Job Hunting and other Adventures

We've been in Queenstown for about 6 days now, and the job hunting is going pretty good. It started out pretty rough, with a lot of people telling us that they were either not hiring at all, or not until the summer season ramps up in 2 or 3 months. We persisted, though, and I've managed to score myself a sweet gig as a temp day laborer. This is the life! Tomorrow I have 4 or 5 hours taking down furniture from a conference at one of the hotels. Very glamourous. Steph has actually done much better, despite not applying at the organic grocer yet. Tomorrow she has a trial run waitressing at a big golf course/housing development outside of town. She hasn't done a lick of waitressing in about 5 years, and at this point it seems like they are going to just throw her in there and "see how it goes". We'll have to wait and see. She's pretty nervous about it and spent about an hour googling the different types of New Zealand wines to get ready. Not only that, but she had an interview for a waitressing job at one of the hotels in town. We've been applying at tons of places, and there are jobs out there, so we think we'll be able to get some work for the time being. Then, once summer rolls around, it shouldn't be difficult at all to get a job. There are 5 golf courses within 20 minutes or so, and all that I've talked to have said they'd have work, so I'm probably going to be doing more of this temp stuff until I can start at one of the courses.

As for housing, we've reserved a motel-type room at the Top 10 holiday park, which is basically the same as a KOA in the states, for $210 a week (about $150 US). It's about 10 minutes out of town, but you can't beat that deal. We were pretty excited about it until we realized how cold the room is. The dinky little wall heater they have in there is on a timer, so you have to reset the stupid thing every hour. Obviously this presents a problem when you are asleep, so despite getting up a couple times every night we still freeze our butts off at night. I don't know why I even bother getting up. In order to heat the place up as much as possible before going to bed, we've been resorting to all means possible. The room has a toaster and an electric kettle, which we are taking full advantage of. Every time we hear the "pop" of the toaster one of us gets up and turns it back on. I repeatedly fill up the kettle and once the water is boiling, pour it into a big dishwashing bucket to steam up the room. I hope you're visualizing a pretty sad little scenerio going on, because that's what it is. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Once we secure jobs we're going to look for an apartment or house to rent. Top criteria = warmth.

We've also had a chance to do a bit of exploring between job searches. We drove up to Glenorchy, which is about 45 minutes away along the lake. The drive was probably one of the most beautiful we have ever done. We did a little walk around the town, but hopefully when we get some time we'll go back and do some serious hiking. Many of the "Great Walks" (best hike in the country) start near here. Today I got my first swim in Lake Wakatipu - my first two swims, actually. The park in town has a frisbee golf course, so I bought a disc and off we went. By the 5th hole I had already been in the lake twice, up to my waist in freezing cold water. My underwear was soaked so once I put my jeans back on it looked like I had wet my pants. Still, went on to shoot a 4-over par, not bad for my first time plus a couple lake shots.

The computer is about to die so I've got to upload. Some new pics are up. Be back soon.