For my Aunt Sharon =)

I´ll write this post in English. I excuse myself for all the possible mistakes I´ll knit in my text, but of course it´s not that fair, if I ignore you Sharon by writing in German the whole time (and all you other guys are perfectly able to understand English and if all else fails I´m pretty sure you have access to a dictionary!), so I´ll try my best to dispose this fact of once and for all, Sharon :-)

By the way it was my Nanas idea, so if anybody of you really have problems with this post, ask her to translate it for you!

So, well my weekend was absolutely marvelous! :-)

I spend it with a teacher I met in the children’s school. She and her family emigrated 15 years ago from Germany to New Zealand. Uschi (yeah poor woman) is such a nice person, I likes here from the very beginning on. She invented me to come to her place the first time we met which is now something around two month and a bit ago. She bolstered me right from the start and she was the one who told me I can stay with her whatever will happen in this odd family as well.

So, to satisfy the invitation, I planned to spend my weekend with the Scheibmair family.

It was a great adventure to get there, cause they´re really living in what is called “the middle of nowhere”. I needed almost one and a half hour to get there and sometimes I really thought I´m wrong , cause the street had been just a path and around me was bush and wilderness.

However after ages I arrived at their place and words can´t describe what I found there. It was awesome, absolutely outstanding! They bought a hill with all the land around it. And the edges of the hill are just beside the beach. On the top, of course, they built there house (Yes they built it, Werner, the husband (of course) planned and built the whole house by himself and the help of some books!). These pictures are not able to show you how it looked like in natural but they may give you an idea what I could feel when I stood there.

Sometimes, Uschi told me, dolpfhins loses their way into the bay.

Several minutes after I arrived, I met Werner and Felix. Felix is the youngest of their three children. He is 21 years old and lives in Auckland where he almost finished his studies by now. Both were working on a pool. Uschi and me let them doing their stuff and went to pick some fruits.

Mates, that was awesome! Oranges, Mandarins, Lemons and Lemonates (kind of a sweet lemon – tastes fantastic!). And of course we picked them directly from the trees!

As I already said they´re building a pool at the moment. And there went something wrong with the plaster so they have to pull it off to go on. And that is an annoying job I can tell you! And I can do that because, of course, I was not sitting around, doing nothing while they were working so hard. So I changed into working cloth and gumboots and hopped into the pool as well. At lunch time we had a awesome “Vesper”. By this time the daughter and her fiance arrived. Gundi is 28 years old and as nice as her family. Of course her fiance whose name is Daniel is nice too and blessed with a great humor. They are living not that far away from where I´m living at the moment and they offered me their place as well as whenever I fell to escape.

After the lunch we returned to the pool and worked there together until dinnertime. Gundi named the work “Pool slavery”, but it wasn´t that hard and all together we were talking a lot. So it was more fun than real work (although I still can feel my back and arms…).

With the beginning of the sunset we stopped working and started preparing dinner. Pizza shell be our dinner. But if you´re thinking now, that we just put a frozen “thing” into the oven are you completely mistaken!

We started with making our own flour by grading grain.




Then followed making the dough, let it rise, bring in the right shape,




put all the healthy stuff on it (Really, I enjoyed the weekend not just but a great part of it because of all the fresh veggies and fruits!).





In the meantime the men fired the oven (I donno the English translation, but in Germany it´s called “Steinofen” (Jap, Leute genau, ein richtiger Steinofen!!) and when it was the time they put the pizzas inside, let them bake for a while and got them out with the typical wooden scraper.

I think I don´t have to tell that this was an incredible, outstanding meal which I won´t forget in this times without any foodculture (I translated that word one by one from the german word, so Sharon, I hope you got, what I wanted to say..?!).

After enjoying that gorgeous dinner we sat down having a glass of vine, chatting and laughing in a german-english-mix. It was so cosy and familiar like it used to be at home.

Because of the quite hard day I was pretty exhausted and went to bed early. The next day I got up ´cause the sun heated the room I was sleeping in. It was the first time ever since I arrived in NZ that I wasn’t freezing while I stood up.

Then I had a fantastic breakfast with self made bread (with a real crust!!) and the marvelous view out of the sitting room. When I was finished I sat down with my book, reading the rest of my time there, not looking forward to drive “home”. But then it got time that I had to drive back into reality. I said goodbye, thank you and waved all the way down the hill until I lost the sight of them at the next corner. In my baggage a bag full of fresh picked fruits of Oranges, Mandarins and Lemonates :-)

So I refueled myself with energy for the following week in which hopefully I will get news from my agency. The best of course would be, if they present me the profile of a family (or two), but if that would take another week it would be more than ordinary.

The situation between the partens and me hast not changed. It´s still relaxed but odd. And of course all the things which never let me felt home so far still exist. But it´s ok, with a little bit of Gods help I´ll be out of here before December. So as you can see I´m all right, I will survive it and lucky me that I can take my time here as an experience and not as a waste of time.

Many thanks to all of you out there for supporting me and becalming me. It means a lot to me to know you all thinking of me! Lets cross fingers to get me soon in a friendlier area.

All of you take care, nice greetings,

Julia