sure I have all the stuff needed within easy reach (since putting them on is an exercise by itself). Need to figure out a more efficient moving technique without the brace (crutches?), so i can lie down and stretch as needed.

Had a decent lunch at Shalimar with Lara, Mari and Dave. Being outside and chatting with other folks makes it much easier to deal with (since u r not thinking about the knee etc). Mari and Jill took marley and maya to the asian art museum in the evening. I had the task of entertaining and putting PJ to sleep. We had a small scoop of icecream and walked over to dave's place. They had already left, so PJ was a bit sad and wanted to go to someone else's house to play. We came back home, and spent some time opening the spanish material from la clase divertida. Hopefully their material is better than their customer service (awful, did not respond to email / phone calls). Read a few stories to PJ on her bed and came close to falling asleep there. Had a decent sleep last nite, tossed and turned a bit more than normal.

Having a hard time focussing and sitting for an extended period. So my work productivity is quite awful. However i'm making up by doing customer support and squashing minor bugs in CiviCRM. Hopefully the focus will come back in a few more days

Day 5 (and 6) after surgery ..

2008-10-02T03:41:00.003+13:00

so day 5 was probably the most painful day of all so far. Not very sure why, but might have been due to my "long" walk on day 4 (which had a decent downhill component). Anyway got up at 3:00 am and was quite uncomfortable (bordering on pain, i think) till 6:30 am. I finally asked mari to help me take a shower with the hope of improving things. It did help a bit but not a lot. I also removed both the support and compression bandage for an hour or so and that seemed to help a lot.

The rest of the day was quite similar. Was not really a happy person yesterday. We went to Phu and Tamar's house in Portola valley after school today. The kids had a good time especially when the sprinklers came on. I started hurting a bit towards the latter part and we hurried back home.

Had a great sleep last nite (removed the compression bandage also). Maybe it was a combination of lack of sleep and the wine etc, but things look real good and up today. The pain has decreased considerably and hopefully things will be better from here on out .... Its amazing how different your mood/attitude is after a good sleep :)

Have been doing a fair amout of physical therapy. Do a set of exercises approx 3 times a day (ankle streches, leg lifts and knee bends). So far things are looking good on that front.

Day 4 after surgery ...

2008-09-30T15:48:00.003+13:00

So things are coming along quite nicely and am fairly happy with progress so far :) We removed the bandage and the immoblizer in the evening and then i took a nice hot shower. The knee did not look too bad, but it is a bit swollen (which is expected). Mari then helped me put on the ace bandage and the immobilizer. Its kinda hard to require help for every little thing, but over a period of time, i'm starting to do more things on my own. I helped cook a simple dinner of brown rice, dahl and roasted potatoes with olive oil and rosemary.

Tried to sleep without a sleeping pill and it worked quite nicely till 1:00 am. Could not get back to sleep, tried reading god of small things, a book which i've never managed to finish reading. This did not help put me back to sleep either, so finally resorted to taking the pill and got 4 more hours of sleep.

Went with Lara and Mari and had an excellent latte at four barrels on 375 Valencia. Was quite nice and strong, though i prefer the latte at cafe belbo. The space inside is really good (better than belbo and ritual), so overall this might become a regular haunt for us (quick bike ride down 14th street, when i'm able to get on my bike). I also started doing some physical therapy exercises which I managed to find on the web: Recovery after ACL Reconstruction. The straight leg raising is quite strenous and get the heart beating.

After speaking to the Kaiser advice nurse, i went for a short walk. My goal was to have a coffee at Reverie and then get a few books from Cole library. As I started my walk, i realized it was a bit too ambitious of a goal and I was not too sure if i could even make it to reverie. I thought to having coffee at the ashbury market and returning home. It was quite empty and I did not want to hang out there, so i continued onto Reverie. The walk back uphill was much easier and faster. I suspect future walks will be a lot easier. I'm hoping to get more sleep tonite with all this physical exercise. I'll also remove the immobilizer and see how that goes.

Day 3 after surgery and other news ...

2008-09-28T13:29:00.003+13:00

last nite and today have been a lot better. Not a lot of sleep last nite either, primarily since i dont sleep on my back, but i've started to twist and turn and sleep on my side which is a good thing. Borrowing a few sleeping pills from my friend, dave, to help solve the problem tonite. Luckily, i have not taken too many of the pain pills, and hence have avoided the stomach issues associated with it.

Took PJ for her first soccer game. Was good fun to see 4 year olds run after the ball and trying to figure things out. Maya prefers to play in the playground and ride her bike instead of soccer. The kids are having a lot of fun in school and integrating quite well with other kids. We've met quite a few of the parents already and will meet the rest over the next few weeks.

For folks who have kids, here's my favorite rhyme which the kids learnt recently:

Where are you going, pig pig pig
I'm going to the garden to dig, dig, dig
Going to my garden to dig, dig, dig?
SHAME ON YOU, pig, pig pig
Sorry man, I'm just a pig
ALL I KNOW is to dig, dig, dig

Day 2 of surgery ...

2008-09-27T10:03:00.002+12:00

day 1 went by quite nicely. Could not keep any food (rice porridge) or water in my stomach till late evening. Then had a few pieces of bread and that stayed in. There was not a lot of pain and i attributed it to the nerve block that i took before surgery.

Did not sleep real well last nite :( Woke up at 2:00 am and then pretty much stayed awake for the rest of the nite. Took a painkiller (oxydocin) and that might have put me to sleep for 30 mins or so. Stayed up and finished a quick non-fiction novel (was not very good either, was about the kids and MIT and Las Vegas, forget the title)

Today has been significantly more uncomfortable than yesterday. I dont think i'm in a lot of pain, but am not very comfortable. Walking around is painful for the first few minutes before it gets better. Have been doing a lot of sitting / sleeping and reading the backlog of new yorkers. Hopefully things will be better tomorrow. Am just taking half the dose of the painkiller and might skip it completely till bedtime

Being immobile is a very different feeling. Kinda strange to be dependent on other folks for most things. Sat outside in the sun for a few minutes and that felt quite good. maybe a short walk with crutches on some flat area might help my mood. Doing work stuff (and blogging) is also a good distraction

ACL surgery done and over with :)

2008-09-26T13:16:00.002+12:00

Got my knee taken care of earlier today. Kaiser informed me last nite that my operation was scheduled for early morning. So I was there bright and early at 6:45 am and scheduled to be operated at 9:15 am. They have quite a few patients to get ready for when the OR opens, hence the early call. Things were quite efficient the Kaiser way, and I spent a fair amount of time streching and getting a few last minute exercises in (while waiting).

I kinda expected to wait for some time, so had a stash of New Yorker magazines to read while waiting. This proved to be a great decisions since i spent a fair amount of time waiting to be wheeled into the room. My ACL was operated on by Dr. Miller (from Kaiser San Francisco, French Campus). I also opted to take the nerve block to minimize pain after surgery. Seems to be working quite well, since I'm not in any pain right now, but am quite nauseous. Nothing seems to be staying in my stomach, so i'm hoping it improves real soon

Overall things went quite smoothly. I was knocked out for 3 hours and then woke up in the recovery room. Had a few more painkiller IV'ed in, before they let me go home. They ensure that your bladder is functioning before they let you go home. I'm quite psyched that I got this fixed finally, and ready for some good physical therapy and get the knee back up and running soon. Need it to play soccer with the kids :)

More updates later, off to sleep a bit

Life in San Francisco ...

2008-09-24T14:40:00.002+12:00

So a couple more weeks since my last update and a few more comments and random thoughts about life in San Francisco compared to life in Nelson

Getting into a regular routine has been quite good. We dont spend a lot of time on the road on the weekdays, the backroads to the kids school is surprisingly fast (approx 15 mins commute, similar to our tahuna -> richmond commute). Also found a great coffee shop with internet access on the way (in Glen Park, Cafe Bello). I think the coffee there is even better than Ritual. Does give a pretty good buzz :)
Our favorite restaurants still rock :) So if you are in San Francisco for an extended period of time make sure you eat at Shalimar for north indian food, Vik's Chaat Corner for indian chaat (snacks), Sketch ice cream (any flavor, any time), Lime Tree for malaysian / singaporean food and Spices for sichuan chinese food, La Corneta Taqueria for mexican food.
We've been pretty good with eating most meals at home including lunches. Mari's food club is working great. Last week we got chicken cacciatore from jill. Jill got mari's famous vegetable dahl (the greens book recipe). This week we've got home made pasta sauce from Lisa and Vegetable ghoulash from jill. We combined the vegetable goulash with some dosa mix from viks to have an excellent meal of uttapam and yoghurt for dinner tonite
Mari and her brothers (benj and benny) along with brian (nephew) and brenda (niece) did the half dome hike this weekend (its a 17 mile roundtrip with approx 4000 ft elevation). I took care of the kids and we had a great time in the valley. Did a few short hikes and a lot of bike rides. We also went for a junior ranger talk / hike at happy isles nature center. Yosemite does have a fair amount of stuff to offer for kids. The waterfalls were non-existent / down to a trickle, so did miss that part of yosemite. On Sunday we took the kids on a fairly long bike ride (2 hours or so). I suspect the kids biked 5-7 miles that day. At the end of the ride, PJ looks at us and whispers that her legs cannot move any more.very cute :). The drive to yosemite on friday evening was quite awful. Took us close to 5 hours to get there. Luckily we did not get stuck in too bad traffic, but it was bad none the less.
Getting my ACL surgery done this thursday. Hopefully i'll be back up and be able to do short walks etc in 3-4 weeks. Mentally i'm quite ready for this and will try to do fairly intensive physical therapy. In the meantime i'm trying to bike as much as possible and do my favorite bike rides (ocean beach/zoo/lake merced, GG Bridge and Sausalito). Biking in the city feels like playing a video game, although the consequences are a bit more severe. Significantly different than biking in Nelson
Found a good public swimming pool for the kids, Martin Luther King Pool in Bayview. Recreation time is typically after school hours (3:00 pm or 3:30 pm) and they reserve a fairly decent section of the pool for families. Last Tuesday we were the only family in there and it was great. Today it was a wee bit more crowded, but still ample space for everyone. The showers are nice and super hot also. Definitely a good surprise. Richmond Aquatic Center still has a significant edge though :)
The kids are doing good in school. Maya has warmed up to the teachers already, and the teachers have already noticed PJ's masti streak. The school is quite good and we are trying to get involved with as many things as we can. There are quite a few evening meetings and educational things for parents on an ongoing basis. Will definitely keep the kids and us busy this year. They have a cool program called WOW (walk on wednesdays). We drive close to school and then join the "walking school bus". There are bagels and milk at the end of the walk.

Pictures and some indepth blog posts on other facets coming soon ..

Back in San Francisco ...

2008-09-14T09:46:00.002+12:00

So its been a week since we got back to san francisco. A few random thoughts and musings ...

San Francisco is dense :) Compared to Nelson (or some other places in NZ), i suspect most of the world is quite dense and crowded. I miss the light traffic, short distances and easy parking of Nelson and NZ in general. I really miss the convenience of the library and the aquatic center and the fabulous playgrounds (though they are quite a few good playgrounds in SF)
Food wise, I think the two places are quite comparable. San Francisco does have a wider variety, but we pretty much had most things we liked in Nelson too. The two farmers markets are equivalent (in my opinion)
The kids started at San Francisco School late last week (Sept 11th). They've settled in quite nicely. The school has been wonderful and very accomodating and we did a pre-trip on Monday to get the kids a bit familiar with the other kids and teachers. We also had a play date with two families from the school last week at Walter Haas playground
The school is a bit closer than I expected :) It takes us between 15-20 minutes to get to school. I was expecting to spend 30 minutes or so driving them to school
Mari started her food exchange program this week with Jill and Lisa. The program was great this week, since we got to eat yummy rice and nut loaf (mari), cous cous with spicy lemon grass fish soup (jill) and lasagne with home made pesto and sausage (lisa). Here's to more good food in the weeks to come
Made a quick visit to Monterey Bay Aquarium on Wed before school started. We've been taking the kids there once or twice a year. Is quite amazing to see the various things that holds their interest at various stages of their life. The fish feeding and penguins were a big hit this time. If you are in the area and have little kids, do stop by at the Dennis the Menace playground. There is also a long bike trail which is great for families with kids :)

Review: Richmond Montessori School, Richmond, Nelson, NZ

2008-09-08T04:50:00.003+12:00

Maya and PJ attended Richmond Montessori School in Nelson the 20 months we were in Nelson. That probably was our best find in the area. Its a great school with staff that really cares for the kids and gives them a good base for them to build their future on. Both Maya and PJ thrived in that school (along with their other classmates) and most of the times were quite excited to go to school. They were recently reviewed by the ERO (education review office) and came out with flying colors. You can read that fine review here.

Here are some of the highlights of our stay there (in no particular order)

The teachers (Tameko, Judith, Natasha, Sarah, Niluckshi and Sally) were all so nice, gentle and patient with the kids. I used to volunteer at the school twice a week and observed them and their interactions quite closely. Its quite amazing how they manage to get a large group of kids to work and focus both on an individual and as part of a group
The snacks and lunch :) The school provides lunch on tue-thu. Most of the produce used for the lunch would have been purchased by Niluckshi (the directress) at the Nelson Saturday market, i.e. local organic produce. The kids were introduced to a variety of different types of food from salmon and cream cheese sandwiches to pumpkin soup. At the end of our stay there, maya and PJ choice of sandwich was a mousetrap (a vegemite and cheese sandwich). We'll need to find a local source for vegemite to satisfy their mousetrap cravings
Bike thursdays and the two scoot bikes that the school offered. Kids out there get to bike and watch their friends bike every thursday. This positive reinforcement along with the help of the scoot bikes resulted in kids as young as 3 years old bike without training wheels.
Yoga class. Niluckshi would lead a yoga class once a week. Most kids loved doing it. They also had a simple breathing and mantra exercise which really helped the kids calm down. We used this mantra a lot with PJ when she would be upset / throw a tantrum. It worked wonders
Willing to experiment and try out new ideas. Mari made a few suggestions on things that the school could potentially do to make things better. The school incorporated those suggestions over the course of our stay there. Niluckshi and team really strive to make the school an enjoyable experience for the kids (and parents too)
Being proactive with regard to a child and their growth. We would talk with both Maya and PJ's teachers on a regular (sometimes weekly basis) and exchange ideas / get tips on how to make things better. Tameko would help us a lot with ideas on how to get PJ to eat better. Judith and Natasha would encourage us to organize more play dates to make maya more comfortable with other kids and adults
Forgot to mention the Profile books that they create for each child. This by itself is a work of art (and hard labor). Maintaining and updating it seems like a full time job for the teachers. They do have to work extra long hours to update the books for ALL the children
Maya and PJ also love the cooking classes that are run weekly. They seem to enjoy the music class too (which is run by fabulous grandparents of a former student, ron and gaylor)

We'd like to thank the staff at RMP for helping raise our kids and being such fine teachers. Your dedication and commitment to the kids and the school is amazing.

Back in San Francisco ...

2008-09-07T02:47:00.002+12:00

We landed in San Francisco yesterday afternoon and are back at home :). The kids are quite pleased to see their old room and toys. Maya and PJ insisted on riding their bikes the minute they got home (after a shower etc)

We had an interesting experience getting to Auckland. Due to fog, the flight was diverted to Hamilton. From Hamilton we were bussed into Auckland. Normally would not be a big deal, but having to transfer 8 pieces of luggage (including a ski bag and a bike case) was quite the challenge. Luckily Maya and PJ are old enough to take care of themselves. They made themselves quite useful by rolling the third cart at Auckland and San Francisco airport.

We went for dinner to Phu's place and met a few friends. We had excellent Beef Stew with noodles / French bread for dinner (mari and tamar had a seafood soup) along with a good bottle of Rimu Grove Pinot Noir. For dessert we had some yummy bi-rite icecream. We had exhausted the kids out there and hoped they would sleep all the way home and into the morning. unfortunately they were still on NZ time and stayed awake a bit late, till 11:00 pm or so. Hopefully they'll get over the jetlag stuff pretty soon. Got a pretty busy weekend ahead with quite a few scheduled activities and events

Restaurant Review: Bouterey ..

2008-09-07T02:29:00.002+12:00

We had two great meals at Boutereys the past few weeks. Boutereys was a finalist this year in the Cuisine magazine restaurant of the year awards (along with Hopgoods in Nelson). On both the visits we had a large enough group that we had a taste of everything on the menu :)

Our first visit was with JD and family. The restaurant (as most kiwi restaurants) were very accomodating and gracious to the kids. They had just re-opened after a three week summer break and had a new menu to start with. Since we were 4 adults and 4 kids, we ordered all 5 appetizers and all 5 main courses and did a lot of sharing. Some of the starter highlights include the tuna tartare, beetroot ravioli, the fried squid, the chicken pate with wafers and the pork belly. I just realized that I mentioned all the 5 starters as highlights. The kids were quite famished (we had a long full day with them in the great outdoors), so they were responsible for finishing off a large section of the starters. One slight disadvantage of dining with small kids sharing your plates is you dont get to taste things as a whole, since the kids typically pick and choose parts of the plate that they like. So the experience does get diminished a wee bit :(. The mains were quite excellent also. We liked th duck breast, the beef cheeks and the potato cannelloni. The only dish that was good but not great was the fish of the day (salmon). The chocolate mousse, creme brulee and the tarte tatin desserts complimented the fine meal. We also shared a very good bottle of the Felten Road Pinot Noir.

On our last week, we organized a farewell dinner at Boutereys with the staff at Richmond Montessori and a few friends. We had a total of 16 adults and 9 kids. We scheduled an early dinner so we could get out before the restaurant got very busy. Fortunately for us, this was a slow winter night and the restaurant was quite empty. I managed to sit with a group of folks who liked to share, and we did the same as our first visit, i.e. ordered all the starters, main courses and desserts. This time however, the restaurant paced the meal very well. The kids had a risotto for their main and a chocolate mousse with icecream for dessert. They got the kids meals out approx 10 minutes before the adult meals. This gave the adults time to ensure that their kids ate most of their meal. This allowed us to enjoy our meals with the various sauces and flavor combinations. Once again everything was quite excellent and I really enjoyed the vegetarian ratatotouille and cannelloni. We managed to stay there for 3 hours and it was quite cool to see 9 kids behave for most of that time. Our thanx to Tania and Matt for being such gracious and accomodating hosts

Restaurant Review: Food Game ..

2008-09-04T15:45:00.002+12:00

I should have written about Food Game a long long time ago, but i did not, and I feel real bad. A bit late is better than never. Food Game is basically a deli / take away / wild game food shop in Wakatu Square, Nelson (next to Lightning Direct and across from the Hunting shop). The yellow pages address is: 70 Achilles Ave, Nelson, 03-545 6505

Ben and his wife also started Fishmongers in Auckland, which is a great fish & chips shop in auckland and a must visit. It serves quite a few other yummy stuff besides F&C. We normally would have a meal there when we spend the day in Auckland before flying to SFO. So it was quite cool and nice for Ben to move to Nelson and start a great place.

The place has got the worlds best sandwiches! There is a different hot sandwich (or two) every day. Some of my favorites include the wild pork, the fish cake and the roasted doppler lamb. Ben will make a grilled fish sandwich for mari since she does not eat meat. Our friends the dierkings visited the shop a few weeks back and mentioned us. JD ordered quite a few things (none of them veggie), so Ben reminded him that Mari does not eat meat and packed a really good fish sandwich for her. Our neighbours Paul and Toni are also frequent visitors to Foodgame.

Here are a few items that we've had there that were wonderful.

Blue cod fish cakes
Smoked Fish Pie
Rabbit Pie
Balinese Goat Curry
Hot smoked salmon
Raw fish in coconut milk
Jamaican style Goat Curry
Wild pork vindaloo
Hummus and Babaganoush
Gnocchi with pear and gorgonzola

So far, we've only had one dish (filipino stule goat curry) that was not great. Unfortunately we had it after the balinese goat curry which was extremely good. Foodgame carries a lot of wild game (from marlborough) and also carries Doppler lamb. Definitely a must visit place in Nelson. I suspect this will be the place I will miss the most on our return to San Francisco.

back to san francisco ..

2008-09-02T08:58:00.002+12:00

So in 3 days from now, we'll be heading back home to san francisco. All of us seem to have different reactions to going home. Maya is thrilled to go home and live in a big city. PJ wants to get reunited with her dora-dora couch. Mari is happy to go home to be with family and friends. I'm kinda in between.

I'm a bit sad to be leaving nelson since i really enjoyed the slower lifestyle here (specifically the not having to deal with traffic and crowds part). The kids have grown up so much out here and have learnt all the outdoor things we wanted to get them into. Its kinda cool that by the time they are five years, they can bike, ski and swim. Their favorite memories of NZ include the backpacking trips to the two huts (thanx Kat!), Flora Hut and Awaroa Hut. We pretty much talk about the hut trip every week or so. I'll miss all our friends and the gatherings at various playgrounds after school, the combined explorations. I'll miss the market and the food, but that is a whole new blog post :)

We've taken the move back as a good reason to reduce the amount of clutter and stuff in our lives. So mari has been spearheading a major major cleanup of our stuff. We also had to give away most of the furniture that came with the house. Luckily our network of friends managed to help us out :)

I'll blog a bit on the various things as we go through the process

US trip report ...

2008-03-24T08:48:00.000+13:00

I went to New Orleans for a CiviCRM training. Getting there direct from AKL involved spending a lot of time at LAX. I opted to break the journey in San Francisco (on both directions) primarily to meet a few friends and wrap up some paperwork. On a related note, booking a multi-city trip on the Air NZ web site is pretty much impossible. I tried to use Judy our NZ travel agent to book the tix, but her response seemed to span quite a few days. Finally I just did it online and booked two separate round trip tix ( AKL <-> SFO and SFO <-> New Orleans)

Did not spend too much time in San Francisco. Did have a few good meals though :). Madras Cafe in Sunnyvale served a pretty yummy mysore masala dosa and a filter coffee (does not come close to the one at Mitra Samaj though). An excellent takeout meal from Shalimar (naan, chicken kofta, bhuna ghost and rice). A pretty good seafood meal at a Vietnamese place in South San Jose (at the vietnamese mall on Story Road). Phu preferred to eat at Cha Cha Cha's over Spices, so we ended up there for lunch. Luckily for us his older brother and family were also there. So it did help to have a bigger crowd and get to taste more dishes there. I think I'm done with Cha Cha Cha for the next decade. The sangria is good but not compelling enough to go back. I think we also need to introduce Phu's family to a few more places in the city :)

The New Orleans trip was a bit more hectic than i would have preferred. A combination of jet lag and 12+ hour work days did not really help things. As such our food experience was good but not great. I definitely would want to go back with mari and spend a week in that part of the country. Might not be a bad idea to do a couple of months road trip with mari, maya and pj on one the school holidays (with wireless network cards pretty much omnipresent in the US, its quite easy to be connected anyplace / anytime).

While walking to the group dinner, we stopped at Fiorella's for a quick snack. We split the catfish poboy (above average) and an incredibly awful gumbo. Not a great start to our NO food experience. Next up, was the group dinner at HerbSaint. I was fortunate to be seated next to Sarmeesha who also is a keen foodie. We decided to get the two soups (shrimp bisque and gumbo) and split 3 small plates (spaghetti with some great cheese and tasso on it, crawfish gratin and shrimp and crawfish over grits (my favorite dish)). All 5 dishes were excellent. I also managed to barter some food with dave for a taste of pork belly with side dishes of dirty rice and collard green. That dish did not seem to be as good as our plates. Dave did mention that his arugula salad with beets and cheese was amazingly good. Overall HerbSaint came out with a score of 7.5/10.

We had a quick breakfast of cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe Du Monde. The coffee was mediocre, the beignet were excellent (according to beignet expert dave). We did find a cafe with pretty good coffee, envie, on decatur street. So the next couple of days we had our coffee there.

Our two sandwich lunches were quite bad, so I will not mention the places here. Suffice to say, dont eat in the central business district of New Orleans. We were a bit disappointed that the line at Mother's was way too long, and hence with a sad heart skipped it. I also had lunch with the US PIRG folks at Casamentos. We had some raw oysters, an oyster loaf (basically a fried oyster sandwich) and a seafood platter. Most of the food was fried (good frying technique, not too greasy), but i do think that all fried food tastes quite good. You cannot judge a place on frying technique alone, so i'll avoid rating it :)

The next night we had dinner at Coops. We shared the jalapeno's stuffed with crawfish (mediocre), 2 pieces fried chicken (good) with rabbit jambalaya (mediocre, a bit too sweet for my taste) and an excellent shrimp etoufee. Unfortunately they had run out of mint (and hence mojitos), so i settled for a decent spicy bloody mary. Overall coop gets a 6/10

We had an excellent training session (in our opinion, need to get feedback from the folks who attended the training!), so we decided to celebrate with a good dinner. We lucked out and got a reservation at our first choice Brigsten's. So off we went. The appetizers seems to be a bit more interesting than the main courses, so we decided to split 3 appetizers and the seafood platter. The appetizers we had were: fried catfish (excellent), crawfish (good) and shrimp etoufee (excellent sauce). The seafood platter had a great jambalaya, and an excellent shrimp with pernod sauce. The rest of the platter (oysters and fish) was mediocre. The service was great and overall i'd give it an 8/10

New Orleans is definitely an interesting place to visit. Its a super touristy town, but also a bit poor compared to some of the other cities I've seen in the US. I suspect this was true even before Katrina and the neighbourhoods we walked thru (quarter, marigny, garden district), most blocks had a mixture of run down homes and good homes. It does seem quite well integrated racially and ethnically.

some good news and bad news ..

2008-03-24T08:44:00.001+13:00

The good news is that the both the kids got into San Francisco School in the city. The bad news is we needed to make a decision and figure out some long term plans. Most of you who know us, realize that we like to avoid making any long term plans, but in this case some quick decisions had to be made. They give you a week to decide. Mari and I had an informal agreement that if the kids do get into a school that we like (sf school, live oak and friends school met that criteria) we'd head back to the US.

So we are off to the US for good in September. I'm a bit sad since we do enjoy living in NZ and have a great circle of friends. I really like our work and play schedule and the amount of time we spend with each other as a family. The less traffic / population density and close access to all the things we like doing make it a great place to live. As with everything in life, there are pros and cons with everything. Will be interesting to see how we react to life back in the US for the first few months.

This also means that if you are planning to visit us in NZ, you better do so NOW :). The NZ winter starts in may/june so the earlier the better. We plan to do a fair amount of travelling and seeing a few places down under before we head back. Some of the places we'd like to visit are queenstown, wanaka and southland in the south island, taranaki, gisborne and coromandel in the north island. We'll also try to visit australia (melbourne, tasmania) and potentially stop over in some islands (fiji, tonga, tahiti) on our return trip home.

Seems like we'll switch our travel schedule and go to places when the kids have summer vacation. I'm currently thinking it might be a good idea to spend time in a different country every summer for the next 8-10 years (assuming the kids still like hanging out with us!). Some countries we'd love to visit and stay in include South America (Argentina or Costa Rica), China and Japan.

Quick trip back to San Francisco

2008-03-24T08:43:00.000+13:00

I'm headed back to San Francisco (actually at auckland airport / in mid flight) while writing this for a quick business trip. Dave and myself are doing a CiviCRM training in New Orleans, so i'll be spending most of my time there. This is the first multi-day trip in a long time without kids, and it already feels a bit strange. I did the same routine we did with the kids the last time we went via AKL airport. Bought a couple of postcards and stamps from Whitcoull's and sent them to the kids in Nelson. I'll try to do the same from the other two cities i visit on this trip. I was a bit sad on the long flight back and did miss playing and chatting with the kids. Since this was a business trip, I flew premium economy. For the additional cost, this is definitely worth avoiding. The food is relatively good (they serve you business class meals), BUT the seats are just a wee bit better than economy. The number of seats per row is the same as economy, so simple math does dictate that you will not get a lot more space. The seats do not recline a lot more either. Would have been so much better if they had traded off the food and seats. Seems like a scam of the highest order :( On the return trip, I did manage to get a decent rest. I was a bit stupid and did not call up and get a window seat ahead of time.

New Orleans seems to be a food mecca. The number of good places to eat seems to be mind boggling. Need to spend less time at work and more time walking and eating around the city. Our good friend Lara seems to know all the good places there. So we've got a long potential list of candidates. ChowHound is quite good to do research also. Between the two, i think i can spend at least a month eating and walking around New Orleans. More food reports as I visit those places.

We've ordered a lot of toys and games from amazon. Things in the US are significantly cheaper than NZ. A card game that cost us NZD 25, costs USD 8 at amazon. The price differential seems crazy and stupid. Since I'm traveling along and light, I figure I can pack a couple of bags filled with toys (and some food too!)

Bouterey's Restaurant

2008-03-22T22:23:00.002+13:00

After a 2+ hour hike up the Richmond hills, Kath and I showed up at Bouterey's. We were hungry. The restaurant was full on a Saturday night. The other diners were dressed nicely and more than casual and we were not. Thank you Bouterey's for not having a dress code.

I was looking forward to dessert so I only ordered a main dish. Kath ordered the curry bread and vegetable side. The very knowledgeable waitress reccomended the bread and said it was amazing. She wasn't kidding about the bread. It was amazing. We ate all but one slice which Kath asked to pack for home. Somehow it didn't get in the doggie bag. Every bite of the curry bread tasted like it was dipped in curry. Yumm. I asked if I would be able to order the bread, but it's made to order so it depends on how many reservations they get on the day, etc., but worth a try to call and request.

On to the main course. Kath ordered the monk fish which she said was very tasty and cooked well. They stacked the fish and layered it with vegetables, salad, and a few ravioli's.

I ordered the vegetarian - a tower layered with beetroot, pumpkin ravioli, and mushroom. Very good, tasty, special sauce. Eating the bread along with the meal made it a satisfying and delicious meal. The portion was enough that I had room for my own dessert.

I ordered the vanila creme brulee with ice cream. It was good. Sweet enough and rich enough for my sweet tooth. I wish I could've had more than a one spoonfull of ice cream. Kath ordered the chocolate souffle and fondant. It was chocolate and more chocolate of very good quality chocolate.

We left the restaurant feeling not stuffed but eating a very tasty delicious food.

Since I was making sure I'd have room for dessert, I didn't get a chance to try the starters. I'd definitely want to go back and have a couple starters for my main meal next time.

Bouterey's is on my restaurant list, just wish it could be on my lunch list as well.

Life back in Nelson ...

2008-03-03T20:33:00.002+13:00

So its been a bit more than 3 weeks since we returned from our trip. It is indeed very nice and relaxing to stay in the same place for some time. Living out of a suitcase gets tiring after a couple of months :)

We've been having a lot of fun the past few weeks. The kids have gotten back into their regular schedule and so have the parents. The kids have made great strides in some outdoor sports. They are both now getting fairly comfortable in the water and can swim a few strokes without floats. We've been hitting the pool at least 4 times a week and have been spending 30-45 minutes or so on each visit. Not sure where the kids get their energy from, but i'm exhausted at the end of the day :) Its still summer here (not that u can tell from the temperature sometimes), so it does not get dark till 8:30 pm or so. We typically go to the pool after an early dinner (6:00 pm), but late enough so that we can use the hydropool (which is a super warm training pool). Its a lot of fun to swim with the kids and see them learn and figure out stuff. Maya right now is experiment with her back float and attempting to do underwater flips. PJ, as always is willing to jump in the deep end and figure out things in real time. As with most things, they each have a very different approach to how they learn and grasp things.

In other news, maya decided it was time for the training wheels to come off. Saturday was the day of the big no-training wheels ride. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate, so we went swimming instead!. Sunday turned out to be a great day, so off we went to Neale Park and the Railway Reserve Bike Trail. mari taught maya how to just use her legs to kick off and get the balance feel. I'm a bit sad that we did not hear about the Wooden Bikes at a earlier stage (would have made things a bit easier). Maya did get a quick feel for the balance and pretty soon she was pedalling with mari / me running behind her holding her up for balance (hard work!). We did this for an hour or so, and quite a few times let go and she pedalled quite nicely. So looks like she'll be up and pedalling away in the next few weeks. Am looking forward to doing the railway reserve ride with her and also the ride along tasman bay (near the airport)

After a short afternoon break, we headed back to the pool for another swim session. We were joined by zack/maddy/chris so the kids had an extra long pool session. We returned home quite tired and rested for a bit. After dinner the kids still seemed to be a bit energetic, so we marched them up the famous tamaki st stairs. The kids managed to get up 250 or so steps before they wanted to head back down. All in all not a bad sunday :)

Nelson lunch spots ... (Go Mexico, Bar Delicous, Falafel Gourmet, House of Sushi, Crema)

2008-02-20T21:24:00.005+13:00

We've been spending a fair amount of time in Nelson during the day running various errands and paying bills that were due some time back. We also get to enjoy lunch in nelson while running these errands. Here's what we've tried in the recent past, the nelson ethnic food scene is definitely getting much better :)

Go Mexico: This is a mexican place run by a North Indian on Bridge Street (close to Collingwood). Our friend Chris had visited this place when it first opened and his reviews were not stellar. So it took us a much longer time than normal to visit this place. We went there for lunch today, and boy was it good!. Mari has the grilled fish (monkfish) burrito with a mild salsa and a horchata (home made). I had the chicken burrito with the medium salsa and a fresh lemonade. Ordering the drinks was a mistake :( The drinks were very good but a bit too big and took up valuable stomach space. My chicken burrito was excellent. The rice and beans had a nice spice and sour taste to it from the chicken sauce / salsa. There was a reasonable amount of meat but the combination hit the spot. The burrito seemed to be more like a home made chappati. Mari's fish burrito was also quite good. I tasted the fish and it was fresh and flaky. We only managed to finish half the burritos, so we have a yummy lunch tomorrow. After i mentioned Chris's review, the owner asked me to send Chris back to the place and pick up a free burrito on the house. The burritos are a bit on the steep side for those of us used to $5 taqueria burritos, but the quality of ingredients and size makes up for the cost (its get amortized over 2 lunches!). If you are in Nelson, go visit Go Mexico! now. We need to ensure it stays in business.
Falafel Gourmet is another great lunch spot (actually all the places on this list are great lunch spots!). I always get a large lamb and mari gets the smal vegetarian falafel. The large is good enough for a meal and a half. The tahini sauce they use is quite good. We need to get some pita bread and hummus from that store home the next time we are in town
Masao and Yuki from our favorite sushi place (House of Sushi) have opened up a new, slightly larger branch on Vanguard St (past the New World). We had lunch there last week. Mari had the fried warehou and salmon over rice with a small salad. I got a pork katsu over rice. We also shared a seaweed salad (which was a large salad with some amount of seaweed in it). We picked a few of their desserts for snacks for the kids. They were ok, i found them a bit too sweet. Masao's japanese curry is very good and worth having. I tried making a japanese curry at home earlier this week, it was good but nowhere close to masao's :(
Bar Delicious is our alternate to Hopgoods since its next door. It recently won the best cafe award in Wild Tomato (a local lifestyle magazine). The nicoise salad is very good here, so is the pork belly. Mari got the pan fried fish of the day (warehou). She liked it, but i thought it was very average. We finished off lunch with an excellent coffee from Crema (a coffee cart near the cathedral)

Its so good to be back home and not have to travel for the next few weeks / months :)

Brady trip report ..

2008-02-20T21:19:00.002+13:00

Our friends the brady's spent a month in Nelson, New Zealand over the xmas holiday. You can read his trip report here. You can also see some good photos of Nelson and NZ here. This link should help folks who complain that the blog has no photos :) Speaking of which, we hope to upload some of our photos to flickr sometime in the near future :)

lobo

A Mumbai Wedding

2008-02-11T09:25:00.000+13:00

Claudy and Ruby’s Wedding. It was an outside evening wedding decorated w/ flowers, lights, and more flowers. Pink and white were clearly the chosen colors. The bright lights delayed bedtime and the music started the party. We arrived on time and so we had our choice of tables. Maya and PJ were full of energy and happy to be dancing to fun music on an empty dance floor.

When Maya and PJ’s cousins finally arrived, they happily danced around with them. I took this chance to take pictures of all that was happening. I wore my friend’s sari that she so freely lent to me. Thank you Smita. It was fun to wear as I felt I blended in with the other few hundred guests. Some advantages to wearing a sari – it’s a good guard against mosquitos, and allows air to freely flow through. I had shorts on just in case of it all falling apart. I found myself adjusting it a lot but maybe more so than needed since I was thinking about it’s looseness whenever I wasn’t roaming around taking pictures or keeping up with the kids.

When the two guests of honor arrived, the DJ did a great job keeping the party alive. Everyone had a good time throwing the pink and white tiny styro-foam balls as Claudy and Ruby walked passed all 400+ guests. Right after that they cut the cake. Kurund was more than happy to open the bottle of champagne and squirt a few lucky people. I was very lucky. After the toasts, the dancing started.

While the dancing started, I and Maya wandered around the buffet table. The servers were kind and allowed Maya and I to take some food before the official food announcement. There were a lot of food choices for vegetarians, carnivores and mithai eaters. The jellibee was the best I’ve every eaten. The chocolate cake was excellent too.

There were crayons and paper available to all the children which helped entertain the kids while the adults filled the dance floor or just relaxed at the table while enjoying the moment.

Around 930pm or so, Maya and PJ fell asleep on a couple of the cushy chairs. They’re cousin Anika joined them. When the music stopped around 10pm or so, everyone quit dancing to eat. To end a fun filled evening, we went on stage to congratulate Claudy and Ruby once again.

You can view a few of the wedding pictures here.

Trip Report: Final Days in PI ...

2008-02-10T12:09:00.000+13:00

We decided to take the family to Normi's beach resort in Bacanotan. Mari's mom has a huge family, so we invited only the kids. This was an unplanned event, so trying to figure out food and transportation for 100 people or so was not really feasible. We ended up with approx 25 adult/kids at the beach. Bacanotan is quite close to the water, but there is no public access to the beach. This is really sad and shocking. Its amazing places exist where there are km's of coastline but no public access. Most of the locals cannot really afford to pay the $3 (USD) to a resort to access the beach. Due to the high cost a beach visit is a very rare occurrence for most of the family. It was quite nice to see all the kids have a great time at the beach. We had a big wave drench all the little kids and then the group decided it would be a bit more fun to play in the swimming pool. After the swim session, we had a snack of club sandwiches, fries, cold drinks and topped it off with ice cream.

The number of kids / young adults is very noticeable in PI. In the villages the percentage is even more noticeable. Mari's dad mentioned that more than 50% of the population is under 30 years. Family sizes are quite high in the villages, and quite a few teens are kids. PI is also a very religious country. Most towns have churches of quite a few denominations (roman catholic, iglesio de christi, seventh day adventist, latter day saints). I suspect the high birth rate is due to a combination of the influence of religion / church and lack of education. Quite a few of mari's cousin's drop out before they even complete high school.

We drove to Manila a few days before our departure to HK / NZ. We stayed at Fraser Place Apartments in Makati. The apartment was quite spacious and the kids had a great time running around the place. We were travel fatigued by the time we goto manila, and took it quite easy and stayed in and around the apartment most of the time. Manila was quite hot during the day and the ac apartment and swimming pool were quite attractive. We had the families of Joy and Alex (maris cousins) visit us in the evenings. Maya and PJ had a great time playing with alliana and justin. Since we were such a large group we just picked up some takeout food for dinner.

We then flew to HK and spent the day there before catching our flight back to NZ. HK was quite cold so we could not spend much time outside. We did have a great dim sum meal at the Celestial Cafe at the Sheraton in Kowloon. We also spent some time in Kowloon Park. We then took the ferry to Hong Kong Island and spent the remainder of the day at IFC mall. We found a good market there, CitySuper, which seems to be similar to whole foods in the US. We got some good bread and a great sashimi platter for a light dinner. We made the children march up and down the escalators at IFC mall and the airport a fair amount. This worked out quite nicely since they slept on the plane even before the plane took off and were knocked out for the next 9 hours.

The flight back was uneventful. We got back home at 5:00 pm. It feels good to be back in a place for the next few months at least ...

Trip Report: Tam-awan Village

2008-02-04T22:44:00.000+13:00

We read about Tam-awan Village in the Lonely Planet while looking for places to stay in Baguio. The description was interesting enough and seemed like we would learn a bit more about Filipino culture and tribes that we decided to stay there. On friday evening, we landed up in Tam-awan Village. Alex is not very familiar with Baguio, so it took us some time to find the right road to get to Tam-awan.

There are some places that seem just right at first glance. Tam-awan Village is that place :). To get to the reception/cafe, you climb up 30 steps or so. Its a small patch of forest surrounded by some old and lots of new development. While climbing the steps an artist entertained the kids by mimicking an elephant and falling water sounds (a hollow bamboo stick filled with seeds or rocks). There is a small open area courtyard (dap-ay, a stone paved gathering place) which is the main focal point of the village. Surrounding the courtyard is the cafe, the art gallery, a performing stage and an Ifugao house which can sleep upto 8 people. The group stayed in this house while we stayed in a smaller house slightly further up the hill. The house is made up of heavy hand-hewn timber, the roof is covered with hay and bound with reed and cogon. In the original construction, nails were not used in the building (probably because nails were not available either). The houses were disassembled and tagged at the source, and reconstructed in the village (was relatively easy to do due to lack of nails!). I had an interesting discussion with maya about the differences between the hut and the houses we have stayed in on this trip. Some of the things we talked about were that the hut was basically a single room, all cooking / cleaning / bathroom was outside the structure. The ceiling was also very very high. The hut was quite warm despite the cold outside (good insulation with the wood). The door was basically a piece of wood that slid open (and hence not attached). The door slipped out of its groove when mari tried opening the door. This freaked the kids out as they thought we were now stuck in the house forever. Inside, the house had a benches on all 4 sides, where guests could sit and chat. The benches were made of bamboo and hence we could see the ground underneath. The benches were also handy to keep all our stuff. There was a small wooden bridge to get to the other side of the complex and to a view point, hence the name Tam-awan, which mean a vantage point. On a clear day, one can see the south china sea, however we were fogged in on both days and visibility was quite limited. While at Tam-awan, we also had some artists sketch portraits of the children.

We had two dinners and a breakfast at the village. The meals were quite excellent and we managed to sample most/all of the dishes. We had some cordillera (moutain region) cuisine. One of their special dishes is pinikpikan (killing-me-softly chicken) chicken, which is chicken in a clear soup broth. There was also few different preparations of bangus (milkfish). Their adobo dish and longanissa was the highlight. Alex and Arlene liked the tuyo (fried salted fish) quite a bit. Breakfast was pretty much the same as dinner, with a fried egg added to the meal. We also had an excellent bottle of rice wine. The next day at the cultural show they released a coffee wine. They had a coffee arts festival starting the next day, and we were told that their coffee was quite good. We thought it was a bit too weak and not as flavorful as some of the other beans we've had in the past.

The next day mari's mom got a two hour (hilog) massage which she recommends highly. We returned that evening to Tam-awan for a cultural performance (and even more food). We saw a couple of indigenous dances including an excellent mindaon performance from a manila based group. The kids were quite enchanted with the tribal dances since there was lots of movement and sound. The indigenous dances were done by kids from the local school. The last dance included audience participation and mari graciously volunteered the two kids. During the break, PJ entertained the female dancers and invited them all the New Zealand. Maya decided to invite the girls to San Francisco. I suspect our kids are as confused about where they really live, as we are :). Both PJ and Maya agreed not to invite any of the boy dancers, since in their words, boys are too much 'masti' (naughty). I suspect the 'lion episode' in singapore zoo is still haunting them a bit. The village seems to have a fair amount of local support since most of the crowd was filipino, and many of them seemed to be local to baguio city.

Tam-awan is run by the Chanum (which means water in Ibaloi) foundation. It was started 12 years ago (1996) by a group of 3 men from Manila.The aim of the foundation is to sustain and nurture indigenous customs, promote awareness and respect for the cultural heritage and arts in the Phillipines, particularly in the Cordilleras. I spoke a bit with one of them, Chit, during our stay there. Chit was an electronics engineer for 10+ years, and then worked in the government for a few years, before he decided to focus on Tam-awan and the Chanum foundation. He has a great working relationship with the staff and artists and seems very much at ease at the village. He was also a contributing editor to Lonely Planet, PI. I suspect the prominent mention of Tam-awan in the LP guide, gets them quite a few visitors. The current goal for the foundation and village is to raise money to build a museum and display gallery for work. The foundation also has art therapy classes for kids from the surrounding provinces. We hope to link them with some of the other schools and organizations that we support in PI.

In this blog post, I have borrowed liberally from the tam-awan brochure. Please see the tam-awan website (http://www.tamawanvillage.com) for more information and/or contact them via email (tamawan@skyinet.net) or phone (+63 921 588 3131, +63-74-423-0570)

Trip Report: Baguio City, Phillipines

2008-02-03T14:53:00.001+13:00

Baguio is a 2 hour drive from Bacnotan where we are staying (in Northern Luzon). We decided to do a short road trip to Baguio City and check out a larger city in PI. We were joined on this trip by Arlene and two of her nieces and a nephew. To avoid traffic we left at 7:00 am, however we still hit school traffic in San Fernando and were stuck in it for some time. We were soon past that traffic and climbing up the mountain on a fairly steep twisty road. At the top of Quezon Hill, a hose of the car blew and we were stranded near Baguio City. Luckily, mari's cousin and our driver Alex is also a mechanic, so while he made a trip to town to get a new hose, we jumped into a Jeepney and went to the main plaza and Burnham park. We found a pretty large playground and kid cycle rental in the park. That kept the kids entertained for the next couple of hours. Maya was quite happy to be playing outside (instead of sitting in the car) and was biking around the park like crazy. PJ on the other hand was content to be sitting in the passenger seat driven around by the older kids.

Since we did not have the car and the kids wanted to be like the grandparents, we had lunch at the nearby McDonalds. After lunch we headed to SM mall since mari's dad wanted to get a new cell phone or sim card. What was supposed to be a quick trip, turned out to be a 2+ hour wait at the mall. There was a bouncy slide thing at the mall, so the kids were quite happy jumping up and down. We finally had a decent cup of coffee at the mall. Its been a long time since I've been to a large mall, but a bit sad to see that most of the food carts were selling junk food (donuts, nachos, hotdog and fries). No wonder obesity is an epidemic in today's world. While we were hunting for Mari's dad and mum, they were at an Internet Cafe and playing Bingo respectively at the mall. Finally after gathering all the troops we piled into the car and headed to Tam-awan Village. The place was quite amazing and warrants its own blog post which I'll do next.

The next day we headed to Burnham park and the kids ran around for a couple of hours. Mari's dad wanted us to visit the Botanical gardens, so we headed there next. We could not find it, and decided to goto John Hay Park. The kids wanted to go horseriding, so we rented a couple of horses and went on the trails for some time. John Hay park is definitely very nice and we could have spent a much longer time there. However we were running a bit late and had to rush to meet the rest of the group at SM mall (again!). We had a mediocre meal at Taste of Laoag (the province that mari's dad comes from) in the food court at SM Mall. PI food courts are a bit better than the ones in the US but cannot be compared to the ones in Singapore. Its hard to have a quick meal with a large group in a restaurant. We then did some handicraft shopping at Easter Weaving Room (near Tam-awan Village). Mari bought a few traditional filipino costumes for folks in NZ, her dad bought a bottle of rice wine and berry wine (which were quite good). We then headed back to Tam-awan village for a cultural show before heading back home to Bacnotan. We had a good time in Baguio and would have prefered to stay another night. However the other folks in the group wanted to head home, so home we went :(

First impressions of Phillipines ...

2008-02-02T15:17:00.000+13:00

After an uneventful flight we landed in Manila, Phillipines in the afternoon. Maya seems to have gotten over her motion sickness since she has not fallen ill the past 5 flights. Hopefully this is a thing of the past. PJ was quite tired and slept for most of the way. The Manila immigration queue reminded me of Mumbai's queue 10 years ago. Not sure why it takes folks such a long time to realize that a snake queue, with a controller at the top, is more manageable and fair rather than 10 separate queues, which tend to split up and merge as the lines lengthen, counters open / close. After some initial confusion as to where mari's dad and alex were, we were finally picked up at the passenger pickup point. We needed to book our tickets from Manila to Hong Kong, so we headed over to Cebu Pacific Air. We could not book our tickets on the internet, since their credit card processor refused to accept our credit cards. The office was relatively empty compared to the number of staff there, but the progress was super slow. It took us close to an hour to book our tix. the agent made 4 copies of 4-6 pages of our passports, we also had to sign for the receipt we received. Not sure why they need to waste so much paper. This was probably our first indication of how things happen in PI.

Due to some mixup in communication, we were scheduled to drive for another 5 hours after we landed. We were hungry and tired, so i was not really looking forward to a long unplanned road trip with the kids. Luckily the kids love mari's dad, and I was hoping he would be the savior (which he was, thanx grandpa!). We had a quick lunch at Makati (the financial capital of PI, sister city to Manila) at a fast food place (Deli France and JolliBee). This was kinda sad, since we had avoided eating at any fast food place on our trip (i don't count an udupi joint in India as fast food, though you could make a very convincing case that it is!). We then headed North towards San Fernando de la Union, which is where the tagalon clan resides (mari's mom side). The five hour trip turned out to be a bit more than 6.5 hours. We finally reached home at 10:00 pm. The kids were asleep, which helped ease the transition.

Phillipines and India are quite similar. Most of the highways are 2 lane. There is significantly less traffic in PI. However the tricycle (a motorcycle with an attachment that can seat 2-4 people) are quite dominant on the highways. These vehicles are quite slow (35 kmph) and basically get down the overall speed of the highway to their speed. These vehicles are not well lit either, so you have to careful and aware of their dim lights at night. It reminded me a bit of our Hrishikesh road trip a couple of years ago, where the bottleneck was even slower bullock carts carrying sugarcane crops.

Mari's parents have a place in Balatacon, adjacent to the highway. So there is a constant vehicle noise all times of the day and night. Luckily its not a super crowded highway, so the pollution is not as bad as mumbai. I'm typing this with a window to the highway, and hear a vehicle approx once a minute or so (at 8:40 pm at nite). The one big advantage, PI has over India is clean restrooms (they are called comfort rooms out here). A few days sampling has revealed that most/all places have pretty clean restrooms. In india, the worst part of a road trip is the unpleasant restrooms (unless it a super busy corridor and you hit a few cafe coffee days along the way). Balatacon is close to the ocean, so we were hoping to go to the beach on a regular basis. Public access to the beach is a foreign concept here. So far we have not seen any public access.

Mari's dad mentioned that he knew a doctor who lives on the beach. So we headed over to the doctor's house. The family was away, so mari's dad went in to call them from his cell. It was super hot and approx 20 mins later, the gate opened and we were granted permission to access the beach. I noticed Mari's dad sitting on the bench with his head down. This is strange behavior for him. I kep watching him and wondered what he was doing. He then got up, but could not support his own weight. I shouted to mari that her dad is sick and we rushed over and supported him. We lifted him into the car and drove towards the hospital. The car had its AC going on full blast, so was quite cool. He recovered pretty quickly and insisted we go home, rather than the hospital. He did mention he was dizzy since he took a tablet a bit late (he was supposed to have taken it the previous nite, he took it in the morning). We listened to him and went home. He looked and felt much better by the time we got home. Mari's mom insisted we get a doctor and do a home visit. So Alex, Arlene and Winnie (mari's extended family cousins) went in search of a doctor. They located and came back with a doctor an hour later. The doctor realized that he has a very low pulse and recommended he stop taking one of his pills for a temporary period of time. She also recommended he check himself into a hospital. He ignored the latter half, but did take a break for the rest of the day. PJ and Maya were quite shocked and saddened to see their grandpa fall sick and could not understand what was happening and why. Later that evening, he felt good enough to join the extended Tagalan family for a clan feast.

Food in PI is not bad, my major complaint is that its always served cold. I'm used to eating food that is piping hot, so making this transition has been quite hard. At mari's place in alameda, we always have the option of microwaving the food to heat it up, which i frequently exercise. Out here in the country, the option does not exist. I'm hoping to taste a few more delicacies from other parts of PI I suspect we'll hit a few restaurants to try these delicacies. the LP guide seems quite good in this regard. The coffee is still Nescafe, so the country needs to make a few strides in the coffee department. This opinion is very biased, since we are in a small town in PI.

We decided to goto the beach early today since it gets quite hot in the afternoon. We hit the beach by 8:00 am (after picking up a few relatives along the way). We went to Normi's resort a few km south, which also has a couple of swimming pools in the resort. We spent a large part of the morning there, had a decent breakfast before heading further south to the city of San Fernando. While the kids were playing in the playground, Mari and I took turns scouting out for good lunch places. Seems like most place in PI are "taru-taru" (point and pick), with very little food being cooked (or at least assembled) to order. We lucked out and found Midtown Manor, a fairly crowded place (high turnover hopefully means the food is more fresh). The place also had upstairs seating, where we could order food (not sure whether it was cooked, or just carted from down below. i suspect a combination of both). While we had a pretty good filipino lunch, mari's parents went to McDonald's. We had gone our separate ways since they wanted to go to PI's Costco, which we decided to pass on. Later in the evening, we visited Mari's cousin Winnie's stall in the market. She runs a pretty happening halo-halo stall in the market and has got quite a few customers (while the other shops are closed for the day). Unfortunately halo-halo has lots of crushed ice, made from ordinary water. While tempting, we had to pass on it and decided to have a treat and had a coke. Singapore and PI are the only places (so far), where i've desperately felt the need to have an ice-cool coca-cola.

We are headed to Baggio in the morning, a hill station to the east of san fernando. We are supposed to be staying at this pretty cool arts complex. more reports from there (i'll also post this entry from a cafe there). Internet in PI is super cheap. the cafe charges 20 pesos / hour, which is approx 50 cents / hour.

Trip Report: Singapore ..

2008-01-31T20:38:00.000+13:00

We left Mumbai late 26th night / early 27th morning en route to Singapore. I'd forgotten how short this flight is (4.5 hours). Kinda makes it a bit hard, since the kids do not get a decent night rest. Gaurav, a friend of my brother Stephen, offered to host us in his apartment in SG. We decided to take him up on his offer.

In retrospect, it was quite an excellent decision to stay with Gaurav. We saw life outside of Orchard Road and Marina and got to explore the non-tourist side of Singapore. The kids were thrilled since there was a small play structure within the apartment complex. Gaurav rents a fairly spacious 3 bedroom apartment in Buket Purmei. The apartment complex was built by the housing board of singapore and has probably 20 buildings or so along with a lower school etc. There is a fair amount of green space for the kids and a few play structures in the complex. We also visited my friend PMT and his family, who also live in another apartment complex on east coast parkway. This apartment complex is private and has a few more facilities, specifically a swimming pool and a gymnasium. Its also much smaller in total number of apartments compared to the HBD complex.

Spending time with another family who has kids with the same age range makes things so much easier. PMT's daughter, Sheba, is also 5 years old and goes to a Montessori school in Singapore. it was quite entertaining to see how sheba and maya would play with each other. They were very polite and shared things nicely. They seemed to agree on when it is ok to break their self made rules. Mari has taught maya the dot game (you lay down a bunch of dots and then fill them up with squares and your initial). Its quite a easy game to teach and play but does provide endless hours of amusement and fun for the kids. We had an excellent lunch at a seafood place on East Coast Parkway (Red ???). PMT thinks that all the places there are similar. We ordered a chilli crab, a black pepper and garlic crab, fried rice, chinese brocolli with ginger and some fried bread. The bread with the chilli crab sauce was most excellent (one of the top 10 dishes of our trip!). The pepper and garlic crab was interesting but lacked the sauce (which IMO is quite important).

We then played at ECP for a few hours, watched some surf boarding at the man made lake there and saw lots of planes land at Changhi (amazing as to how busy that airport is!). We then went for a quick swim in the complex before heading to Chinatown night market. The kids were quite exhausted (not a lot of sleep the previous nite on the plane), and we had to carry them and give them a couple of good sugar drinks (coconut water and watermelon juice). The food at the chinatown night market (on smith street) was quite excellent. We got peanut/sesame ball soup, chicken porridge and fried noodles (char kway theo?). You need a big group to eat at such places, too many choices for a small group.

The next day we went and visited our good friends at the NZ immigration office. Compared to LA consulate, this office was very busy and quite slow. We waiting for 30 minutes before seeing the person. Unforunately our files had not yet been transferred. The person was nice enough to call our case officer (JD) in Christchurch, who immediately fixed the situation.Good thing that SG and NZ are relatively close from a timezone perspecitve (+5.5 hours). We were asked to wait for 30 mins and so we decided to head down to Food Republicj in Wasim Atria for a quick singaporean breakfast. We had a great breakfast at Toastbox (toast with eggs in a sweet soy sauce and white pepper). The other places at Food Republic seemed quite good also. We did want to have lunch there, but unforunately, we could not hang out in that area forever since shopping is the main and only attraction on Orchard Road. The much advertised and signed aquarium in Wasim Atria / Ngee Anh City is basically a large fish tank at the basement of the building. We then picked up the visas and headed to the zoo. We wanted the kids to experience the SG subway system, so we took them to the zoo on the subway. Maya has a slight aversion to subway's after seeing kurund miss the subway in NY. We finally convinced her it was ok, and off we went.

SG zoo is a must visit. Its quite amazing to see how kids change as they grow older. We've taken the kids to the zoo multiple times in the past. This time it seemed a bit different. Maya was really curious about some of the animals. It helped that the male lion got into a fight with the female lions and scratched one of them pretty badly and prevented the lioness from getting any feed. PJ was quite upset with the male lion. One of the trainers explained that the male lion gets teased a lot by the lionesses and hence reacts that way when his patience runs out. PJ seemed to relate to the situation (she likes to tease maya a lot, and maya gets mad at her periodically), but insisted that in her case it is very different. After playing in the park they wanted to go back and visit the lions again. They also liked seeing the other cats. The orangutans and chimpanzees also put on a good show for us. We convinced the kids to pose for a picture with the orangutans. The camera uses a wireless card to store the image on a computer at the picture desk (a few meters away). So you get the picture pretty much immediately after its clicked. Pretty cool use of technology. A new kids park / animal rides is being constructed at SG Zoo and this is scheduled to open in June 2008. Kinda cool to see them making things even better. The kids were having so much fun at the zoo, that we had a mediocre lunch at the zoo and played there till a bit past 5:00 pm. We arranged to meet our friends PMT and family at their house and then head to the hawker / food court at Vivocity, a new mall in SG. The Vivocity foodcourt was very mediocre. We had some decent dim sum and a collection of different noodle dishes. We over ordered a bit for the kids, and then ended up eating that food. In retrospect, we should have headed to a more historic / renowned hawker area like Maxwell, Newton or the more recent Glutton Bay (near esplanade).

We had an early flight the next day morning. We got to the airport well in advance and hoped to find a good breakfast spot at the airport. I was not aware that the better eating spots are in the public areas, while the transit area has the more mediocre places. We ended up eating an awful masala dosa and chai from Kaveri. The kids had inari and tamago from a sushi boat place. there were quite amused by the sushi going in a circle. There was a pretty cool block art area for kids and adults at the airport. We spent some time there before we boarded the plane to Manila, for our final leg of the journey.

Eating adventures in India ..

2008-01-29T04:16:00.000+13:00

Its a bit sad, but its kinda hard to try out new and different food places with kids. In general eating out with kids on a regular basis is hard. It took a fair amount of time for maya to get comfortable in Mumbai. It did not help that we would take a trip out of Mumbai every other week. PJ on the other hand was willing to go with anyone who offered to take her. That said here are some of the places we ate at (and liked) in India. You'll need to check the Times food guide for address / hours. The places are listed in the likability order:

Cafe Madras in Matunga, Mumbai. Good dosas and absolutely the best filter coffee. They also have good banana chips, chaklis and great halwa for sale.
Mahesh Lunch home near Khadi Bunder, Mumbai. Great seafood preparation. the fried prawns with garlic was divine. The stuffed pomfret and butter garlic crab were not bad. Bob had a great dining experience at Trishna, which is mahesh'smore expensive and fancier offshoot.
Mitre Samaj in Udupi. The best snack place in Udupi. Great dosas, decent coffee
Jaihind in Parel, Mumbai (near ST bus stand). Good fresh seafood at reasonable / cheap prices. Limited menu. The fried prawns was excellent as was the stuffed masala pomfret. If price is included in the rating, Jaihind beats Mahesh very easily (the price is a third of Mahesh)
Badshah Kulfi House at Crawford Market, Mumbai. Good pau baji and badshahi kulfi (dont get the royal falooda)
Madhuvan Village, Mangalore. Decent food for that area, crappy service.
Elko Pani Puri in Bandra
Wild Grass lodge in Kaziranga, Assam. The assamese food at this place was quite good!
House of Sushi. Takeout sushi made by Ravina in Mumbai (check TOI food guide). The rolls need a bit more filling and less rice. Unfortunately she does not have any raw fish rolls :( but the rolls she does have are quite good
Ratan Tata Institute (RTI). We've gotten snacks from this place and have wolfed them down (might have been because we were super hungry). The pattice and quiche are not spicy and the kids love it.
La Pattisserie in Taj Mumbai for birthday cakes.

Places that we'll probably skip the next time include Caravan Serai, Ideal Cafe, Noodle Bar, Baghdadi. Bade Mia seems to have lost its charm for me (or i really dont care for kebabs a lot). I was not impressed by the various biryani providers either (Olympia, Noorani, Lucky, Jeff's caterers). My aunt (annie aunty) makes a better biryani than all the above providers :)

And finally we can go back to NZ ...

2008-01-29T04:01:00.000+13:00

For most of the trip our final destination was always a bit in suspense!. We could not enter NZ unless our residency application was successful or immigration figured out how to get us a temporary visa (since we had hit our limit of a max stay of 12 months / 24 months).

Our legal team (Karsten and Julie from NZ Immigration Concepts) did a great job, filed all the papers soon after we handed it to him and followed up with the immigration department on a regular basis. We were fortunate to get a very understanding officer (i'll use the initials JD, since i'd like to avoid mentioning the name of the person) look at our papers. All things fell in place at just the right time. We recd a letter a week before we left India about an interview in Christchurch before our application could be finalized. We explained to JD over email about our situation and our unsuccessful try at getting a visa at the LA embassy.

At this point, JD suggested it might be easier to do a phone interview and potentially finalize the application immediately. This would enable us to bypass the entire visa application process and get a residence permit (and returning resident visa). We had the phone interview last tuesday on our way to the web access office. We clarified a few things with JD and seemed satisfied with the answers. There was a minor hitch, since she was not aware that we were working full time on CiviCRM and assumed we would be looking for a job. We exchanged some more email and on thursday we recd our residence permit via email. We paid out migrant levy fees and confirmed that we would obtain the permit in Singapore. We got the permit on our passports earlier today at the NZ immigration office in SG.

Overall it was an incredibly smooth and excellent process. We managed to get the residence permit in approx 5 months which is quite cool considering the amount of paperwork and back and forth that needed to happen. Being able to talk directly to your case officer is so beneficial and smooths the process a lot. The Bureau of Immigration in the US might want to learn a bit from their NZ counterparts :)

So the uncertainty is off, and kinda glad to know that we can stick to our original plans and go back to cool Nelson. Hopefully we have not missed most of the summer. We are off to PI in the morning

Things to do / food to eat with kids in Mumbai

2008-01-25T23:44:00.000+13:00

(most of this is from maya and PJ and what they liked doing in mumbai)

Cooperage Pony Park (south mumbai)
Mumbai Port Trust Joggers Park
Chowpatty beach in the morning (its clean and deserted)
Bandra bandstand park (on the water). The promenade walk is a couple of km's and has three playgrounds along the way and a Cafe Coffee Day at the end of the promenade.
jechand talakshi toys (51 empire bldg, above mcdonalds at VT). A great selection of montessori based teaching materials.
nehru science center, museum and planetorium. We did not get time to visit this, but it was high on our list
Skip Byculla Zoo, Taraporevala Aquarium and Aquaria (unless u want to buy some aquarium supplies)
Balodyan a playground for kids and women ONLY. This is near charni road station

Food and restaurants that are kid friendly

Cholle Bhatura from Cream Center
Natural IceCream
Kulfi Falooda at Badshah (near crawford market)
Sada (Plain) Dosa at any Udupi restaurant
Pani Puri at Elko's (bandra). The kids can experiment and make their own pani puris and decide what goes in each puri
Fresh Lime Soda or Lassi in any restaurant. A good alternative to water and not too unhealthy (if u regulate the amount of sweet syrup u add)
Some snacks (chicken pattice, veggie quiche) from RTI (ratan tata institute, colaba)
The bakeries carry quite good bread. We've bought good bread from Birdy's and CeleJour. La Pattisserie makes excellent cakes. Maya chose a chocolate truffle cake for her birthday which was very good

Trip Report: Mangalore ...

2008-01-25T20:20:00.000+13:00

On our return from Guwahati, Assam we spent a couple of days in Mumbai. We attended Claudian's wedding (which was quite grand) in Mumbai, before we headed down south to my mom's native place, Mangalore. We always look forward to going to Mangalore. The weather is very nice, the beaches quite clean and the water warm. The traffic is also quite minimal (relatively speaking).

The airlines in India like to serve good food even on a short flight. We flew Jet airways to Mangalore and the service/food was quite good and similar to Kingfisher. There are some new cheap no-frills airlines which have started recently (Indigo, Spice Jet, Air Deccan etc) similar to the Southwest model. However, unlike the US there is no passenger bill of rights. So if there is a long delay, these airlines will cancel their flight. The passenger is then left to fend for themselves. We had this experience when the Pune->Mumbai train was cancelled and each passenger had to fend for themselves.

Mangalore is pretty close to the Kerala border in South India. The scenery is very green and lush year round. There are lots and lots of coconut trees and there is a decent sized river every 10 kms or so. Typically the river and the town share the same name (mulki, udayawar, katapadi). Similar rivers across the state boundary in Kerala have a thriving houseboat tourist industry. We had done a one day houseboat trip near Bektal, Kerala two years ago. I think one day was a good amount of time, it gets kinda boring at the end, and there is only so much scenery you can look at and admire.

When we got to Shankerpura, we gave the kids a bucket of water and let them play in the front yard (aangaan). The kids can spend days just playing like this. We managed to keep the kids entertained and snuck out to the big town of Udupi. We visited our favorite Udupi restaurant (Mitre Samaj near Krishna temple) and then took the bus back home. Mari and the kids went with my brother Frank to Coondapura on the second day, while I attempted to recover from a mild cold and fever. The third day we went to our aunt Sunita's place in Mulki. Her brother, Peter, drives us around when we are in mangalore. They have a great place in Mulki, adjacent to the confluence of the Mulki river and the Arabian Sea. They have built a new house in the past year and have a good 2 bedroom apartment on the first floor for guests and visitors. We are sending our friends Michal and Piotr on a 5 day trip to Mulki and environment later next week. I suspect they'll have lots of photographs. If anyone is interested in staying at Mulki at Peter's place, you can him at: +9194481 04396. There are lots and lots of beaches (most of them clean) around that area (Surathkal, New Mangalore Port, Kapu, Malpe, Ullal).

The next day we took all the kids, Ashwita, Allan, Anita, Maya and PJ to a water park near Mangalore (Manasa water park). We had a lot of fun on the various water slides. However, there the kids school was also going to be at the park later that day. So the kids were a bit on edge, as any group of kids sent them into scurrying away since they thought it was their school. This turned out to be wrong a few too many times, before we decided to pack up and leave. We had lunch at Madhuvan on the airport road. Its got pretty good manglorean style seafood. It also had spaghetti with olives which our kids devoured (it was a wee bit spicy!).

We spent the last couple of days just hanging out at home and playing with the kids. Mari started teaching the kids baseball. We used a 2 liter coke bottle as the bat and the kids collapsible ball as the baseball. It was good fun watching Maya and PJ trying to figure out the various mechanics of how to hit the ball. Its quite interesting to see how all these small things add up in the development of a kid. Its amazing how many things we take for granted :)

four different kids, four different personalities ...

2008-01-13T06:32:00.000+13:00

we just 5 days with Amitav and Nandini in Assam. It was quite entertaining to see the kids interact with each other over a decent period of time and how different each one is. Here are some of my thoughts on each kid and their parents (i'll try to be politically correct and postive)

Both Maya and Amitav are moody. Amitav goes in and out of moods quite quickly. He rebounds quite nicely from a down mood. Maya switches moods less often, but she takes a long time to get back into a good swing
PJ is always upbeat. She is very binary. She's either charging full steam ahead (1) or she is sleeping (0).
Nandini and Maya knows exactly what they want and when. They get quite upset if things dont match what they expect. Maya being older, is a bit more logical and is right most of the times
Maya and PJ are two very different creatures. Maya is like a cat, who does what she wants to do. PJ is more like a dog, who can be influenced to do things. Maya is sensitive, PJ is more thick skinned. Maya gets upset even if you just raise your voice when talking to her. PJ is always thinking of how she can get by with eating less good food and more sweets. PJ seems to be a very carrot-stick kind of kid
PJ and Nandini get along very very well. They are the best of friends most of the time and are always holding hands and cuddling each other. Its interesting to listen to their conversations, since they are always talking about two totally different things on two different topics. Hence there is really no need to disagree with the other person
Mari and I have very different playing styles and conversations with the kids. Mari is much more creative and language oriented and can get the kids to sing / talk in various languages and pass time away in a car. I look to the environment and things around me to figure out what can be done to keep the kids amused and entertained. Mari had a great conversation with Amitav on the way back from Tezpur where they talked about everything from Pokemon to shopping at Target. My conversations with Amitav are much shorter and each of us trying to get the better of the other.
Mrinal has a very quiet peaceful way of dealing with the kids. He never seems to get angry or mad at them. Smita spins things in a very different way than us. She managed to convince PJ not to suck her thumb for 5 sleeps in the car.
PJ adores crowds and attention. She loves people cuddling and kissing her. Maya is not very comfortable in crowds (like her parents). She clings to us a bit more in the presence of strangers.

Trip Report: Guwahati / Kaziranga National Park, Assam

2008-01-12T15:06:00.000+13:00

We just got back from a 6 day trip to Guwahati, Assam. We stayed with our friends: Smita, Amitav, Nandini and Mrinal. The two sets of kids and parents get along quite well with each other. I went to school with Mrinal at REC Warangal more than 20 years back (yes, we are old!) and always wanted to goto Assam and the Northeast. So to some extent this was fulfilling an old dream of mine.

We flew on a kingfisher flight from Mumbai to Guwahati. I suspect this is one of the longest flights in India. Going there was more than an hour faster than coming back, most likely due to the west -> east winds. Also for some reason the flight did not cross Bangladesh, at least on the map crossing Bangladesh seems the best route. On the way over, we gave Maya a Dramamine tablet for her motion sickness. It did do the job quite nicely, but also had the unpleasant side-effect of making her feel wierd (and hence cranky) for the next 12 hours. On the way back we decided to limit food intake and skip the drugs. This did work, but made her a bit queasy after the flight landed and hence not a very happy camper either :(. I suspect we'll skip the drugs for the next couple of flights.

Smita's parents have a great place with a lots of space on the yard and rooftop. This was quite a treat for our kids after being enclosed in an apartment in Mumbai. We spent the first day just playing various games on the terrace. The next day, we rented a tata sumo and set off for kaziranga national park. From a distance perspective, its relatively close to Guwahati (210 km / 110 miles). However, this being India the trip took us pretty close to six hours. India is making progress at an incredible rate. Will be good indeed when the traffic moves at a significantly faster rate and you can cover distances in reasonable time.

We stayed at Wild Grass Resort in Kaziranga. We got in at approx 4:00 pm on Monday and decided to take it easy and let the kids run around. The resort is great for kids since there is lots of running space and some swings / badminton set etc. In summer, I suspect the swimming pool is also open. We had all our meals there, and the food felt like home cooking. We had some traditional assamese dishes and there were a few hits and misses. We signed up for the elephant ride the next morning and a jeep safari in the afternoon. The kids enjoyed both events and found it quite thrilling to be on the elephant (pictures coming soon). We were quite pleasantly surprised to watch Maya enjoy the jeep tour. She was the only kid to be awake for the entire tour. She was also the kid who complained the most about the long car rides. So kinda nice to see her realize that there is some benefit of being in a vehicle.

Kaziranga lived upto its reputation and we saw abundant wildlife other than tigers. There were quite a few one horned rhinocerous, wild buffaloes, deer, sambal, jungle fowl and wild swine. In contrast we just saw one mother/baby rhinocerous on a trip to Chitwan National Park (in nepal) 8 years ago. The population growth is nice and linear for all species in the Park. India's parks are more like reserves / sanctuaries. There were no hiking trails within the park that we could explore with kids. Adding some hiking trails in various parks would allow people to spend a lot more time within the park. I suspect this will also allow poachers much easier access, so there are some disadvantages :(

We drove back to Guwahati on Wednesday via Tezpur. The DK guide led us to Cole Park there which was a very welcome spot for the kids. The park is well designed in a limited space and the play structures are not bad. We then drove back to Smita's parents house with a short snack/dinner break. The car ride was a wee bit too long. Mrinal's answer was its two more hours to home irrespective of the distance travelled

On thursday we visited Guwahati zoo which is spread across quite a few acres. Significantly better than Mumbai's pathetic Byculla Zoo (which we refuse to take out kids to!). We saw quite a few elephants, some cats, a couple of tigers and a brown bear. The kids were in a perpetual state of hunger, for snacks we gave them digestive biscuits (none of the adults had read the label very carefullty). After a couple of hours at the zoo, we headed to Beatrix in town. We had the Indian-Chinese food there while the kids had a chicken / fish burger. The food was not bad, and a good change from all the Indian food we've been eating the past 3 weeks. The digestive biscuits seemed to have done the job quite nicely, since all the kids had to use the bathroom. Each kid seemed to take their own sweet time and were occupying the potty for 15 minutes or so. We shared quite a few amusing (and disgusting) potty stories while we waited the next hour. We were having a pretty early lunch, so we had the top room, and more importantly the bathroom all to ourselves.

After lunch we trooped over to the Assam State Museum and learnt a bit more about the various assamese tribes. The kids did seem interested in seeing the various model villages and other activities. Would be good if they had some hands on activities. The bathrooms were beyond disgusting and we headed to the nearest cafe coffee day. Yes, it does seem we spend a lot of time in bathrooms :). We then played at the park across from the museum.

The final day we went to Nehru Children's park which is supposed to open at 10:00 am but in reality opens at 10:30 am. The play structures were ok, but it has a pretty cool maze and we spent 30-45 minutes playing hide and seek there. It was just perfect for the younger kids. We then headed to Dynasty, Guwahati's premier hotel and restaurant. The Indian restaurant was not open, and we had to settle for the breakfast menu at Chopstix. The food was passable but the service was pretty pathetic. The food took forever to make, even a simple plain dosa :( We asked for the cheque which took even more time than the food to arrive. We managed to get out of there just in time to catch the plane back home to Mumbai

The good and bad of Mumbai / India ...

2008-01-04T16:05:00.000+13:00

We've been in India a bit more than a week and its quite amazing as to the city evolve and change with the times. Here are a few things which we love about mumbai

The three essential books that any tourist / family should have are: The Times of India Food Guide, TimeOut Mumbai Kids Guide, Outlook Weekend Guide (you can get a copy specific to the big five/six indian cities)
Thanx to the above books, we had pretty good sushi rolls from House of Sushi, got a few good cheeses from a cheese shop in Crawford Market, discovered a few new parks in the Colaba area and a small aquarium in the Bandra area. Kinda nice that we can get everything out here, kinda sad that it took us so long to discover these places
The food as always is amazing and so so so tasty. There are so many places we want to eat at and we probably wont even eat at a fraction of them. Its a bit more difficult to eat out with kids at night (jet lag, getting them on schedule etc)
Maya says that her favorite activity is playing at Chowpatty beach. We tend to go early in the morning to avoid the crowds and that has been working quite well
Hanging out with friends and family is always a treat. The cousins get along well with each other (most of the time)
The joggers park in various parts of the city is a nice place to get away from it all (especially the one in colaba)
Traffic discipline is so much better and gets better every year. Drivers do stop at red light at night these days (some of the time).
The city is so much cleaner. Fining people for littering is a good thing :)

And for a few things we do not like about the city

The traffic sucks. We've been doing better this time and planning our trips during non-peak hours.
The poverty and seeing all the kids in the street is hitting me much harder this time. Its sad, and there does not seem you can do that much. This does not mean you should not do anything :)
Crossing a street with kids is an adventure and/or a video game (depending on your outlook in life). Drivers still refuse to stop even if you try to make eye contact (not that traffic is moving very fast)
The parks / playgrounds have very strange hours. They are open in the morning and evenings only. What do we do during the day folks? We like to play all day and all night :)
Bob C does not like the short ceiling height of the taxi cabs. He is 6'2'', which is significantly taller than the average indian :)
Its a bit hard and frustrating dealing with St. Catherine's. While we are very grateful to them for raising PJ and giving us the opportunity to adopt her, its been real hard to schedule/plan any visits. Simple etiquette of taking messages and returning phonecalls is a foreign concept. Hopefully we'll be able to visit a few more times before we leave

A visit to St. Catherine's

2008-01-02T03:01:00.000+13:00

As most of you know we adopted PJ (Pranjali) from St. Catherine's close to two years ago. The adoption process was quite interesting and fairly long and deserves a seperate blog post of its own. At that point, we did not really get a chance to see the place where PJ spent the first twenty months of her life. We had decided to go back and spend some more time out there when we visited India the next time.

We went back and visited St. Catherine's on Dec 28th. It was a wonderful experience and I'm so glad that we did it. St. Catherine's is part of PJ's life and she was looking forward to the visit. She knows pretty much all what we know about the place (which is not a whole lot), but she does remember Sr. Helen and all the chocolates she gave PJ. Sr. Helen was on vacation, so we coordinated with the Sr. Superior (Sr. Udaya) for the visit.

We went at 3:30 pm when the kids were waking up from their afternoon nap and ready to start the afternoon session. There were approx 30-35 kids with at least 16 infants including an 8 day old baby. It was quite nice to see a very high staff to kid ratio. There was approx 1 staff for every 2 infants and 1 staff for every 3 toddlers. It was nice to see how they raise the kids and the kids interaction with each other. There were a couple of kids at the place that reminded us of PJ.

Quite a few of the staff remembered PJ and were very happy to see her. We met some of PJ's primary caregivers and made sure we got some photographs and names of them so we can have some more details of the PJ story. PJ was probably a bit overwhelmed at the visit and for the first part was very very quiet and stayed relatively close to Mari and me. There were a couple of kids who were there when PJ was there, so there was a mini reunion. The two kids who were still there were handicapped and hence i suspect they were still there. I did feel a bit sad for them, but they are also getting really good care from a great group of sisters and staff. PJ got a bit more playful as the day progressed but was still quite reserved compared to her normal self. We will visit St. Catherine's a few more times before we leave and hopefully she will get used to it and enjoy the experience and interact with some of the folks who took care of her a lot more. There was a movie screening that night, so we left a bit earlier than expected. All the kids were quite excited to go see a movie. In addition to the kids orphanage, they also operate quite a few other services for abused and hiv children.

We were pleasantly surprised to see one solar street light which they are testing. We'll probably get them to install quite a few more for the rest of the complex. It also seems to be lacking a good play structure for the smaller kids. We'll probably chat with the sisters about both these projects

Knitting in Nelson

2007-12-27T21:57:00.000+13:00

When winter greeted Nelson, it was especially freezing for a California family whose warmest jacket was made of recycled plastic bottles. One sunny clear morning as the kids were riding to school in a warm heated car, I got on my bicycle and rode down the hill and headed for the city. Not even down the first hill, my bare knuckles and face were splashed with freezing air. I thought of going back home, but the idea of having to walk up my bike on the steepest hill of my bike ride convinced me to continue riding to the city.

My body warmed up from biking, but my knuckles were cracked, brittle and dry. When I finished my errands in town, all I could think about on my bike ride home was that I needed to go wool shopping. Our first month in Nelson was spent exploring random places. One of the random places we visited was Grape Escape. Coincidentally we visited on Grape Escape's 10th Anniversary. I think it was 10th but was definitely an anniversary. There was a jumpy castle in addition to balloons and play structures. Also, child size picnic tables alongside regular size picnic tables.

Next to Grape Escape Cafe were about 6 other shops. One shop that i especially liked was Cruellas. The yarn is locally knit and dyed. The scarf and poncho I ended up buying was made with a combination of wool and alpaca. It was super soft and after removing the poncho, I wanted to put it back on because it was warm, and light in weight rather than bulky. Cruellas also offers instruction once a week for $10. The insruction is on what ever project you want help on. Included in the fee is tea, coffee and baked treats. I've never been to the tea and instruction but saw the baked cakes on the table and it looked very tempting.

The coffee at the cafe is pretty good and definitely a good idea if you want to enjoy a coffee while the kids are running around the play structures.

Zurich trip report

2007-12-25T09:34:00.000+13:00

Zurich Trip Report

The dramamine did work :). However it did not put her to sleep as I expected. So mari and maya spent a large part of the flight doing various painting and cutting projects. It was a short 7 hour flight across the pond (atlantic) and we landed in a cold frosty zurich early saturday morning. We flew Swiss Air for the first time. Air NZ and Singapore airlines spoil you a fair amount (video on demand, good travel pack for the kids). Swiss Air did not meet their high standards. However the child meal was not too bad (veggies, mashed potatoes, chicken strips).

We did not have to fill any of the stupid custom/immigration forms that most countries make you fill up. So customs/passport control was a breeze, we got our bags and headed off to rent a car. Rented a car from EuropCar along with a GPS navigation unit (which is so so useful). We typically tend to avoid renting cars for short trips, but for some strange reason, I figured a car might not be a bad idea on this trip.

We drove to the youth hostel near Lake Zurich and checked in. Had our first cup of bad, weak coffee at the hostel. We love the common spaces that are so common in hostels but unknown in hotels. The common space and steps saved us the next two nights. We then headed off to Shopville/RailCity which we assumed would be indoors. We also assumed there would be some activities for kids as advertised. We were wrong on both counts :(. We did spend a few hours there moving constantly between the semi-cold and very-cold places. The kids had a sausage for lunch while mari and I shared an excellent mozarella tomato sandwich and a good latte. After a quick afternoon nap, we then headed to Planet Magica which is an indoor playground for kids (similar to Chipmunks). The kids bounced around for two-three hours before we headed back to the hostel. Maya was jetlagged and did not want to goto sleep. So mari and i took turns doing various projects with her. We finally made her climb the steps in the hostel (5 floors) a few times to tire her out. She finally went to bed at 12:00 am or so. PJ seemed to have had her rest by this time and decided to get up. Luckily for us, we coerced PJ to go back to sleep after an hour or so. Maya had two semi-big falls from the bunk bed at nite which made things even more interesting. As parents, you need to deal with the combined jet lag of you and your kids, which makes travel even more fun and interesting. Hopefully it will be a bit better in India.

The next day we went to Kinder City (older kids should check out technorama) and spent a few hours there. Its quite a large indoor spot with lots of interactive activities. Its a bit like exploratorium. Maya got a bit car sick and was not well for the first couple of hours. She finally threw up and then felt much better. The cleaning staff at the museum were not very pleased with us :( (obviously they dont have kids!). We had a great thin crust cheese pizza at kinder city. Maya and PJ then enjoyed the big kids exhibits for another hour or so. There were additional activities like bread making, dinosaur sand blocks, chocolate making which we had to skip, since we did not know how good/bad maya felt. Its quite amazing to watch her bounce right back and continue playing before/after she is sick. Zurich is really cold (-2 degree cent), so we cannot spend a lot of time outside. We have a fair amount of warm clothing but dont have all the things like mittens and ear muffs etc. The kids start freezing and are unhappy after 5-10 minutes outside.

Our next destination was trampolino, an indoor playground similar to planet magica but much bigger. It was also quite crowded, but the kids had a great time jumping and doing various activities. Its kinda cool to see them persevere in various things and keep trying till they get it. For one of the slides, i had to jump in and help them climb up. We hoped to exhaust them before bedtime. Unfortunately, i did not have time to do any research with regard to food places, so we did not really eat any good swiss food. PJ was also quite tired by 6:30 pm or so, which made getting dinner outside even more difficult. We got some good bread/cheese/smoked fish/salmon roe/meatloaf from the grocery store (coop is one big chain, migros is the other) and had a pretty good dinner. Gave the kids a bath to get them in the sleepy mood. This worked great for PJ who was out by 8:00 pm. Maya stated that she was not tired but was kind enough to keep herself entertained for the next hour or so. She ended up making a fair amount of noise which woke PJ up and now we had 2 jet lagged kids to deal with. Once again, the common spaces in the hostel and the steps saved us. After making the kids climb up and down three times and a few games in the lobby, we headed back to sleep for a couple of hours before we got on the flight to Mumbai.

We had to get to the airport a bit early, since we had to find our way there and to the rental car return. We also take our time to feed the kids at the airport, do lots of postcards with them and in general get them physically and mentally tired (hence i can type this blog post, while they snore next to me!). Maya was nice enough to remind us of her "dramamine" medicine, even though she does not like chewing the tablet.

Onto India and more fun travels. We'll start using some of the home schooling material that we've lugged half way across the world. More home schooling stories coming up in future blog posts.

New York trip report ..

2007-12-25T09:27:00.000+13:00

We flew into new york on dec 18th on United. The flight was quite comfortable and turbulent free. However, Maya got sick on the plane, for the third time in a row and threw up. I suspect plane travel does not sit well with her. The kids decided I was their favorite parent and wanted to sit next to me the entire time. We had a 3-1 seat configuration and mari got to chill for some time. We spent most of the time playing melissa and doug's pattern travel game. Its a bit too easy for maya, so will need to get her something more challenging for the next flight.

We spoke to a pediatrician in New York, who recommended we give her Dramamine before take off which will dull her balance sensors (they are behind the ear). They seemed to have worked well so far (writing this on the Zurich->Mumbai flight). However, she did throw up on a car trip yesterday when we did not give her Dramamine.

This has been our first trip with two kids who are grown up (relatively speaking). Its a lot of work with kids at this age which makes travel quite hard and different. When the kids were younger, we could carry them on backpacks and pretty much do things we liked, wander the city, stop at cafes etc. At this age, we think more about what activities will entertain and educate the kids. So we basically hunt for discovery / exploratorium museum equivalents in various cities. Both New York and Zurich will be cold this time of the year and will limit any outside activities

We got into NY late friday. The kids were glad to be in a spacious one bedroom apartment and we spent the evening doing various projects. Mari, Lara and Frank went to dinner at Frank's Italian restaurant in the East Village and came back with a pretty good report. The next morning, i had an excellent CiviCRM meetup with some of our users and consultants. The kids wanted to stay at home and do school, which is what Mari did using some of the home schooling material we have. We went for lunch to Momafuke, the noodle bar in east village. We got the sashimi appetizer, the hot mushroom bun and the squid salad. The squid salad was exceptional and definitely worth getting. The other two appetizers were quite ordinary and a bit disappointing. The portion size seemed a bit small. For the main courses, Mari got the chicken ramem, kurund got the shrimp and rice, and I got the pork and poached egg ramen. All three courses were quite good and devoured by us (with some help from the kids). The pork pieces were quite fatty (which makes the soup tasty). Its kinda ironic that restaurants are going back to using the "good parts" of an animal to prepare food. This is quite common in my Mom's home cookin. We then took Metro North to visit Kavya, Esha, Suhrud and Chayya. We had a delicious indian meal at their place (baingan bharta, cholle and upside down veggies). The kids took care of themselves for most of the visit. Kinda nice that the kids can entertain themselves at this age.

The next morning we headed to the Museum of Natural History (MNH). We met Mari's cousin, Rona there. On our way there we managed to lose Kurund in the subway. For the next three hours, the kids were quite sad and kept mentioning that Kurund is lost and they will not meet him again. It did not help that MNH is a very hands off museum (see, read but dont touch) and the kids got bored there pretty quickly. MNH does have a discovery center which is open ONLY from 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm. Not sure why such a large museum has such limited hours for something which all small kids like. MNH was very crowded and the noise level was so so high, seemed like all schools in NY decided to visit it that day (or so it felt). Overall MNH is not a great museum for kids under 5, IMO. The one thing that did excite the kids for 30 mins or so was the evolution of man (from chimpanzee to neanderthal to man). Maya went around checking which one was male and which was female. PJ was quite happy to see monkeys.

We then went over to Time Warner Center for lunch at Bouchon Bakery. We were a large group and bought food from the takeaway. The menu is quite limited and we tasted most items on the menu. The sandwiches (tuna salad, roast beef, turkey, vegetarian) were made on some great bread and the quality of ingredients was high. The focacia sandwich was the tastiest which yummy bacon on top :). The desserts (macaroons, chocolate chip cookie and chocolate cake) met our high standards. The chocolate cake was as good as any of the chocolate stuff from tartine, if not a wee bit better.

We then visited Elin Waring and Manhattan Country School (MCS). Elin has deployed CiviCRM at MCS. MCS is a small progressive school on Upper West Side. Diversity in NY is so so different than diversity in San Francisco. While all the SF schools make a strong attempt at being diverse, it still means that 60% of the kids are white. The kids at MCS were like a mini-UN (borrowed from lara's description of a subway car in NY). Visiting MCS made me think that staying in NY for the spring / summer / fall might not be a bad idea (assuming we figure out what we will do with the kids education). NY in winter might be a wee bit too cold for my liking. Our final destination of the day was Manhasset, Long Island. We took LIRR and the kids entertained (or tortured) the other passengers by playing phone the entire ride over (30 mins). We had another great indian meal (alu gobi, dhal and shrimp curry) and the kids used frank as a jumping bag.

The next morning we had coffee and breakfast at Araca (with lara and rona) on 7th Avenue. This place (another Lara find) was started by someone who worked at Blue Bottle Coffee in the Bay Area. The coffee was obviously quite excellent and the food was very good (poached eggs on fry bread, chile poblano sandwich with avocado salsa, egg and potato quiche). This place was so so small that only 4-5 people could stand inside at any given time. There is a bench outside so we rotated people and food from inside to outside on a regular basis (was quite cold that morning). We then headed to Children's Museum of Manhattan (we wanted to goto Children's museum of art, which opened a bit too late for us, 12:00 pm). I took a 90 minute walk along the riverfront while the kids enjoyed the museum. We also purchased some Kapla blocks as a present. Seems quite an interesting set and we'l probably purchase a set for our kids when we get back home. We were running a bit late and to mine (and rona's) disappointment we had to skip Katz and settled for H&H bagels and cream cheese for lunch.

Now off on another plane ride to Zurich. Maya is getting a bit tired of planes and has mentioned a few times she does not want to get on a plane to goto europe. The postcard game is quite entertaining (and a great diversion) and we spent an hour or so writing postcards to all our friends in NZ and other parts of the world.

The evolution of Maya and PJ

2007-12-16T18:41:00.001+13:00

Its kinda cool to see a kid grow up and evolve. We've seen quite a few changes in Maya since PJ became part of the family close to two years ago. Its fascinating to see how they interact with each other and how maya has adapted in how she deals with PJ. Initially, there was the timid Maya who did not really know what to do with PJ. These days, we see a Maya who gets on the offensive a bit more than needed. PJ knows maya's soft spots and does not hesitate to use them at times. Not sure if its the younger kid syndrome, or PJ's character, but she does like to needle maya. Most of her attempts are when she thinks no one's watching. Unfortunately for PJ, maya does not take this lying down any more. So fireworks typically follow such outings. Kinda reminds me of the line of control between india and pakistan.

With PJ's influence (or so i think), maya has become more social and interacts with people more easily. She had two children sessions by herself at two schools in SF recently. She enjoyed both the sessions quite a bit, and had a pretty distinct spring in her step after the second session at Live Oak. However, when we visited the other two schools where PJ is also a potential student, Maya was quite reserved and was glued to our sides. Mari's theory is that Maya thought it was little children's work since PJ was there, and hence did not participate

Maya has taken an interest in computers these days. We've started spending some time on a computer and she sits on my lap typing the various numbers and alphabets. We then do a bit of spelling on the computer where she decides what words she wants to spell. Today she decided she wanted to learn how to spell stinky and yucky. She seems to find great humor in this.

Another fascinating topic for her these days is death and dying. Need to do a bit of research on what our responses should be, but we do have good conversation about this. She mentioned earlier today that only people died and animals did not. Mari explained to her that a pig had to die for her ham and cheese pastry earlier today and fish need to be sacrificed for her sushi dinners.

The private school admission experience ...

2007-12-16T18:19:00.000+13:00

So we've applied to 4 private schools (San Francisco School, San Francisco Friends, Children's Day School and Live Oak) in San Francisco. The supply / demand curve is completely out of whack, and as such there are approx 100-200 applicants for approx 10 spots. We have PJ who's applying for the age 4 slot, where typically schools have between 0-2 vacancies. As such, i suspect our chances at those schools (SF and CDS) is quite low. Our chances at the other schools is probably a bit higher. The schools were very accomodating and scheduled us for both parent and kid interviews before we took off. That does give us some hope :)

These four schools are part of the group of small progressive schools in san francisco. Overall the type of education they offer is quite similar across the schools. Differentiated education, small class size (approx 8-12 kids / teacher), focus on arts and music, emphasis on the environment and community, a focus on diversity at multiple levels (ethnic, income and family orientation).

Last year we visited SF school and I was quite impressed with it. This year, i had a slightly different outlook. Maya and PJ attend Richmond Montessori, an excellent program in NZ. The teachers are friendly and interact with the kids in a very nice supportive manner. I also spoke to my friend Smita who is home schooling her kid Amitav. So I spent the first few weeks on a couple of home schooling mailing lists (post on home schooling coming soon) and learned a bit more about home schooling. While the private schools were still quite impressive, I was not as enamored of them as I was last year. I think home schooling is definitely a option and compares quite favorably to the private schools. We hope to visit a public school before we head out. The SF public lottery system is not ideal, since you dont know if your child will get into any of the schools in the neighbourhood

Life in San Francisco and my poor old knee

2007-12-12T18:07:00.000+13:00

Our life in San Francisco seems so so busy on this trip. Between school appointments, tours, open houses, visits to the doctor/dentist and work its a constant stress machine. We need to figure out how to slow things down a wee bit when we come back. Maybe we'll do a better job on the next trip

A couple of interesting things to note on this trip. Decided to get my knee checked by the good folks at kaiser. We discovered pretty quickly that my left knee ACL was non existent and an MRI revealed a potential tear in the MCL. The doctor thinks the MRI might be wrong with the MCL tear since i can squat without pain. Had some good visits with the physical therapist, Brian Soo, who gave me a few good trip on strengthening my quads, hamstrings and glutes. I've not lost a lot of strength/muscle on my left leg, which is indeed a good thing. Most likely, i will opt for ACL surgery when we revisit the US in July 2008

Our going back to NZ has hit a tiny little snag. We failed to get an extension to our visa at the NZ embassy in LA (since there is no concept of a visa beyond a year). Hopefully our immigration paperwork will come through before Feb 9th

Its time for us to start thinking about a potential school for Maya / PJ in the city. The supply/demand equation is totally out of whack. I've been chatting with Smita about her home schooling experiences with Amitav and am more convinced that home schooling is a saner/safer/more efficient option. More details on our school visits in the next post

Headed back to SF via Auckland ...

2007-11-21T00:05:00.000+13:00

So we are headed home early tomorrow morning (actually in a few hours from now). We are spending the day in auckland before boarding the late evening flight to san francisco. The strategy is to get this kids exhausted by making them walk / play in auckland, so they sleep for most of the flight home :)

Since we are spending the day in the big city, i had to do some research to find out what to eat and where :) Here is a list of places from NZ Herald. They should do a better job highlighting articles like these on their main food page. It took me some time to find the article even though i knew exactly what I was looking for. I combined this with the Best Cafe List from Cafe magazine (great magazine, crappy web site) to come up with the following list of places under consideration:

Satya, Ponsoby
17 Great North Rd, Ponsonby

Handmade Burgers
455 New North Rd, Kingsland, ph (09) 849 4590

Renkon Express
2/175 Ponsonby Rd, ph (09) 376 3090;

Fatima's
240 Ponsonby Rd, Ponsonby, ph (09) 376 9303

Raw Power
10 Vulcan Lane, City, ph (09) 303 3624

Otto Woo
47 Ponsonby Rd, ph (09) 360 1989

Sheinken
3 Lorne St, City, 09.303 4301

Ben
57 Fort St, City, 09.308 9338

Yes, its a long list and we only have 2 meals to eat, but i'll figure out where to go by the time we land in AKL :)

Off around the world ...

2007-11-17T21:01:00.000+13:00

In a few days we'll be starting a round the world (RTW) trip. The RTW trip made sense since we had to go to San Francisco, India, Phillipines and back to NZ. We were pretty lucky to find a good travel agent at the Nelson Air NZ offices who got us a Star Alliance RTW fare with changeable dates etc. Here's our schedule in case you want to meet with us :)

Nov 21 - Dec 17: San Francisco
Dec 18 - Dec 21: New York
Dec 22 - Dec 24: Zurich
Dec 25 - Jan 25: Mumbai and other destinations in India
Jan 25 - Jan 27: Singapore
Jan 27 - Feb 5: Manila
Feb 6 - Feb 8: Hong Kong
Feb 9 - ???: Nelson

We have decided to spend some more time in NZ and Nelson and are part way through with the immigration paperwork. Hopefully things will work out and we will be allowed to return to NZ :)

We have friends staying for a few weeks at our place in Nelson. If you are interested in using the house / car while we are away, send me email

Food in Nelson ...

2007-11-17T20:39:00.000+13:00

Continuing with my trail of living in nelson. The past couple of posts and this one are primarily for a friend and his family who will be in nelson while we are off travelling the world (see the next blog post for details)

It is good to go a bit early to the Nelson Saturday Market. On a good summer day it gets quite crowded and makes it a bit less fun. We try to get there by 8:30 am or so at the latest. Our friends Nilakshi, Alec and Tameko are typically done by 8:30 am!. So most locals get there quite early. Here are some of our favorite stalls (the stall are not named, so you'll have to look around and find them)

There are quite a few good organic veggie and fruit stalls. We typically pick what we are in the mood for and whats in season. The good stalls run out of fruit/veggies by 10:00 am
Fresh Organic whole salmon or salmon fillets from the Marlborough Sounds farm
Mussel and Oysters from the stall next to the salmon stall
Eggs (from belgrove farms) / Half baked baguettes from the stall on the other side of the salmon stall
Small / Family sized pies from the My Pie cart
Billtong (dried south african jerky) from pete (next to mussels)
Pears/apples from poppy's pears
Cheese from Cheesemongers
Great walnut-raisin Bread from the stall next door
Cannon bars / Teriyaki Sauce / Satay Sauce / BBQ sauce from Carl and Shannon
Ciabatta, Whole Wheat, Chocolate Chip Cookies from Artisan Bakery
Salad mix from stall behind artisan bakery
Manuka honey from mountain valley honey
Whitebait sandwiches
Olive oil from kakariki
Cashews/Almonds snack pack
Great coffee from divine coffee cart
Good crepes at Kaffay. Good olleberry (donut) from stall next to crepe(s)
Sausages and german meat products from doris
Smoked Fish / Salmon Pate from Nelson Nature smoke
Sheep cheese from Neudorf Cheese
Good wooden toys from Limpopo

We get most of the stuff at the market (as evident from the list above, and i suspect i missed a few of our favorite vendors). For the other stuff

Meat from O'Neills Butchery and Deli in Richmond Mall
Fish from Guyton's at Richmond Mall or Haven Road
Atomic Coffee for Plunger (kiwi term for french press) from Morrison Cafe
Bulk items (rice, lentils, cereal) from Bin Inn (Richmond or Nelson)
Fresh Choice, New World and Woolworths are the grocery stores we visit (typically decided by what park we are taking the kids to). All the grocery stores pretty much carry the same range of items

Places to eat in the Nelson Region ..

2007-11-09T14:31:00.000+13:00

Continuing with our theme of stuff to do in and around nelson (or the top part of the south island)

Nelson / Richmond

Morrison Cafe
Hopgoods
Bar delicious
Sushi House
Haven Fish and Chips
Kaffey crepes at the Nelson Farmers Market
My Pie at the Nelson Farmers Market
Dellah
Steffano Pizzeria
Crema coffee near cathedral steps
Ambrosia
Bouterey's
Waimea Vineyard Cafe
Macmillan Ceramics and Cafe (kids do pottery while u sip a latte)

Beyond Nelson

Monterey House in Orinoco
Awaroa Lodge in Abel Tasman
Mussel Inn in Golden Bay
Norwester Cafe in Amberley (near Christchurch)
Hapuku Lodge and Cafe near Kaikoura
Nin's Bin near Kaikoura
Le Cafe, Picton
C4 Blenheim
Arnee Bajee, Christchurch
Bodhi Tree, Christchurch

Things to do in the nelson region ..

2007-10-30T07:24:00.000+13:00

Some ideas for short/long/day trips to do in and around nelson with young kids.

nelson -> westport -> punakaiki -> glacier (south west coast) and/or karamea (north west coast)
nelson -> kaikoura -> christchurch -> hanmer springs -> nelson
nelson -> picton -> wellingon (ferry ride) -> picton -> nelson

some shorter overnight trips are:

nelson lakes
golden bay
marlborough sounds / queen charlotte track
french pass / pelorus sounds / d'urville island
blenheim and wine country
abel tasman national park

day trips around nelson:

cable bay
mapua
kaiteriteri
moutere valley vineyards
havelock mussel tour

Other things to do around nelson during the day

nelson city saturday market
motueka sunday market
richmond aquatic center
hike to center of new zealand
tahunanui beach
isel park / washbourn gardens / queen gardens
hike to center of nz
grampians hike
nelson pool
natureland
rock climbing gym
chipmunks
nelson library
roller skating rink

AT&T sucks big time ...

2007-07-03T04:16:00.000+12:00

AT&T is the worst telecom provider by a big margin

I owe an apology to Telecom NZ :(. AT&T makes Telecom NZ look real good. We wanted to get DSL at home to enable us to work from home. However AT&T's incompetence makes this fairly unlikely. After navigating through their fairly horrendous voice recognition system, you finally get put in line for an operator due to high call volumes. (on a weekday late evening!). When I do get the operator the call is mysteriously dropped and I get to repeat the whole process. I finally manage to get through, place the order and am assured that DSL will be turned on Saturday evening. Saturday comes and goes with no signs of DSL. Obviously their sales department does not work on the weekends, so I have to wait till Monday (since customer support informs me they have no records of an order)

I called back on Monday only to be informed by a super rude customer support personnel (gwen green) that the previous person did not know what she was talking about with regard to the Saturday date. She does the same thing and tells me it will be turned on Tuesday nite. Tuesday nite comes and goes and no DSL. We left for Seattle on Wednesday, so I just did not bother to call them. We came back Sunday nite, still no DSL :( Spoke to another customer service rep (after going through their crappy voice recognition software), and we tried trouble shooting with no luck. She told me that the line technician will check it tomorrow and they'll charge me if it is my fault. Will they refund me for the hours I wasted if it is their fault?

I'm not too hopeful that we'll get DSL turned on in the next week or so. I suspect I'll cancel the order later this week. What was Apple thinking when they chose AT&T/Cingular as their exclusive iPhone carrier. (bad reports are streaming in at a nice rate already!)

In general customer service across most large US companies have detiorated significantly over the past few years. Maybe its time companies started paying folks at the top a bit less and started improving their basic operations

Back in San Francisco ...

2007-06-28T15:59:00.001+12:00

So am on a flight again, this time to seattle. The kids are asleep and trying to get a few words in. We spent the last week in San Francisco, meeting old friends and the kids visiting their favorite museums and playgrounds (exploratorium, discovery museum, grattan playground). Its a bit strange to be in a relatively big city after seven months in Nelson. San Francisco seems to be quite crowded relatively speaking, a lot of traffic and just too rushed. I think i've gotten used to the quiet slower pace of life in Nelson :). While we do miss the various activities the kids can do in SF, I think we have it pretty good in Nelson.

Having to do a fair amount of work with no DSL at home and a few folks from india visiting makes life a lot busier than I'd like. I miss our regular swimming pool and beach visits.

However the food makes up for quite a few of the above things. We've eaten at quite a few of our favorite places. All of them still rock and definitely worth visiting (Shalimar, Viks, Sketch, Sartaj, Cheung Hing Chinese, Tartine). We also tried Bi-Rite Creamery and it indeed is delicious. The salted caramel and honey lavender are amazing flavors. I think Sketch is a wee bit better, the ice-cream a bit lighter and smoother, the flavors much more natural. However Bi-Rite has the location advantage of being close to where we love. Also recently saw EOS (a fancy restaurant in Cole Valley) offering home made icecream also with similar flavors to Bi-Rite. Looks like ice-cream is the trendy thing in SF this year (thin crust pizza was the trendy thing the past couple of years)

Some more thoughts on 7 months in NZ ..

2007-06-28T15:57:00.000+12:00

Flying is a great time to update the blog. You have a few free minutes while the kids are asleep to get some work done and/or update the blog. WIne does not really help the work aspect, so updating the blog is a good alternative. As we are flying back to the US, here's a look back at some of the high and low points of our 200 days stay in NZ ..

We've decided to extend our stay in NZ till Nov 20 (this was when our visa runs out). A combination of us liking NZ and not getting into the schools we wanted in SF led us to extend our visit. I foresee some more travel for us in 2007 / 2008 (maybe a spanish language country?)

I think the biggest drawback is we miss our friends and family in NZ. We've been super lucky to have quite a few folks visit us in NZ (and we'd like to encourage even more people to come visit us!) and we've spent a fair amount of time with them. So overall I think we spent quite some time with our close friends and grandparents in NZ. I thought we'd miss the food and coffee, but NZ surprised me in both counts. I'm a bit scared that I'd miss NZ coffee in San Francisco now. The produce / fruits / meat / seafood is quite excellent and the quality is as good if not much better than the US. We've been doing much more cooking at home which is quite enjoyable. We travelled a fair amount in NZ but not as much as I expected. The summer was fairly cold and rainy that we did not go camping. The beaches in and around Nelson are so awesome that we felt driving a long distance to do something similar was just not worth it. With kids, the top three things you look for are: a beach and water, a play structure and a place to ride their bikes. Nelson has those amenities in plenty and as such driving a long distance to do the same did not seem worth it. We did go Northland and the Bay of Islands, Christchurch and Wellington. I'd like to otaga, southland and milford sound before we head back home to the USA.

I'm quite glad and happy that we did make the move to NZ. It is a great experience for all of us. We've spent way more time with the kids than we did in the US and have a fun time doing quite a few different things as a family. I liked our regular schedule of dropping the kids at school in the morning and doing an activity with them most days after school. At the same time Mari and I would get some exercise in (either a swim or a run). Work was a bit easier than I expected. I liked the fact that NZ is in between India and the US and I could spend a fair amount of time with developers in both India and US while working regular hours in NZ. My work schedule was much more flexible in Nelson than the US, and something I probably will carry back with me. I'm glad and excited that we learnt how to sail a yacht. I hope to get the next certification when its spring and the winds are steady and predictable. I'm also quite thrilled with my swimming progress and cant wait to get better in the TI technique.

Swimming class, day two ...

2007-06-17T19:25:00.000+12:00

Today was the second day of the total immersion swim class. We dropped the kids off at the babysitter's place at 7:30 am before heading down to the pool. Its quite cold in Nelson in the morning (0 c / 32 f), so we were all bundled up and ready to go.

The first hour or so we spent watching video from yesterday and saw a few good things we did and a few things we needed to focus on and improve for the next session. Watching an underwater video is an awesome thing, gives u a much better perspective and idea on all the things that are happening and how you respond. I was quite surprised as to the many good things I do while watching the video. We hit the pool by 9:00 am and spent the first 30 minutes warming up and doing the drills from yesterday (relaxed back float and kick, fish, switch, zipper stich and linked zipper). Lionel was also kind enough take me to the deep end and work with me a bit on my kicking technique. The good thing from the class is we've got lots of drills to do when we go swimming on our own. At the end of the session, we were filmed again so we could analyze and improve for the next session.

After a short break and a video session, we got back in the pool. We warmed up a bit and then started linking zipper switch strokes to complete our free style motion. Lionel also introduced a bit of breathing technique in this session. This was the only part of the class which felt a bit rushed, i.e. there was no nice smooth progression to introducing this. We did a few lengths in the pool and finally got a stroke count. My initial stroke count was 40, using the gliding technique I came out with a stroke count of 16!!. To be fair, it was not a valid stroke count, since I was still getting the breathing technique and hence was quite irregular with my strokes and did a fair amount of gliding.

Overall the class was awesome. Lionel is a great teacher and coach, and we hope to use him more in the next few months in Nelson. TI was all what I expected it to be and a bit more :) A few things I need to practice include:

Relax more in the water and flow with it
Keep the lead hand at a good 4:00, fingers lower than wrist lower than elbow
Hand close to shoulder on zipper switch
Work on my balance
Work on my back float and comfort level
Practice kicking in the deep end

I'd highly recommend a TI class to anyone (and everyone). We hope to teach maya and pj swimming using quite a few of these techniques :). I would recommend buying Terry's book and DVD as a good way of getting started. I'll post videos of all our swims when I get them from Lionel :)

Returning to San Francisco ..

2007-06-16T19:41:00.001+12:00

but just for a visit :) We'll be in the Bay Area from June 20th to July 17th. The kids are quite excited to go back to their home and have been talking about it for a few days now. Mari and I are excited to meet all our friends and eat at some of our favorite places in the Bay Area (Shalimar, Sketch, Pizetta 211, Tartine, Good Luck Dim Sum, Noriega takeout chinese) and also try some new places (bi-rite ice-cream!)

We'll be visiting Seattle from June 27th - July 1 for Ryan and Julie's wedding. We are also planning on doing a couple of camping trips around the Bay Area / Sierra's

Total Immersion swimming ...

2007-06-16T19:28:00.000+12:00

So this weekend mari and i are taking a 2 day swimming class at Riverside Pool in Nelson. The class is basically about how to swim efficiently using Total Immersion Techniques

We've been spending a fair amount of time in the water in Nelson. The kids love the pool and like to swim, so we figured we might as well become better and more efficient swimmers. I've been interested in the total immersion technique since it seems quite logical and scientific.

Today was day 1 of the class. It was a six hour class from 8:00 am to 2:00 pm. We managed to find a babysitter for Maya and PJ for these two days, so off we went bright and early to the pool. We met the other two students and our instructor Lionel. Lionel is quite an excellent instructor, very patient and works within your swimming ability (mine obviously being quite poor!)

We had two 90 minute sessions in the pool. Saw some video clips of our swimming and practiced balance on the water and how to move more efficiently. To some extent swimming is both a complicated sport since any movement / tension can cause drag and the goal is to minimize drag (and hence maximize speed). TI basically approaches swimming like skating, so the goal is for you to skate thru the water while minimizing drag.

We pratices skating and switch skating. Tommorrow we'll do the zipper switch and more fish like swimming strokes. Mari got a wee bit sea sick from all that time in the water (which is ironic considering that our yachting class we had much rougher water!). Personally I need to work on getting much more comfortable in deep water and learn how to thread water a bit more effortlessly. Overall the class is just awesome and highly recommeded

3 days in Christchurch.

2007-06-07T11:15:00.000+12:00

Not so early in the morning, we headed for christchurch. On the way, we stopped in Blenheim for breakfast at the Golden Arches. We had our usual egg mcmuffin, hashbrow, coffee/orange juice. There is a very nice indoor play structure that M and P enjoyed playing in. There are even cubby holes for the children to put their shoes in before entering the play structure. P is 3 now and tall enough to climb up and down and return on her own.

While P and M were burning off their extra Mickey D calories, Lobo went to CPR to pick us up some real coffee-2 flat whites. We enjoyed our daily caffeine while M and P screamed (mostly laughing) and ran around in the playstructure. The coffee is worth it if you're going to be in Blenheim.

Back in the car and on the road. Before Kaikoura, we picked up some cooked crayfish at nin's bin (it's a permanent trailer that sells fresh crayfish. Our next stop was Kaikoura where we met up with Stephen, Ivy, Frei, Reia and Janaki, Venkat, Sarayu. They saw dolphines and whales. We had a bit of lunch at the dolphin encounter cafe. After lunch the crayfish eaters had some ok crayfish. It wasn't as tasty as some yummy crab i've eaten. The kids had fun throwing rocks in the water. The beach in Kaikoura is filled with smooth, soft round rocks from pure white to dark grey. We took some back to color

We started to head back to christchurch around 3pm. We arrived at our accomodation, addington motel in time for dinner. We ordered pizza and falafels from Souvlaki's. Their falafels were great and the pita is home made and tasty on it's own.

Early Saturday morning we headed for Lytleton Farmer's Market. I bought 3 jars of Rasberry Valrohna Jam. I've been looking forward to buying her Jam since the last time we were there. There's a shop in Nelson selling her Jam at double the price. She does phone orders : ) Other things we ate were stuffed olives, savory pies and coffee. I also bought 2 loaves of ginger bread. It's the best ginger bread that I've ever had. Last time I just bought one. Silly me.

Next stop - downtown Christchurch. The kids hung out at the museum in the botanical garden, while the adults went wandering around the arts centre and craft market. We also had lunch at the craft market - a variety of food - greek, chinese, thai, crepes, sausages. Later in the evening we went to QE2. It's an awesome swim centre with a wave pool, lap pool and large toddler pool that's warm. There's a jacuzzi too.

Sunday we had dimsum for lunch. It was our second time there and just as good as the first time. We hung out in Cathedral square and watched an entertaining street show under the sunshine. We also kept warm while listening to an oregon recital in the Cathedral.

I realize i enjoy visiting the big cities like Christchurch. I looked forward to the dim sum and the option of other ethnic foods to eat. There's more driving and more traffic, but also more things to do. Besides going swimming and to a playground, other things to do in Christchurch is go to the museum, walk around different neighborhoods, window shop, eat ethnic, try more cafes and explore different open spaces.

Into the bay we go (on a boat ..)

2007-05-23T22:24:00.000+12:00

We took a 5 day Competent Crew Sailing Class from John Moore at Sail Nelson. John and his partner Woodi also run the fabulous boutique Wakefield Quay B&B. At the end of the course we would get our competent crew certification and if possible maybe even a day skipper certification.

Its fall in NZ, so the wind is not very reliable. The seas are also a bit calmer than the summer time. John was quite accommodating and tailored the course to our schedule. We split the course into a 3 day / 2 night session, a few days break and then a 2 day / 1 night class.

Maya and PJ were gracious enough to let us escape for that time. The grandparents were awesome and took great care of the kids. For the second part of the class, Maya and PJ were not too sad to see us go. They had a great time with both sets of grandparents and I suspect were quite spoiled also. Maya wanted to take them to Boathouse since we had not taken them there. Mari's dad did not know where it was, so Maya directed them there. They saw the door shut and thought it was closed so drove away (it was open, but since it was super windy they shut the doors and windows). Maya was very sad that they could not have a seafood meal. Instead she had to eat bad chinese at the food court in Richmond Mall.

Overall the course was quite nice. We got a lot of practice sailing in decent winds. We motored for a fair bit too. Handling a yacht is a bit easier than handling a small dinghy. The first trip we went and stayed opposite Adele island and we had penguins as our campsite mates. They are quite noisy at night, luckily we were exhausted both nights and fell asleep quite quickly. We learnt how to rig the boat, get the sails up, a bit of navigation and how to operate the VHF. We came in pretty late at night and it was quite challenging (and a bit scary) to get the boat into the marina at night. Overall the first part of the course was quite uneventful. I think we could have covered quite a bit of navigation, tides and anchoring while we were motoring. I normally dont like too much structure, but I suspect some planning and structure during the slow times would have made the course more informative and challenging.

The second part of the course turned out to be quite an adventure. The forecast was for gale force winds, and John gave us an option to delay the course till later. However due to various scheduling issues, we opted to sail under those conditions. We practiced some maneuvering in the morning and learnt how to tie the boat to the jetty before we took off towards Marlborough sounds and Crousells harbor. The wind was slow at first, but kicked in after an hour and we were flying at a good healthy speed of 7-8 knots.We got into the harbor at 4:00 pm or so and started making our way into the bay and past quite a few mussel farms. We were supposed to tie into a Nelson yacht club mooring far in, but could not find a mooring after a fair amount of searching in the dusk. We put down the anchor, hoped for the best and cooked a decent meal. At this point in time the rain was coming down quite nicely along with decent gusts of wind. Our anchor did not hold, so we had to lift it up and re-anchored the boat. We thought we had done a good job and were having a good time chatting and laughing, but 30 minutes later we ran aground after being pushed by the wind. We dressed up and went out into the horrendous weather and pulled up the anchor again. Its quite difficult to navigate in the night with only a little flashlight with no moon light or stars!. Not sure how John managed to pull it off, but we reanchored again. He was not too happy with it, so we pulled the anchor up again and attached the second anchor to the first one and put it down one more time. This time we seemed to be holding pretty good and managed to have a depth of 10m or so for most of the time. It was past midnight and we decided to sleep a bit. John was awake for most of the night making sure things were ok. He took a short nap just before daylight. When he woke up we were in the mussell beds and he tried to get us out of it with the little flashlight. Unfortunately he lost the light and gave up, decided to tackle the issue at daylight. Dawn came soon enough, we got out of the mussel mess and a few of us snoozed till 9:00 am. Mari and i were enjoying the scenic sounds :)

We searched the next day for the buoy again with no luck and headed back to Nelson. John was not his chipper self, a wee bit nervous, and the rest of is were quite low energy. We basically tried to get home at a reasonable hour and made it back by 5:00 pm. We then went over to the B&B where Woodi graciously fed us a few good snacks and a good wine. Overall we had an excellent time and learnt a fair amount. John did mention that the course felt quite disjointed because of the way we split it up. I would have liked to have gotten a bit more out of it and learn more advanced navigation, tides and anchoring. I guess we'll save that for summer and invite the grandparents over again :)

nelson's best restaurant

2007-05-07T20:28:00.000+12:00

the cut, nelson nz

fish soup, mushroom risotto, double layer chocolate cake made w/ valrhona. complimentary chocolate truffles. martini

It was a cold night so sipping a martini warmed the body faster than the portable heater. I've never liked martini's but this one went down smooth, no after taste and kept you warm for awhile.

We shared the fish soup so that we could enjoy the valrhona double layer cake. The fish soup was tasty, savory. Bits of vegetables and very flavorful. It came with a couple thin sliced baguette pieces. We said that we'd share the soup so they went out of their way to split it into two bowls. "They care : )" A perfect choice for a rainy, wet and cold night. I ordered the mushroom risotto because i love risotto and haven't ate it in 6+ months. The portion was good - not too much and not too little. Plenty of mushrooms.

Dessert was excellent. Double layered chocolate made w/ valrhona. I was pretty happy with the whole meal, but get this, they gave complimentary truffles. They make them! The only negative thing about The Cut is that they're not open for lunch. They did say we could bring our daughters and just have dessert. : )

Some pictures ..

2007-05-06T18:23:00.000+12:00

So lots of folks have complained that our blog is text heavy and picture light :(. Unfortunately we are not really photo people and dont take the time to clicks lots of snaps. I think our kids will cuss us when they grow up.

In the meantime, here are some photos from our friends who visited us recently

Phu's photos
Joonsuk's photos
Jill's photos
Some random stranger photos. (quite good photos)

Our parents rock ...

2007-05-05T07:06:00.000+12:00

So Maya and PJ have both sets of grandparents visiting at the same time. They've been with us for a little more than a week and are in NZ for 4 more weeks. I suspect most of our non-asian readers are thinking: wow, thats a long time. Are the parents getting along nicely with each otehr? Are we getting along well with them and living in peace? Suffice to say, we are all having a very good time. I'm seeing a side of my parents i've never seen before and am quite dazzled by the experience. Here are some highlights and cute things they do ...

Mari's dad is so so good with the kids. Maya will go upto him after dinner (or after school) and request in a cute voice: "Grandpa, can you please play with me?". She'll then drag him to the living room and they'll play for 30 mins - 3 hours. He took the energy and trouble to get a few things that they could play together with. Thanx grandpa tilos
PJ likes to goto bed with my dad reading her stories. PJ tends to fall asleep on her own. So we read her a few stories and we leave the room. My dad is not aware of this and reads to her till she falls asleep
In the morning the parents make an oatmeal breakfast for each other every day!. They then sit and plan their activities for the day (with some help/advice from us). They try to leave by 9:30 am or so and get back by 4:00 pm. They are way more adventurous than I expected them to be. A lot of the time they are outside they are on their feet walking around the town/beach/destination for the day!
Sometimes they will come back home and complain about how tired and hungry they are. They will then cook some noodles or a sandwich and swallow it down while complaining all the time about how much they walked!
They love to exercise! We have a set of 380 steps a block away from the house. Their evening walk consists of climbing all 380 of those steps. If its a bit late, they will try to go upto the half way point (where there is a nice bench!). The first time they did it, they struggled a bit. I suspect they race up it now. At the end of the day they are typically so tired they crash at 8:00 pm, a few mins after the kids!
We (mari and me) get to go on bike rides and have some time to ourselves!. We went on a dinner date to "The Cut" last week. We had a wonderful time, the food was awesome, review coming soon
They walked to the center of NZ. Its a pretty steep climb!
I was really scared that my parents will be bored out of their mind, since we dont have TV or get any Indian channels. To prevent this, I called Andrew (our landlord) and asked him to subscribe us to the SkyTV package and the Indian channel (Star Plus). Once every other day, my parents will watch 30 mins of StarPlus. I expected to get way more usage, but considering the current pattern, we'll cancel SkyTV pretty soon!
A few days after coming here, they realized that Nelson was too small a town for their wandering and they'll get bored quickly. So they started looking around and decided they wanted to visit another country (Fiji) since they are so close and might as well see a few more countries. (yes, they do believe in the germanic style of travel and ticking off places they've seen / driven by). They are off to Fiji next week for five days
A few days after deciding on Fiji, they realized taking the ferry to wellington might be fun. So now they've started planning a trip to Wellington. I had to remind them that they were here to spend some time with the kids.

Feijoa

2007-05-04T22:24:00.000+12:00

Feijoa facts - http://www.crfg.org/pubs/ff/feijoa.html
Common Names: Feijoa, Pineapple Guava, Guavasteen
Origin: The feijoa is a native to extreme southern Brazil, N. Argentina, W.Paraguay and Uruguay where it is common in the mountains.

I love going to the farmer's market. I look forward to buying cake, sampling the fresh fruit; (feijoas and apples right now), having savory breakfast crepes and browsing through the local craft stalls.

Wouldn't it be fun to sell something? At the Friday market they allow people to sell their excess fruit. And there's no charge to be a seller : ) I told my neighbor about it and she was happy to let me sell some of her feijoas. We (Maya, PJ and I ) sold 210 to be exact. It was fun. I chatted with my stall neighbors, cut up feijoas for people and Maya and PJ to sample and bought baked goods from my other stall neighbors. I was happy to sell the last bag after an hour or so.

You either love feijoas or not. I'd offer people passing to taste and some would say, " No thanks. I know what they taste like. "

Something to think about: What about feijoa zest with butter milk scones ....sounds YUM

Visitors, Visitors and more Visitors ...

2007-04-29T07:57:00.000+12:00

We've had quite a steady stream of visitors starting late march and continuing into early June. We then return to the US for a few weeks before coming back here and the visitor stream continues.

Its really awesome to have folks visiting us. The kids are entertained, the parents get a break and in general everyone has a good time. There was a period of 3 days when we did not have anyone around, the the house was so quiet, that it was a wee bit depressing. Currently we have both sets of grand parents visiting us. Mari's dad plays a lot with the kids and the kids enjoy his company quite a bit. This gives us a fair amount of free time to go biking etc. We hope to take a fair bit of time off from the kids over the next month.

We've been doing a fair amount of cooking at home. I made my famous mussels in white wine sauce for lunch yesterday (Phu/Joon: this was way better than Spin Inns version). Mari's mom made a tasty filipino dish, arroz caldo, a chicken and rice dish. The kids had multiple helpings of the dish (and so did the adults). Mari has been doing a fair amount of baking from the Tartine book. She recently made gougiere, scones and banana bread. Maya and I are craving the taiwanese pork chop dish from spices, so we are planning to make it this week.

Winter is moving in at a bit too fast a rate. We've started using the propane heater and will start the wood burning stove this week. Just need to get a gate to prevent the kids from running into the fireplace. Its gets pretty chilly in the morning (single degree celsius) before warming up to the late teens in the afternoon.

back home - looking at pictures

2007-04-25T19:06:00.000+12:00

we got home on Saturday afternoon Pacific time. Since we left Auckland Saturday evening and spent 12 hours in the air it was nice to gain a day coming home. Of course on our way to NZ we completely lost a saturday - so it all evens out. We are missing the lobos and so we are compensating by looking at pictures of them. here's a link to phu's photos on flckr. if you can stand the delay - they are fun to look out. http://flickr.com/photos/phuhoang

The kids are still going to bed late and trying to sleep late every morning. We drag them out of bed to go to school hoping they'll wake up on the car ride there and maybe eat some breakfast. Grace talks about all the things she did on the trip quite often..while Jason is still disappointed that our rental car didn't have a sliding door. He is now quite fascinated with mini-vans with sliding doors - don't know why. We are heading to Cape May in a week and he is looking forward to our rental.

This weekend I am hunting for fejoias! maybe one of the farmers markets here will have them..

swimming with dolphins

2007-04-23T20:28:00.000+12:00

When we arrived in New Zealand and started talking to the lobos about what we wanted to do on our trip - I didn't have a clear idea of what we were going to do or where we were going for that matter. As each day went by, lobo and mari started to telling us that we should book a trip to swim with the dolphins. I told them it sounded fun but really had no idea what they were talking about. I pictured going to an aquarium or something and getting into a pool while dolphins did tricks and ate fish all around me. It didn't sound very good so everytime the lobos would bring it up I just pretended I didn't hear them.
So then they told me more about it and it turns out that you go out on a boat into the ocean and jump off the boat wearing a wetsuit and actually swim with wild dolphins in the ocean. This sounded better but as I looked at the ocean and the wind and the rain outside, it didn't seem much like boating and swimming weather - it was cold and raining. So I said, yea, we should do it. And hoped that it would keep raining. One day when we were in Russell phu actually called to book the trip and while I waited - listening to him talk to the tour operator - I was relieved to hear that no boats were leaving that day because of the weather.
Well we finally plotted out the rest of our trip from the day when we would leave the lobos in Nelson and we planned to stay one day in Kaikoura - just so we could go swimming with the dolphins. We booked a trip for Thursday morning at 8:00am that would return us 3 1/2 hours later. so it was done.
We arrived in Kaikoura on Wednesday night. We had a really good meal at a restaurant called 42 degrees on the main boulevard in town. Over dinner phu and chi mapped out the plan for the morning - we were leaving the kids with chi to watch while we went on the trip and so chi had to account for every minute between our departure and our return. She was equipped with 3 sets of legos, a dolphin video and various other paraphernalia to keep the kids occupied.
That morning we had breakfast at our bed and breakfast place (terrible spot that I can't remember the name of) and then headed out to Dolphin Encounter - the outfit running the dolphin trip.
Dolphin Encouters did a really good job. They have this dolphin stuff down to a science. When we arrived they had already done one trip that left at 5:30 in the morning. They reported good clear weather and dolphins at only 25 minutes from the shore (a good sign). We were called to go get "wetsuited" which meant getting into a wetsuit that fit snugly. I had no idea what that meant, but I wasn't about to go asking for help in the state I was in (a wetsuit that felt tight and not snug). Wetsuits are not not something I want to wear ever again unless I lose 20 pounds.
Anyway, we eventually got on a bus and into a boat and although I was anxious and nervous about the whole ordeal - like clockwork - they spotted a huge school of dolphins about 20 minutes after we left. The organizer on our boat explained that once they spotted the dolphins we were to sit on the edge of the boat and when they sounded the horn, we jump in the water and swim in the direction where they told us the dolphins were swimming. All the while we are wearing a scuba mask and snorkel - so you can only breathe through the snorkel - not your nose. I will admit this caused me some anxiety. I like to have all my breathing options open to me - especially when I don't know what I'm doing. But I figured I would give it a try - so I practiced with the mask and snorkel thingy on the boat before jumping in...breathe in ...breathe out..not from my nose. So once I had to jump in my heart was pounding a mile a minute. I didn't much care about seeing any dolphins at that point. I was just hoping to get back on the boat alive. Breathing was the main point. So I did a belly flop into the water and just to get the hang of it I swam around for a bit just kicking my fins and breathing. Then I saw some dolphins underneath me..just a flash. Then some more - swimming in circles two and three at a time around me. It was truly exhilarating. I was laughing under the water. Sometimes it seemed like they could hear me and were looking at me too. When I looked up I could see fins and sometimes you could see dolphins jump up and do flips.
After a few minutes I wasn't seeing dolphins anymore and the only thing I saw under the water was a lot of blue. So I tried to make my way back to the boat which felt like a long way away. Kicking and breathing hard I got back but at that point I felt like I was about to die. I pulled my tired body back onto the boat. When they spotted the dolphins again and told us to jump in, I went back and ending up going in for 4 more swims. After that the crew served us hot chocolate and cookies and once we got into warm clothes we just cruised around a bit so we could take pictures of the dolphins and watch them do their acrobatics from the boat. I was very tired and cold, but it was all worth it.
We got back into town and the kids were happy to see us. Jason ran into phu's arms and Grace ran towards me to give me a hug. Jason asked us, "so, how was the dolphins?"

See you tomorrow

2007-04-22T21:10:00.000+12:00

We've had a lot of friends pass through these last few weeks. J.D., Lisa, Sophie, Matt for one weekend. Jill, Marley and their friend Lynn for one week and then Phu, Tamar, Jason, Grace, and Chi the next week. We were lucky to get a visit with Joon-Suk, Julie and Devin in Nelson, and for a couple days in Russell. It's been super fun to have good friends to talk with, laugh, and talk to again the next day and the day after, and after. If there's anything to miss, it's all our friends and family. After weeks of traveling, cooking, eating, talking, etc. with friends, the house was quiet. Maya said, "Why is it just us in the house?" PJ asked, "Where's Grace and Jason?" We told her they took a plane to San Francisco. The next thing we hear is PJ crying in the hallway. PJ and Maya are looking forward to the sleep over at Jason and Grace's house in June. We love you and to all the friends and family that have yet to visit, see you real soon. Totally looking forward to it.

Some cool things that we did and saw with our friends.

Lisa and I took a glass paper weight making class at the Hooglund Glass Blowing Gallery in Nelson. It was a one hour intense, and heated class. It was nerve racking for me because I didn't want to accidentally burn myself. Our teachers were calm, ready to lend a hand, easy to understand, and super friendly. They made sure that you didn't get burned. They teach you by example, so after you watch them, it's your turn. The second time I went there, we brought all the kids. Tamar was the only student and Maya and PJ and Jason enjoyed watching for 15 minutes or so. I also had a bag of fejoas (10) that they gobbled while watching tamar create her masterpiece. There is a large garden on the gallery grounds. There were two kinds of pear trees fillled w/ ripe pears. It was nearing lunch time so the kids were eager to eat the fresh fruit. I ate one too : ) Juicy. There's a little bridge thing for kids to walk around and balance on, a pet peacock wandering around. There was also a whole row of fejoa trees. The fejoas were still small but maybe in a week or two I can bring someone else to the gallery : )

On Jill, Marley and Lynn's last day we had lunch at Waimea Winery. I also had lunch with Cecile there on her last day. "Cecile is training for a marathon in June!" Can you tell I like the food. It's yum, and vegetarian friendly. Earlier that day, we went to the shop of Motueka Gold. They make tasty lip smacking jam. We got a fill and taste of most of their jams. If you have a sweet tooth, it's worth a visit if you're over there wine tasting anyway.

A surprise find was the doughnuts and fried banana fritters from our favorite fish and chips shop. Thanks Lynn, Jill and Joonsuk for ordering it. It was delicious.

We flew to the Bay of Islands/ Russell. It's a small little town- 2 blocks of shops. There was a library that entertained the kids for 45 minutes on one of the windy, cold days. It sold paperbacks for 50cents. The beach was rocky but clean. The kids were happy. A 10 min. ferry ride will take passengers to Pahia, the big Town. After roaming around Pahia, it had a little china town in one of the alleys. The playground by the beach was better than Russell.

If you would like to learn more about the maori culture/ new zealand, a trip to Waitangi Treaty Grounds is a must. The scenery from the site is breathtaking. If you watched the movie, "Whale Rider" , the scenes were taken from Waitangi. There is a cultural night show at Waitangi that's worth seeing.

While Jill, Lynn and Marley were here we cooked a lot. Jill is the master cook and so we had to make our best meal. Thank you for being inspired to make some tartine goodies while you were here as well as main course meals. Lynn introduced us to home made ice cream. She made honey lavender and it was the best ice cream in new zealand. I made a chocolate chip ice cream and used my stash of valrhona bars for the chips. It's really good.

leaving nelson

2007-04-17T21:37:00.000+12:00

tomorrow morning we will head out from Nelson and continue our trip in New Zealand without the lobos. We have been here nearly 10 days traveling from Auckland to the Bay of Islands and then to Nelson. Our kids have had lots of fun hanging out with their new sisters Maya and PJ. Jason already looked at me with shock and disbelief when I told him that Maya wasn't coming with us to Koilhkara and Christchurch. I think he believed that the lobos adopted us and we were staying in New Zealand forever. Besides playing with Maya and PJ, I think the favorite parts of New Zealand so far for the kids are the beaches. From Auckland to Russell and now in Nelson, we have really been blow away by the beautiful beaches here. The kids love to run around and throw stones into the water and dig holes. And, argue over who gets which shovel. The kids also really enjoy the Kiwi steamed milk drink here called a "fluffy." Not only is it fun to do what all the other kids are doing, but a "fluffy" in New Zealand comes with a complimentary marshmallow. Of course the marshmallow is really the main reason why Jason and Grace are adopting this drink as their own.
Today Mari convinced me to do a glass blowing class in Nelson. So I went to a glass blowing studio with everyone and got scared to death while a very patient glass blower showed me how to make a paperweight. The paperweight turned out quite nice mostly because the teacher corrected all the work I did. Thankfully I was careful enough not to burn myself or the teacher. After I was done the teacher let the kids blow a glass bubble into a long tube. Jason blew a big bubble..PJ blew a tiny one..more like a big tear trop. and Maya didn't feel like blowing at all.
Lots of good food here in New Zealand as well. We have been having great meals with lots of snacks in-between. But if you stay at the lobos, just be careful of the coffee. Since you need to be a good guest, you can humor lobo a bit and congratulate him while he carefully whips up a batch of french press coffee.

Nelson is quite beautiful

2007-04-16T20:16:00.000+12:00

We are in our second leg of our New Zealand trip, having flown from the Bay of Islands to Nelson. We will be staying here 3 days before driving south to Kaikoura and finally Christchurch. Nelson is a very cute town, with all the conveniences of a modern city, yet the weather and beach and views of the sea is simply breath-taking. We got here Saturday night late, and on Sunday, we set out west towards Motueka for a very nice farmer's market, and then off to a stunning golden sand beach called Kaiteriteri. The kids had a great time. The water was a bit chilly, but I jumped in and took a dip anyways. Today, the weather was a bit colder, so we stayed around Nelson. We visited the town center, went to Lobo's favorite coffee place, and just checked out the city. Later in the afternoon, we went down to the beach and playground, and the children had a blast. Chi decided to venture out on her own around town, and walked home around 5pm.

Still thinking through what we will do tomorrow.

Phu

Russell (Bay of Islands) trip report (part one)

2007-04-16T15:04:00.000+12:00

We spent 5 days in Russell with Phu, Tamar, Jason, Grace and Chi. We were joined by Joonsuk, Julie and Devin for the final 2.5 days of this adventure. In our past visits to NZ, we had never ventured north of Auckland, so we figured we'd take advantage of the easter break and explore one of the few places we've not seen in NZ. Exploring a place with kids is very different from exploring a place with packs. With kids you get to spend quality time in playgrounds, beaches and just any open space.

We chose Russell based on wonderful reports from various books and our friends (the briggs family) who had lived here for 3 months a few years ago. We booked a four bedroom house with Russell Cottages. The house was a 5 minute walk from the beach and across from a school with a great playground. So it was indeed a great location. The house was quite modern with enough sleeping space for all of us (5 adults, 4 kids), a good swimming pool and very friendly and attentive hosts. I'd definitely recommend the place if you are looking for family accommodation in Russell. Russell is across the bay from Pahia. Its a short passenger ferry ride, and a relatively long car drive away (via okiata and opua). Staying in Russell is not a great idea if you want to see quite a few places by car primarily because it is a bit remote from the main route. However it is much less touristy and more laid back than Pahia.

We flew into KeriKeri and picked up the rental cars at the airport. We spent the afternoon at KeriKeri near the StoneHouse at a nice cafe next to the river. The kids had a blast running around and playing various games in and around the trees. They also mingled with some other kids present there. We then picked up some groceries at New World in KeriKeri before heading south into Russell. Chi made us a wonderful pork noodle soup and I cooked some fairly spicy grouper vindaloo which was only appreciated by Phu :) (it was a bit too spicy for everyone else)

The next day we lounged around Russell and visited the two beaches in Russell. We also spent some quality hours at the school playground. We had pretty good Atomic coffee at Waterfront. Tamar also purchased a local coffee blend (Tiger Mountain Coffee). We had a friendly wager as to who could make the best french press coffee. Being a participant and the judge, I declared myself the winner by a big margin. (the trick is to preheat the coffee carafe)

San Francisco food update from Lynne (Gialina pizza review)

2007-04-16T15:00:00.000+12:00

Our friend Lynne has sent us another wonderful San Francisco food and restaurant review which is definitely worth a read :) Without further ado, here's lynne ...

hello! i was just checking in on your blog and reading all your talk about food and restaurants made me really miss you guys. i thought you would want to know about the new pizza restaurant in glen park and various other eating adventures back here in sf.

gialina opened recently, right across the street from the new canyon market in glen park (was this open before you left? the bi-rite folks have a stake in it, i think they do the produce/groceries, and the other partners do the deli/butcher shop. it's basically like a j.v. bi-rite). i went early on a friday night (5:30ish) with my friends graham and katrina and their toddler Elias (he's almost 2). gialina's nice inside, a long and narrow space made lighter with windows and light-colored walls and wood. the menu is all pizza with one special non-pizza item per day. everything sounded very delicious, but in the new-standard bay area pizza way, as in, now one expects to see wild nettles on a pizza menu and so they don't really stand out anymore. after some negotiation (graham doesn't like vegetables), we ordered the meatball pizza, a wild nettle-prosciutto pizza, and an asparagus-potato-truffled pecorino pizza. we tried to sell graham on the dandelion greens-italian sausage-fontina pizza, but he wouldn't go for it. the meatball pizza was very good, especially if you like spaghetti and meatballs. the crust is thin and crispy in the right places but with a nice chewy quality (not as good as pizzette or delfineria, but so much better than A16). sadly, the saltiness of the prosciutto totally overwhelmed the taste of the wild nettles and i considered it a waste of wild nettles, especially after we all know how good they can be a la pizzaiolo. what's the point of using wild nettles if you can't taste them? i thought the asparagus-potato-truffled pecorino was the best one, with the rich truffley flavor nicely offsetting the asparagus and pecorino, and the potatoes adding a little creamy counterpoint. service was a little over attentive in that anxious-new-restaurant way (i got the strong sense that the waiter was one of the owners, and i don't think anxiety about the success of a business needs to be so apparent to customers). they also seemed a little cheap, as in we asked for bread for elias, and they said they only made enough to go with the special of the day and they couldn't spare it. a pizza restaurant that can't spare a little bread for a baby? in a neighborhood filled with families?

if gialina was in cole valley, or if i lived in glen park, i would be very excited and would probably eat there a few times a week, but since it is in glen park and i live in cole valley, it's not really the kind of place i would go back to. on the bay area pizza scale, i give it a 6.5.

other pizzas of note: i had a great roasted cauliflower-fontina pizza at pauline's a few weeks ago. pauline's remains a very solid pizza institution. really you can't go wrong there.

in bi-rite creamery news: i'm only one punch away from a free ice cream on my bi-rite creamery punch card. i've also ventured out from the salted caramel (it's still my favorite). they have this amazing malted vanilla ice cream with vahlrona-chocolate covered crispies in it, and the mint chip is fantastic, especially when sandwiched between two dark chocolate cookies in one of their ice cream sandwiches. cookies and cream is appropriately creamy; roasted banana is good but very sweet, it's best cut with another flavor. hmmm. i had sworn off the creamery for a few days (i'm going to nyc tomorrow) but now i'm thinking i might need one last scoop before i go.

there's a new restaurant downtown on mission btwn 1st and 2nd by the town hall folks: the salt house, a kind of san francisco version of the gastropub. i ate there with thomas rogers recently. they have a great salty version of poutine, the montreal dish of french fries, cheese, and gravy. in their version, it's thick, wedge-cut fries, gruyere, and short rib gravy. very tasty indeed.

and finally, you will be happy to hear that i ventured out from yummy yummy and ate at dragonfly the other day. everything was good, but i did miss the pork bunh with imperial rolls.

Auckland: Day Two with the Hoangs

2007-04-11T15:10:00.001+12:00

The Hoang / Fructman clan arrived pretty early in the morning from San Francisco (the flight lands at 5:30 am or so!). I was awake and ventured into the lobby to meet and greet them. The goal was to keep them on their feet for most of the day to avoid jet lag and fatigue. After a quick breakfast and coffee in the hotel bar, we headed out. We took a tour of the inner city on The Link bus and went through Parnell, Ponsoby, New Market, Newton before getting down at the quay. We walked around the quay and Viaduct harbor for some time before proceeding to a dim sum lunch. Our original choice was Ocean City dim sum which had received an excellent review in Cusine magazine. On our walk there, we saw Sunshine which had won Best Chinese Restaurant award in 2005 and 2006 and we saw quite a few folks entering this place. We decided to chance it which was an excellent decision. It was quite ironic that their first meal was yum-cha in NZ since the Bay area has got excellent dim sum also. The dim sum was quite good (our expecations in NZ are also a bit lower than SF), specifically the turnip cake, the beef ribs on squash, the shrimp dumplings, the scallop dumplings and the egg tart. This was definitely the best dim sum we've had in NZ (the other two were in Christchurch and Wellington).

We then took the ferry to Davenport to get a view of Auckland from the water. Davenport basically is the Sausalito of Auckland. We spent a few hours at the playground and beach while the adults took turns walking along the beach and upto North Head for some spectacular views of Auckland and the hauraki gulf. For dinner we decided to get fish and chips at FishMongers in Parnell. We had an excellent driver who managed to squeeze us all into his minivan cab. Unfortunately the Parnell location was closed for Easter Sunday so we went to their Remuera location. We ordered a sampling of various fish and chips, grilled salmon and tuna, and a thai fish cake. We also got some Kumara chips. Unfortunately it was late and there was not enough seating out there, so we did not enjoy the meal as much. The food was quite good and well worth a visit. The same cabbie came and picked us up an hour later.

Maya and PJ were quite excited to play with Jason. So the three of them stayed up pretty late playing with play dough. Tomorrow we leave for Keri Keri and the Bay of Islands. I reserved a super shuttle van to take us to the airport tomorrow. I did this online, but did not trust the reservation process, so I called them to double check. It was good that I called, since the online system had messed up both my name the pickup time.

Auckland: Day One ...

2007-04-11T15:08:00.000+12:00

We decided to spend a couple of days in Auckland before going further up into Northland. We planned to spend a day with Jill and Marley in Auckland and then meet up with Phu, Tamar, Chi, Jason and Grace in Auckland. The kids were quite excited to go on a plane again. We had heard pretty good reviews of Kelly Tarlton from the Dierkings, so we decided to spend the afternoon at Kelly Tarlton's. We took the Super Shuttle from the airport to our hotel, The Quadrant near CBD. The one bedroom apartment was a wee bit too small compared to some of the other places we've stayed at. I guess, big city hotels also mean smaller rooms.

We took the shuttle from Sky City to Kelly Tarlton. The penguin encounter was quite cool and amazing, but the rest of the aquarium was quite mediocre. I would definitely not recommend it for a short visit to Auckland.

Being in the big city, we felt like ethnic food. Having dined at Wagamama in London 8 years ago, we decided to revisit this chain restaurant. In retrospect it was a big mistake, and definitely not recommended. Maya got the kids ramen with chicken noodles, PJ and Marley the chicken katsu curry, Mari the salmon miso ramen, Jill the Chilli Chicken Soba noodle and I got th spicy beef noodles. Except for Mari's dish the other dishes were disappointing to awful. In specific, Jill's noodle dish and PJ's curry were plain awful. The atmosphere however is quite excellent for kids, since its more a cafeteria style place with a high noise level. We walked back to the hotel and bid adieu to Jill and Marley since they were leaving for Brisbane early the next day

Some more sights and sounds around Nelson, NZ

2007-04-09T07:57:00.000+12:00

We had lunch at Waterfront with Lynn, Jill and Marley before bidding farewell to Lynn and her wonderful icecream making abilities. We had the scallops, moroccan spiced turbot and the calamari. Waterfront lunch is definitely a good deal and great value for money. Jill and Lynn wanted to have the banana dessert from the fish and chip shop, but it is open for lunch just a few days of the week.

It is good to have folks in the house that like to eat food and also cook food. We spent quite a few hours talking about food and all the places we miss while we had visitors. This also made everyone hungry, so Jill decided to make scones from the Tartine recipe book. This decision was made at 9:00 pm. Unfortunately we did not have any lemons in the house, and the grocery stores were all closed. However, our neighbours across the street have a good lemon tree. We had borrowed a lemon from them in the past. Since it was too late, we decided to get a few lemons from them and inform them the next day morning. So Mari and Lynn crept up to their house with a flashlight, scaled the wall and grabbed a few of the exquisite Meyer Lemons which promptly went into the scone mixture.

We also decided to visit Nelson lakes with Jill and Marley. We stayed overnight at Nelson Lakes Motel (aka The yellow house). Nelson Lakes is a beautiful area with supposedly lots of wonderful hikes. However without a good adult / kid ratio its really hard to take advantage of the place and go on long hikes. We hope to do a few long hikes when mari's parents are in town. The kids spent hours at the lake throwing stones into the lake. There were quite a few ducks at the shore who seem to be very well trained for visitors and tourists. They would immediately swim to a new group of people as they approached the lake and try to look cute. Unfortunately a few people do feed them which reinforces this bad habit. Lake Rototiti also has these humoungous eel which are supposed to be the oldest eel's in NZ. They take 90 years to mature. Its illegal to fish them at the lake, so we saw a couple of them at the jetty. The kids were quite excited to see such big fish.

More adventures in NZ with visitors ...

2007-04-09T07:56:00.000+12:00

On Friday evening, I picked Jill, Marley and Lynn from Nelson airport. They came in via Queenstown -> Christchurch -> Nelson. PJ and Maya were quite excited and awaited the arrival of their neighbour and friend Marley. We were waiting from the window of the house for their plane to land. Its so convenient to have the airport literally at your doorstep (a 5 min ride). We had a leftover dinner that night which includes some lamb, chicken adobo and rice.

The next day we went to the Nelson Saturday market and had our regular crepe breakfast from Kaffeys (8/10) along with Divine Coffee. Joonsuk, Julie and Devin arrived earlier in the morning from San Francisco, so I biked over to pick them up and get them to the market. It was so good to see and talk to familiar faces. We spent some time at Riverside playground, before walking down to Morrison Cafe for a late lunch. Morrison Cafe has so far met and exceeded expectations and has been a hit with all our visitors. We decided to cook a big meal at home that night. Jill made a fabulous moroccan lamb stew, Mari made a great big tray of veggie lasagna with yummy portabello mushrooms, Lynn made vanilla and honey icecream, while my contribution was yummy brown rice :) (actually Joonsuk and I took the kids to the playground for an hour to give the cooks some peace and quiet).

The next day we went to Motueka farmers market on our way to Kaiteriteri beach. Jill and Lynn took the scenic route and went half way to Murchison before turning back and coming to Motueka via Motueka Valley Road. Jill had some delicious muffins from the Muffin Madness in Motueka, while Joonsuk, Julie and Devin feasted on German sausage. The weather was nice and sunny (in contrast to our visit with JD where it was a bit cold and cloudy). Since we had a good adult / kid ratio ( 6 / 4 ), we decided to take advantage of the numbers and rented two double kayaks from Kaiteriteri Kayaks and kayaked a bit of Abel Tasman. Since Mari got her exercise doing some laps in Tasman Bay, I got to go on the kayak trip. Joonsuk and me were in one double, while Jill and Lynn were in the other double kayak. We headed towards Marahau Bay and it was good to be out paddling. Been quite a few years since I did it, and I suspect we'll want to do more of it, now that the kids are getting older. We had a good time in the water and headed back to the beach and the kids. Maya and PJ met some friends from school at the beach. The older kids found a couple of dead crabs and decided to hold a funeral and memorial service for the crabs. PJ and Marley were quite serious and grave faced at the service, while Maya was happy doing her own thing.

Since it was pretty late, we decided to have a fish and chips dinner and took the group to the Haven Fish and Chips place. We got an assortment of fish (Blue Cod, Blue Nose, Tarakihi, fish kebab, scallops, mussels, crab sticks) and chips. We also ventured into dessert this time and got fried bananas. Mari reprimanded me for not including this in our previous dinners. The weather was quite nice, so it was a good treat to be eating newspaper fish and chips overlooking tasman bay.

The next day Joonsuk and Julie drove to Havelock. They had the mussell platter at Slip Inn and also took the Green Mussell Cruise from Havelock.It was a good trip since they got to see a fair amount of Marlborough sounds and did not have to drive all the way into Picton. We offered to babysit Devin that night while they went and spent some quality time at a restaurant, but they were a bit too stuffed from the mussell trip. We had another good feast that night. We made Lamb tikka masala, rig fish in teriyaki sauce, and stir fried pumpkin and sweet onions (which were delicious). Lynn topped off the meal by making lavender icecream. We bid farewell to Joon and Julie and will meet them in 10 days in Russell (Northland)

Visitors galore ...

2007-04-09T07:55:00.000+12:00

Apologies for the sporadic entries on the blog. We've had a lot of visitors from the San Francisco area the past couple of weeks and things have been very hectic between making them feel at home and getting some work done.

The first group of visitors were the Dierkings from Sonoma, CA. JD, Liza, Sophie (6 years) and Matt (4 years) visited us for 4 days a week and a half ago. It was awesome to have more kids in the house and the two sets of kids got along very well. Sophie played the big sister role and took care of the other kids very well. The Dierking's had a whirlwind trip, flying into Auckland on Friday morning. They spent the day visiting the Sky Tower and the Kelly Tarlton Aquarium before jetting down to Rotorua. Did a couple of cultural activities and the geysers in Rotorua on Saturday and stayed overnite there before driving to Wellington Sunday evening. Then on the Interislander Monday morning to Picton and drove into Nelson. We had a good dinner of a rocket, avocado, blue cheese and egg salad, lamb shank with roasted potatoes and carrots and mac and cheese. The food and wine (Neudorf Sauvignon Blanc and Rimu Grove Pinot Noir 2004) were quite delicious. The next day they went to Morrison Cafe in the morning and had lunch at the Smokehouse cafe in Mapua. They had stayed in Ruby Bay when they honeymooned here 9 years ago. So this was more of a flashback. We met them at the Richmond wave pool and had a blast before doing our customary Sushi dinner on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, Mari and Liza crafted a glass paper weight at Hogland glass factory and then all of us went to Kaiteriteri Beach. Its amazing that kids are just so happy to play with sand, water and rocks and can spend hours doing that. We headed back to Nelson and offered to take care of their kids for the evening.

They visited our current favorite restaurant Hopgood's and came back with rave reviews (JD mentioned the duck was quite excellent, and Liza liked her fish dish). We took the kids to Steffano's pizzeria (above the State cinema) and had pretty good pizza. We ordered the kids an individual child pizza which we assumed would be fairly small. However the child pizza was pretty close to size as the regular pizza (its a great deal at half the price and each kid can have their own taste catered for!). The pizza was quite good and definitely well worth a revisit. We met them at the Boat Shed for lunch before they continued their whirwind tour of Blenheim, Kaikoura and Christchurch. The food at Boat Shed was very good, though the service left a lot to be desired. Mari and I also came to the conclusion that we've OD'ed on mussels and need to stay away from them for the next few months. They also visited the Bead Factory in Nelson earlier that day and mentioned it was a good place for kids Sophie's age and older. You need to be aware of what beads you choose, else you can end up making a very expensive bead necklace.

Looking for a place to rent in Nelson, NZ (apr 15 - jun 1)

2007-03-25T18:15:00.000+12:00

This post is targeted to folks local to Nelson. We have quite a few friends and family visiting us from April 15 - June 1. Our current place is quite large BUT has only one bathroom which limits the number of folks that we can host comforably. So if you know of a place in and around Tahuna hills, send me mail to lobo at yahoo dot com

The weather in NZ ...

2007-03-19T20:57:00.000+12:00

Its been a crazy past weekend with regard to the weather in NZ. Luckily, Nelson was one of the few places that missed most of the excitement. The past weekend NZ experienced:

A lahar bursting from a crater. Apparently this is quite common and they have been more than 30 of such bursts in the past decade
Hail and torrential downpour in Christchurch and Canterbury
The heaviest downpour in decades in Westport on the West Coast of the South Island
A large fire in Blenheim scorching 700 hectares (yes, this is not weather)

We had gone swimming at the pool saturday evening, and put our swim gear to dry on the back porch. The next day we could not find PJ's gear and we assumed the wind gods made off with it. Monday is swimming day at the Nelson pool, so mari went looking for swimsuits for PJ. Well, its no longer summer, and she could not find her a swimming costume!. She came back and called a few stores and the local pools and did not find any. Joys of living in a small town!. She finally called the aquatic center to check if we had left PJ's costume at the pool by mistake. Fortunately we did, and we could continue with our regularly scheduled swimming fun

The girls are getting quite good in the water. They are very comfortable and operate at two different levels. Maya is cautious but keeps progressing at a nice pace that she controls. PJ is the energetic one who loves to jump and get dunked in the water. She's also very willing to try stuff (especially with Mari) and experiment. Maya likes to control the experiment and decides what she will do and when. Two very different attitudes to life ..

Top ten things to do in Wellington, NZ with kids

2007-03-17T16:00:00.000+13:00

Visit Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand. Make sure you visit the kid store, discovery area, nature space and the bush walk.
Have a South Indian meal at Roti Chennai. Order roti and lassi for the kids
Take a walk along the quay and spend a couple of hours at Waitanga Park or some time at the beach a bit further down
Now walk in the opposite direction and spend more time at Frank Kipps Park
Take the cable car to the Botanic gardens and do a short hike to the playground in the gardens
Take the cable car back to downtown and stop at the University playground
Have Malaysian food at Roti
Visit Wellington Zoo in Newtown
Have some dimsum or yum-cha at Regal Chinese
Spend some time in one of the cafes at Courtney Place or Cuba

Windy Not

2007-03-14T11:42:00.000+13:00

After 3 months of mellow yellow (sunshine) Nelson, off to NZ's capital we go. Also known as Windy Wellington. We lucked out big - weather was awesome - 24C. The main reason to go - canele, dimsum, indian/malaysian food : ) , Te Papa museum, cable car, different playgrounds, zoo, see more people (163,824; 2001 census)

fun fact: Wellington is the most "fully wired" city in the most "fully wired" country in the world.

The food was excellent. Roti had great roti's. The mango lassi was a hit with maya and pj. Lobo and I ordered the rose lassi and it was delicious. Petit Bordeux, the french bakery I found on the web was closed. Somehow Lobo managed to find another bakery, Bourdeux, that happened to be owned by petit bordeux as well. Thank goodness for the internet. It had good croissants, canele, and pastries. It was so yum, that we bought some to take home. After our fill of butter, we all walked down the street parallel to the train tracks. The girls ran up and down laughing and giggling.

The location of our one bedroom apartment on The Terrace allowed all of us to walk 15 minutes (maya and pj pace) down to to the waterfront, playground, cable car, roti chennai and roti restaurant. The waterfront was a great place to walk, and wander. Lots of people jogging, walking, and biking. Walking around Wellington, was like walking around San Francisco, many stairs and hills to climb. To keep PJ and Maya walking up, I made it fun to walk slow on their toes, run fast, then slow again.

I've been frequenting the $2 shops these days to keep Maya and PJ busy with interesting activities. There are a lot of craft things - glitter glue, paper, paint, little shiny things to glue, etc. During my wandering around Cuba Street I spotted a $2 shop and went in. Knowing that Maya will be awake when I return, I decide to buy some paper oval boxes and stickers. She keeps herself busy for 30 minutes. : ) She spent a lot of time cutting tiny bits of scrap paper to fill her box to the rim.

We could've easily spent a 4th night in Wellington eating and exploring. It's a great city to wander, and yum coffee to start everyday.

NZ weather report ..

2007-03-14T11:15:00.000+13:00

We had fabulous weather in Wellington two days ago (25 degree C). Over the weekend a pretty strong weather front moved in and its drenching pretty much all of NZ currently. Its gotten quite cold and was 7 degrees C this morning. The kids had to be bundled up with jackets and beanies etc. Summer was quite short out here looks like :(. The radio station reported that there was a sprinkling of the white stuff (snow) on peaks of some mountains near takaka. Our fabuolous view is quite blurry right now, and no peaks are visible. Hey, might be a great winter ski season here!

Hopfully we'll have some good weather when all our friends start visiting later this month and into next month. Start praying to the weather gods folks ...

Wellington, NZ: Day Three

2007-03-12T20:05:00.001+13:00

We had heard about a farmers / veggie market near Te Papa museum. We figured we might as well try to get some yummy food there. My previous night research on the web did not reveal much, so I was not very sure if we would find anything there. Wellington does not have a real farmers market. The one next to Te Papa is more like a commercial veggie market with a few producers with big veggie trucks. We did not find any interesting food, though we did purchase some good artisan bread. It was a windy wellington morning and we wandered over to the Dragon Boat races. Maya does not like speaker sounds, so she was a bit spooked at the announcements of the dragon race and insisted we go home. We compromised and went inside to Te Papa cafe where we had a mediocre flat white and some large fluffies. There was a fair amount of toys to keep the kids entertained while we waited for the museum to open at 10:00 am.

We are not big fans of museums (unless they are kid museums!), but Te Papa was definitely an amazing place and a must-visit attractions. Its well designed, spacious and has quite a few things for kids to do. We spent a fair amount of time at the Discovery Center and then at Nature Space exploring and checking out the birds and animals of NZ. The kids played with a few puzzles at Discovery Center (which we later purchased at the kids store). We then went on the short bush walk and ended up at the sandpit where the kids set up camp for an hour or so. By 11:30 am, the kids were quite tired and we headed to Wellington Market where we had head of a Maori stall. The stall unfortunately had closed down some time ago and the other stalls did not look too good. Roti Chennai has a presence there, but we were still stuffed with malaysian / indian food from our past meals. We had some decent mexican eggs and beans at Vive Mexico, the salsa was quite well spiced. I took the kids home for their afternoon siesta while Mari went exploring Courtney Place and Cuba St.

The evening program was more playtime and biking along the waterfront at Waitanga Park. We had dinner reservations at Bistro Breton in Kelburn and we headed there at 6:30 pm. We started off with an amuse bouche of good salmon pate on not very interesting bread. Mari had an excellent french onion soup as a starter and I ordered the smoked fish plate. Maya managed to scarf most of the smoked salmon and tuna while I got some more of the salmon pate and bread. The kids split the kids menu meal of an excellent pieced of grilled blue cod and some average thick cut french fries. They squeezed ketchup from a cute tomato shaped container. For the main course, Mari had the the Cotriade Breton. This is basically the bretonnese version of Bouilliabaise with musssels, shrimps, salmon and a white fish in a fish stock. The fish was a bit dry, the broth was quite flavorful and tasty. I picked the Potee Bretonne, which is also a traditional Breton Stew with pork sausages and bacon with green cabbage, turnips, carrots and potatoes. We thought the main courses were quite average. For dessert we ordered the Ile Flottante, which is creme anglaise and soft meringye, caramel sauce and grilled almonds. The kids split vanilla and cholcolate kapiti icecream (which was part of their kids meals). We also shared a bottle of French wine (basically I drank most of it, with mari the designated driver having an occasional sip). Overall I'd give the place a 6/10. It was good, but for that price range, your expectations are also much higher. Our meal cost us NZD $150.

Yet another excellent day spent in Wellington. We have a baby cot in the apartment (the playpen), and the kids take turns sleeping in it. We've nicknamed it The Cage. We had it when Maya was a kid and she refused to stay in it, but now they love sleeping on their own in it. The joys of seeing children grow and change :)

Wellington, NZ: Day Two

2007-03-12T20:04:00.000+13:00

Mari got up bright and early Saturday morning and went off to explore Wellington. Her main goal was to goto a French Bakery and get some croissants home for breakfast along with some good coffee. Unfortunately the bakery she had selected (Le Petit Bordeaux) seemed to be closed and looking for a new chef. Her coffee shop of choice (Masi) was also closed down since that block was under renovation.

She came back empty handed, and we got the kids ready and headed for the zoo via Cafe L'Affare. The cafe was crowded and buzzing at 9:15 am in the morning (which is quite unusual in NZ). We had an excellent flat white, a good blueberry muffin and the kids had their fluffy with quite a few marshmallows. We then went to the Wellington Zoo in Newtown. The Zoo was not bad, and definitely a fun activity to do with kids. There was a fair amount of walking involved and we got to see a few interesting animals and birds. The view of the giraffes at eye level was definitely the best part. We spent some time at the Newtown playground after that before heading for lunch.

Lunch was excellent dim sum at Regal (5 Courtney Place). The place was quite packed just like Kon Tiang or Koi Palace in San Francisco. A 15 minute wait turned out to be more like 30 minutes before we were finally seated. We were quite hungry and ordered a fair amount of dim sum to satisfy our craving. The roast duck and spare ribs were quite good. The kids enjoyed the shrimp sui mai, eggplant and fish, egg tart. There was not as much of a seafood variety as I would have liked (or probably those plates never made it to our table!). Overall an excellent lunch, i'd give it a 7/10.

Headed back to the Terrace and put PJ down for her nap. We resumed our adventures at 4:00 pm or so and walked to Lambton Quay and the cable car terminus at the bottom of the hill. Took the cable car all the way to Wellington Botanic Gardens. The children's playground was a good 10 minutes walk away in the middle of the gardens and met our high playground standards. (most playgrounds in NZ are well built and quite new!) While one of us was hanging out at the playground with the kids the other one took a 30 min walk through the gardens. We then took the cable car back to town and stopped at a small playground on the way down. This one in contrast was quite old and run down. I suspect there are not too many small kids in that area since the playground was next to Victoria University hostels.

Dinner that night was at Roti Chennai (the original Roti place in wellington according to their menu). We ordered a vegetarian dosa, roti with mild chicken curry for the kids, fish veruval and seafood/chicken laksa. The food was really good. The sambhar had lots of flavor and the coconut and tomato chutney played a good supporting role. The roti was nice and flaky, the chicken curry was quite mild which the kids liked. We had too much food, so did not really eat the fish dish (though the bites we had were good). The only sour note was the laksa, which was really bad. The noodles seemed undercooked and did not taste great. We topped off the meal with a good glass of rose flavored lassi. Overall our best meal of the trip so far and gets the highest rating of 8/10.

We had a nice climb back up to the apartment hotel which walked off our dinner as well as made the kids tired :) Another exciting day in the big city ...

Wellington, NZ: Day One

2007-03-12T07:03:00.001+13:00

We've been quite busy having a lot of fun in Wellington. Its nice to be back in a relatively big city, but to a large extent, I'm glad we are spending the year in a smaller place like Nelson.

We woke up fairly early at 4:00 am on Friday. Got the car packed, kids ready and were on the road by 5:30 am. NZ driving is significantly more difficult than US driving. The roads are curvier, fair amount of construction and its pretty much a 2 lane hwy into Picton. It took us a bit longer than expected and we had to skip coffee at the Picton Village Bakery (or Le Cafe) and headed straight to the BlueBridge ferry boat, Santa Regina. The Inter-Islander boats are a bit more comfortable and spread out, and have a few more activities for kids. Next time, we'll take the Inter-Islander between the two islands. We got into Wellington at 11:15, drove around the city in search of our apartment hotel (The Terraces). Its a good find. Its quite central to the city but a good step climb away and very spacious. The major drawback is its close to the Wellington freeway, but the noise level is quite tolerable

The ethnic food in Wellington has met or surpassed our expectations already. We started the trip with a good meal at Roti on Willis St. We had the Egg Roti with lamb, the veggie murtabak, mee goreng noodles, mango lassi and rose lassi. We polished most of it off quite nicely. It was significantly better than the local malaysian restaurant in nelson (spices). They also had thosai (which is the malaysian spelling for the south indian dosa!). Didn't know that before we ordered, so we unfortunately skipped it. (i used to be a dosa addict, still am!). Have not had good ethnic food is some time, so my ratings are a bit off. I'd probably give Roti a good solid 7/10.

We walked around downtown a bit. Wellington is a fairly compact city and all the popular areas are a few blocks from each other. We saw quite a few places that were on our list while we wandered around. PJ needed her afternoon nap, so we headed home to put her down. On the way home, I picked an excellent cup of coffee at Mojo (on Willis and Dixon).

In the evening we headed to the Frank Kipps playground along the waterfront. The kids were quite happy there and we go a good view of the harbor and the afternoon ferry coming in. The place was quite happening since it was a Friday evening. On our way home, we checked the cable car location for a potential trip the next day. Mari took the kids home, while I walked to Courtney Place to get some takeaway dinner. It was either Chinese food from The Beijing or Latin American food from sweet mother. I found Sweet Mother first and went there. We got the Fish PoBoy, Chicken Quesadillas (for PJ), Jambalaya and Kumara Mash. I had a pretty strong margarita while I was waiting and also read a pretty good review of the restaurant in the local Wellington magazine. (the praise was a bit too generous and flowing for all the restaurants there, which made it seem like an advertisement rather than a review). I was tired (and a bit drunk), and did not relish the prospect of a long walk back home. Figuring the kids might be a bit hungry, I jumped in a cab :). The food was quite good. In general takeaway food does not have the same taste/feeling as eating at the restaurant. The Poboy and the kumara mash were excellent. The jambalaya and the quesadilla were above average. I'd give it a 6/10

We were quite tired and slept early the first nite in the Big City :)

The web sites of NZ newspapers are pathetic

2007-03-08T21:56:00.000+13:00

Someone please recommend a good web design company to the newspaper folks here. Its amazing as to how little content they have on their website. I've been trying to research the food and kid scene in Wellington, and the newspapers dont help. A few weeks ago, we thought about subscribing to the Christchurch Press, and it took me a fairly long time to find how to subscribe. Obviously, u cannot do it online. You send them email, they tell you to go buy the paper, cut and fill the subscription form and send it in. Can someone please pull them into the internet age

If you think I'm exaggerating, see for yourself the fine web sites of The Nelson Mail, The Christchurch Press and the Dominion Post. They don't have the restaurant reviews online, or stuff about the city / place. Please take a look at the SF Chronicle or the NY Times to see how a real newspaper's website should look like. Maybe the parent website Stuff should stop the practice of producing cookie cutter newspaper sites

Ok, enough venting for now ..

Wellington plans ...

2007-03-08T21:31:00.000+13:00

We head out early tomorrow morning at 5:30 am or so to catch the 8:00 am Bluebridge ferry from Picton to Wellington. Its amazing the things you need to pack with kids :) We are taking their bike/tryke, books, helmets, swimming gear etc. Mari has come up with the Pillow Case (tm) packing scheme. Each of us gets a pillow cover and we stuff our clothes in it. The same for books and other items.

We spend a lot of time figuring out the place we'll eat and have coffee etc. All of us are quite excited to be going to the big city. So here' s a list of things we plan to do in Wellingon. If you are local to Wellington, feedback is appreciated.

Malaysian / South Indian food at Roti
Chinese dim-sum or yum-cha at Regal
Coffee at Mojo
Seafood at Shed5
Chocolate at Schoc. This will involve a roadtrip to goto the original store in Greytown
French at Bistro Breton
Maori food at Kai in the City
More coffee at Cafe L'affare

Most of the above places are within a 2km walk around our apartment hotel. I suspect we'll be walking a lot in Wellington. I suspect we'll entice the kids with fluffies and other yummy treats Thats just the eating part on my list. Mari is maintaining her own separate list. We'll definitely visit Te Papa, hang out along the waterfront, visit the Zoo and/or wildlife park, definitely check out the playgrounds. We'll also check out the local farmers market Seems like the next few days are gonna be packed with eating / playing and having a good time. The weather forecast looks good for now. Hopefully the wind factor does not kick in

We'll keep you updated. Feels so strange to be excited about going into the city. I'm so looking forward to eating some good chinese and malay food :)

Sushi tuesday's with the kids ...

2007-03-06T18:58:00.000+13:00

We are starting to fall into a regular rhythm now :) Tuesday nite is Sushi night. We call up Masao-San from Sushi House tuesday morning and place our regular order (combination of nigiri sushi, sashimi and rolls) for pickup tuesday evening. Mari picks up the kids from school, feeds their ever growing appetites and drops them off at Nelson library. I bike to the library and hang out with them doing art and puzzles for the next hour or so. Mari wanders around happening Nelson, picks up the sushi and wanders back to the library. The nelson area also gets tuna from Fiji on tuesdays and hence there is a bit more variety in the sushi.

We then head home with a platter of yummy food ready to be devoured by the starving Tilos/Lobo clan. There has been an interesting change in dynamics the past few weeks. PJ who would not touch sushi once upon a time now competes with Maya to pick up the choicest morsels (leaving the rice for moi!). Last week we had to increase our order to accomodate PJ's growing appetite. Unfortunately, today Maya and PJ took it to the next level and pretty much gobbled up 80% of the sashimi and quite a bit of the other nigiri (the rolls have too much rice for their liking!). Looks like the order will need to be revised again for next week :)

Its kinda nice to see how PJ's food habits have evolved from a year ago. A year ago she would only eat rice, oatmeal and meat and refuse to touch any fruit or fish. Today, she loves to eat fruit and fish and is becoming quite adventurous in her eating habits (she still has some ways to go to becoming a true foodie!)

Headed to Wellington this week ...

2007-03-06T15:39:00.000+13:00

We are headed to Wellington this weekend :) Taking the Bluebridge ferry and staying at Terrace Villas. We are leaving friday morning and will be back monday nite. If you are from the wellington area or know about good food / cafe / kid things to do, please leave a comment on the blog :)

we'll obviously document all the things to do with kids when we are there, but would be good to get some insider tips :)

Noise

2007-02-26T20:38:00.000+13:00

Nelson is a pretty mellow place to live in and the weather is good. Riding my bike into Downtown Nelson today, I realized that there's a lot of pollution. Biking parallel with the beautiful aqua Tasman Sea, I take in a lot of exhaust. Nelson being a small town, I'm actually biking on Highway 6, which is used by the big cargo trucks all day long.

In the other direction, towards home, the sea breeze is against you, and there are bike trails away from the highway traffic. A very good bike ride from Nelson to Richmond (Railway reserve) is an excellent bike trail. On a major portion of it, it is accessible only to bikers and pedestrians. Nelson is a very biker friendly place. Even the children bike to school - girls and boys.

Everyday I hear this noise. It's 24/7 or until the windows are closed. Since we arrived, I haven't even seen one, but heard them all the time buzzing in the trees. I would wonder, "How many are in there?" Today, while biking home, one smashed into my chest. It was about 3 inches long and big. The previous night, I saw one in the house. ( the bathroom window will now be closed in the night). Some cidada fun facts below.

http://www.ivyhall.district96.k12.il.us/4th/kkhp/1insects/cicada.html

http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/projects/cicada/NZ/gallery.htm

Restaurant Review: Waterfront

2007-02-25T21:19:00.000+13:00

Mari and I have started a "lunch date" tradition. One day in a week (typically thursday), we'll go out and have lunch somewhere in town. So far we've been to Waterfront, which is the sister restaurant to The Smokehouse Cafe (which we've also visited and have pretty good memories of, nothing outstanding but quite solid) in Mapua. It is pretty much across from the Boatshed (a restaurant no longer frequented by us!) on Wakefield Quay. The views from the dining room overlook Tasman Bay and the Nelson Sailing Club.

They have a pretty good lunch menu and on our two visits we've tried four different dishes. All of them were quite solid and well worth it for the price. On our first visit I tried the chili calamari with potatoes and a summer salad and Mari had the moroccan spiced turbot with a summer salad. The turbot was pan fried and quite delicious, the calamari was tender but not as spicy as I expected it to be. On our next visit Mari tried the nelson bay scallops with fries and a salad and I got a steak and mushrooms with fries. The fries were thick cut and not very good. The scallops were quite excellent with a nice white sauce. The steak and mushrooms were ok, I'm not a major meat eater so can't really evaluate steak very well. I suspect we'll try a few other places the next few weeks before going back there. Its close, quick, good and reasonably priced. What more can I ask?

Accountability in the non-profit world ....

2007-02-25T11:58:00.000+13:00

A bit of deviation from my normal Life in NZ blog. Recently became aware of a pretty decent wiki/blog site called Givewell. This came up primarily from an article on the NTEN blog. Weirdly enough, this article is no longer present on the blog. I felt strongly enough to make a small comment on that article.

I have some experience on all sides of the non-profit equation, i.e. employee, funder and fundee. I was an employee of a non-profit (Groundspring.org at that time run by Tides, now part of Network for Good). My two years out there were an eye opening experience and I came away with a sad feeling about how inefficient the whole foundation funding process is and to some extent how big a role "connections" play in funding non-profits. I also concluded that some non-profit organizations are not very efficient, not willing to change and improve their business process and reduce expenses.

We started CiviCRM to provide a good base of open source tools for the non-profit sector. I've been doing this for a little more than two years now, and it has been a pretty good experience. We seem to be filling good niche and are getting used by quite a few orgs in the US and worldwide. You can read more about CiviCRM in our year end report, our website and our blog. We have been reluctant to go down the foundation funding road primarily due to the long road involved but have been lucky enough to have been funded by a good foundation.

We also do some funding in our personal life for a few organizations. Over a period of time, we've started focusing on funding organizations working directly in India. We have experienced quite a few of the things that the Givewell folks mention in their wiki and their blog. Its good to see an organization focus on the non-profit world and publicly analyze and compare them in a transparent manner. There is definitely a need for this, and I hope more foundations do the same and collaborate and publish their findings to improve the sector

The kids in Nelson ...

2007-02-22T17:54:00.000+13:00

I recently took the kids to Edna Turner library in Nelson. Its the library for Nelson region and its quite big and very nice. They have a pretty big kids area, a coloring desk and chairs, bean bags and lots of other activities and puzzles to keep kids of all ages entertained and occupied. I had not been to the kids part of the library before (mari and cecile had done the honors previously) and it was quite a pleasant surprise. They have a pretty good collection of books and we checked out a few to keep the kids occupied. Their current favorite books from the library are: Good night, Pillow Fight and You are not my real mother. They also like the Madeline and Olivia series of books quite a bit. The house we are currently renting has a few small model cars. Both the kids are fascinated with the cars and spend quite some time playing with them.

Maya likes us to spend time with her in school so she can show us all her work. The school out here is much more relaxed and open. The kids can take and share books and toys during circle time, parents can visit and spend time with their kids, hours are quite flexible and casual. Mari spent an hour with Maya at school last week, and this week Maya wanted me to show up. It was interesting to see the group of three to five year olds playing together and individually. All of the kids were focused and doing their work, spending time thinking about what to do next etc. The afternoon class is much smaller than the morning class and so they do get more attention if needed. From the looks of it, the kids did not need more attention. All of them were self reliant and quite self absorbed with their projects. PJ was fast asleep for most of my visit, need to visit when she is awake the next time. I suspect Mari and I will try to visit and spend time at school at least once a week.

Dave and Bob gave the kids two george bears on their visit in December. Maya has named PJ's one eyed bear Sausalito and has named her bear Yoghurt. Not sure how she picked those names, but they are here to stay :)

Trips in the near future ...

2007-02-19T20:13:00.000+13:00

We pretty much have a stream of visitors from the US and India starting late march all the way into mid may. We've started planning trips and will attempt to visit places that we have not seen before. Some of the places on our list include

Wellington: Its relatively close, but the drive, the wait and the ferry ride make it a 5-6 hour trip. However the ferry ride is guaranteed to entertain the kids and give them something to talk about. We'll probably do this over the next few weekends by ourselves. It has the added bonus of having the IceBreaker factory outlet in the vicinity (or so i've heard)
Northland and the Bay of Islands: We are planning to go here with Phu, Tamar, Chi, Jason and Grace after Easter. Their visit coincides with the kids easter break, so I suspect it will be one long road trip
Golden Bay: We'd like to revisit this place and spend a few days there. Most likely we'll go there with Jill and Marley and my brother Steve
Nelson Lakes: Definitely want to spend a few days there hiking and tramping. Hopefully the weather will still be good when Mari's parents visit and we'll rent a bach there. We'll probably do a day trip or overnite with JD and Lisa there
Dunedin / Otaga Peninsula / Invercargill: I suspect we'll do this with Stephen, Ivy, Freia and Reia
New Plymouth and Stewart Island are on the list. Not figured out when we will be able to make it to either place. Maybe with Mari and/or my parents
Fiji, Cook islands, Vanatu: too many places, too little time :(

Weekend update ..

2007-02-18T18:26:00.000+13:00

Another week flies by, followed closely by another equally hectic weekend. Its good to get back on a nice schedule and see the kids get comfortable with their surroundings and consider this their new home :)

Mari and the kids went to the Friday market at Founders primarily to get some delicous bread and baked goods from the awesome Founders bakery. The market is worth a visit just for the delicious ciabatta, whole wheat loaf and canale. Saturday morning, mari took off a bit early to go biking while I fed the kids and got them ready for the day. We met mari later on at Morrison Cafe and headed to the Saturday Market for our weekly produce / fruit / meat shopping. We really enjoy the market and are starting to build a good relationship with some of the suppliers. I also realized that our egg supplier also supplies free range chicken (but does not have a sign for that, since she has limited quantity!). We also frequent a great crepe place for crepes (Kaffey's). Some of our other favorite stalls include the my pie lady, the mussel man, the organic salmon lady and the cheese folks.

The saturday market includes quite a few craft stalls. We bought a very cute drawing table of the right size with two chairs from a local craftsman called Bruce Monro (s_bmonro at hyper dot net dot nz). Maya and PJ have been doing a lot of chalk drawing on it outside while we cook in the kitchen (and can keep them in the corner of our eye)

On Sunday we went to the Brightwater Wine, Food and Music festival. It was definitely the happening place in Nelson that day and drew a large crowd. It was a bit like the Saturday market with wineries in a much larger space. The music was quite good, and there were a few activities for the kids (bouncy tent, face painting, tractor ride, ice cream). We spent a good three hours there before heading home to rest and get ready for the week ahead

I made a pretty awesome chicken adobo and brown rice for dinner Sunday nite. The kids loved it and chowed down quite a bit. I put in a few lobo modification (fried onions and potatoes to improve on the recipe. We also used a few things that mari's mom puts in here adobo (star anise, brown sugar). Monday nite, i attempted to make, picnic fried chicken and was not too happy with the results. Not sure if i'll attempt that dish again or what went wrong :(

canele

2007-02-16T21:29:00.000+13:00

After moving 3 times, it feels great to finally take all of or mostly all of our things from our suitcases. There's still some boxes in the basement but it's mostly winter clothes and there's no need because summer has arrived. There's still the occasional rain shower, but it's not freezing outside and it's a sure bet that the sun will peek through before it gets dark.

I've realized that I really like having fruit trees close by. It's so fun to pick a fruit and eat it whenever you want. There are two plum trees and one peach tree. We've gone plum picking 3 or 4 times from the backyard. Maya and PJ enjoy the fruit picking. Before plucking it from the tree we'll look at it, make sure it's the right color and then pluck it into the bucket.

The sun is awfully hot here so much so that if we're at Tahunanui Beach, Maya and PJ ask for ice-cream. They're regulars at the ice-cream truck. Maya once said, "If it's hot we have to eat ice-cream." The search is still on for good ice cream.

I cooked a lot of things from my Tartine cook book when we first arrived because I love to eat sweets. After being here for awhile, I found the yummy stuff. There's a baker at the founder's market that bakes canele. Other things that I've been eating: chocolate panetoni, olli balls (deep fried muffin), savory muffins, and cakes from the swedish bakery in Richmond.

I've stopped getting bit so much by the sand fly. Or maybe I've stopped itching after it bites.

Settling down ..

2007-02-16T16:21:00.000+13:00

Life is back to normal and we seem to have settled down in a pretty good routine. The kids seem to be exhausted at the end of each day, so we let them sleep in till 7:30 am. Feed them breakfast, pack their lunch on monday and fridays, and then I drop them off at school by 8:50 am.

Its kinda boring working from home all day, so then I walk over to my alternate favorite coffee shop in Richmond, Ambrosia, which also has wireless access. Spend anywhere from an hour to three hours working from my cafe office (am a regular there and have my own reserved table and power outlet in one corner) before I head home and have lunch (typically leftovers from the previous nite dinner) with mari.

Mari picks the kids up at 3:00 pm (also spending some time at Ambrosia prior to picking them up). They hang out at the school or neighbourhood playground before I meet them at either the swimming pool or climbing gym or beach at 4:00 pm. All of us hang out, with mari and i getting in our workout while the kids are playing / splashing / climbing. Back home by 6:00 pm, we cook a pretty good meal. The menu for this week included spinach and mushroom gratin, lamb shank stew, whole salmon with wild rice, moroccan pie (from MyPie), and sushu from Sushi House. We are eating quite nicely out here :). PJ is well on her way to becoming a true foodie. She has started eating Sushi and chows down quite a few fruits these days (a sharp contrast from a year ago!). I've been tempting the kids with various lamb dishes. Its takes quite a few attempts but now maya and PJ seem to enjoy lamb. Yippee!, that means i can buy and cook more lamb (which is quite delicious out here!)

By 7:30 pm the kids are tired and exhausted. So we brush their teeth, read them a lot of bedtime stories and put them to sleep. Kinda nice to read to both of them at the same time. PJ sleeps in the top bunk bed while maya is queen on the lower bed.

The interactions between the two kids is getting quite interesting. They seem to play really well with each other, but then have a big fight periodically. PJ seems to be getting into her terrible two's quite nicely and is starting to rebel a bit more. Seems like we are in for some interesting times ..

Furnished vacation home and car for one lucky family ..

2007-02-08T19:20:00.000+13:00

We are scheduled to be in the US from June 20 - July 10. We'd like to offer use of the house, car, bikes and kids stuff to any folks who might be interested. We need to know the family either directly or via a 1 hop relationship

If you are interested or know of someone who might be interested, please send us email. Please feel free to forward this message. Fares to NZ are quite cheap that time of the year (its winter in June, but the winters are pretty similar to SF winters). You can fly to NZ and Australia via Air New Zealand (pretty good service) for less than USD 1000

Book your tickets to NZ now ...

2007-02-08T18:15:00.000+13:00

before its too late :). We already have confirmed visitors from late March (Jill and Marley) to late April (Phu, Tamar, Jason and Grace). Mari's and my parents will be visiting us sometime between late April and June

So if you would like to come out and hang around with the kids and us, better send us email soon. We will make sure you see the diverse beauty and splendor of NZ and sample the fine regional cuisine, local fine and superb coffee along with fun places for the kids and adults :)

And we are back with broadband access...

2007-02-08T17:59:00.000+13:00

Nice to have reliable DSL access after close to 2 weeks of flaky/no-broadband /dial-up. Telecom NZ did come through quite nicely and flipped the switch when they said they would. Its another matter as to why it took them so long to do it, but thats in the past :)

Other than not being able to post on my personal and work blogs periodically (or too frequently as some of you might comment), life without DSL was quite productive. I managed to get a lot of work done since IM / Skype / IRC / email interruptions were quite minimal. I suspect i'll actually disconnect from the net on daily basis for 4 hours or so and see the results. We also spent way more time at Richmond Mall than we ever have, since there was a great coffee shop, Ambrosia, with good broadband access. Its close to the kids school which makes it even more convenient. Might be a regular part of our life. Have a flat white while responding to email :)

We'll upload a few more pictures of our adventures in NZ over the next day or so for the visually inclined :)

The move is done ...

2007-02-06T11:53:00.000+13:00

Seems like it has taken forever to get to our current state. It has indeed taken a while (9 weeks), but we are now settling down, and unpacking some of the things we got with us. Unrolled the sleeping bags and thermarest (giving them room to breathe etc)

The kids had Monday and Tuesday off before the new quarter starts. We are still getting used to the NZ school and holiday schedule and messed up once again and drove them to school on a holiday! Mari has now attached the calendar to the refrigerator and hopefully we wont make this mistake again (we made the same mistake a week ago on NZ day!)

Dial-up at home is a bit painful. Luckily there are cafes with fast internet access near Maya's school (at the happening Richmond Mall). Paul Roper also stepped in and got me access at NMIT (you can read more about it at my work blog)

The house is nice and spacious. So please do come and visit :). The views of the Tasman Bay, Takaka Hill, Kahurangi range etc are quite amazing. We'll post pictures on flickr once we get broadband at home.