haere mai

So - I'm home. Arrived at 2:20pm on Thursday 13 December, exhausted after leaving Perth at midnight. Lucky because I travelled by business class and was able to use the Qantas Business class lounge in Sydney, with free food, magazines, wireless internet and soft comfy armchairs. I am still jetlagged (this timezone change is a killer - I have to get up at 3am and go to bed at what feels like 4pm) and I have Business to attend to in the form of enrolling for university, making hospital appointments, informing Inland Revenue that I AM in NZ and therefore don't have to pay extra interest on my student loan, applying for travel insurance - and so on.

I have come back to:
- heavenly, heavenly cold weather. When I came out the airport door, it was rainy, misty and windy. BLISS. Such is a New Zealand summer. It's only started to get sunny today. And when it gets warm, it won't be too dry and it won't be too humid. There will be hardly any flies, no poisonous spiders, no snakes.
- Dad, my sister and her husband, my two nephews aged 9 and 7. Alex, the younger, said to me on Thursday - "when are you going to get married and have babies?" (I am the only one in the family who is still resisting.)
I snorted and said, "I don't know, never maybe."
Alex replied, "Well, you're lovely, someone should marry you!"
As little as I want to get married right now, isn't that just so sweet? Who wouldn't want to be around a kid like that?
- old computer and slow, restricted internet. I cannot use facebook and my gmail and blogger accounts only display the basics - no photos can be published today. Right now it is still funny.
- a soft bed. For various reasons the mattress I slept on in Oz was built like a log and my sleep now is long, luxurious and uninterrupted.
- people who are like me. Even chatting to the airport staff who wheeled me through Christchurch Airport reinforced this. The Aussies I met were on the whole great, and hardly all that different from me. But being back here reminds me this is where I belong, this is where I fit in. No more New Zealander jokes. No more overemphasized imitations of my accent. No more slightly different standards of politeness.
- a mall in which I inevitably run into at least three people I know every time I shop there. One of the lonely things about Perth was walking around town or mall or beach and knowing I would see nobody I knew even vaguely. Today I met some friends at a cafe near Riccarton mall and besides these friends I bumped into four other people I know. Christchurch is a small, small place.

It's good to be home.