A snapshot of Christmas times....

It feels like I have been away from my blog for like a million years! I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years with friends and family. I have so much to tell you and I still haven't worked out my New Years Resolutions/goals for 2014.

I thought today I'd just share a few photos of my Christmas time - this year Rich and I went to stay at his parents orchard in Te Puna near Tauranga. What kind of orchard you may ask? Well kiwifruit of course.

If you're not from New Zealand you most likely call them simply "kiwi" - but we also have kiwi (birds) and so things could get confusing if we call the fruit "kiwi" as well.

Anyways enough about the kiwifruit - a few things we got up to whilst we were staying with Rich's parents include a walk to Te Puna Quarry Park. It's partly an "art park" - but it does have bush walks as well. We have checked out the art part of the park many times before, so decided to go for a bush walk.

We also went to check out the succulent garden in quarry park - so many interesting plants and pretty colours.

 We also checked out the butterfly garden which had lots of pretty flowers and monarch butterflies - however, the butterflies were a little camera shy.

They have also recently added a water wheel at the park - I thought it was kind of fun.

Also whilst we were at Rich's parents we did a walk around Mount Maunganui - I didn't take any photos of our walk. But I did take some of our stroll along Mount Maunganui beach afterwards.

Last we went to check out "Historic Villiage on 17" - when  I was young this was a park where you would visit and learn about the past, what life was like in New Zealand for the early settlers and I'm pretty sure there was a steam train of some type.

However, now its kind of a centre for stores and artists - it was pretty quiet the day we visited. However, we were visiting the day after boxing day! It did seem like a pretty cool space.

Finally here's a photograph from our plane when we were returning to Wellington - when we finally arrived home it was raining (Murphy's Law). However, its always good to be home.

In Tauranga

For the last few days, I've been hanging out with Rich and his parents in Tauranga. However, the "sunny" Bay of Plenty hasn't really been living up to it's name. It's cold, and I mean really cold.

Well for me at least - everyone else doesn't seem to be suffering quite as badly. I just hope New Zealand can give me one day of sunshine before I leave.

I haven't been up to that much since I've been here (that's what holidays are for right). However, I did manage to make two batches of cupcake and I will post pictures soon.

I'm also working on a very small cross stitch project - I've had a bit of drama with the pin-up girl I was working out which requires a lot of removing stitches. Which I just can't be bothered with right now.

We also had a rather successful shopping trip into town today - I manged to buy two new cute cardies for the warm weather in Taiwan as well as other necessities which can be hard for a Kiwi girl to find in Asia.

I also bought a Manderin Phrasebook and CD - let's see if I can move beyond "Hello" and "Thank you".

If you've been watching the news in New Zealand or in fact anywhere in the world you would have seen that our beautiful Christchurch city has been hit by a 7.1 earthquake. Thankfully it happened in the small hours of the morning so there were no casualties.

But many people's homes and businesses have been destroyed which makes me sad.

I have also read that at least two of the historical buildings in the CBD will need to be demolished - which makes me incredibly sad. I loved Christchurch's town centre and part of that is due to the historical buildings. It's so sad to lose our history.

Over the weekend I spent much of my time crafting and listening to radio New Zealand - due to the fact they had a lot of coverage on the earthquake.

I don't want to sound like an advertisement for Radio New Zealand, but they do also have a fantastic music show on. I'm pretty much totally out of touch with the New Zealand music scene after living in Korea. But I am pretty much sure this is my new favourite New Zealand song.


I shall return soon with a cupcake post!

I'm Home Again.....

After around 16 hours flight time (Seoul to Sydney and then Sydney to Auckland) I'm finally home again.

It's pretty awesome to be home, even though it was so cold today I had to stop off at Glassons and buy a winter hat. Even though the news said it's only 15 degrees in Auckland it feels much colder to me!

It looks like we will be staying in Auckland this weekend and hopefully catching up with a couple of friends, then it's off to Tauranga to see Rich's family (we'll hopefully fit in a brieft visit to Hamilton somewhere) and finally to Taranaki to see my family.

So I think my blogging and blog reading/commenting shall be a light for a while.

I will be out enjoying New Zealand with my family and friends and appreciating the green, enjoying hearing New Zealand accents all around me, eating awesome food and wondering why everyone seems to be so laid back.