Hunchback and A Bunch of Other Stuff

Kia Ora! Welcome to today's post. For this post we are going way back in time, all the way to August 10, 2024! On that day we took the family to see the musical "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". We are so glad we went - it was really fantastic. Take into account that we bought the tickets for the "cheap" show (had the back up singers performing, ugh, what's the term I'm looking for, you know the ones who do all the work practicing just in case the leads can't perform). We wondered how amazing the show with the "regular" star performers was because we were not at all disappointed in the show we saw. As soon as the ensemble started singing the opening song we knew we were in for a treat! 

On the say to the show we passed this big Deloitte building, so I took a picture in honor of Uncle Paris.

Here's a picture of the theatre. We were on the second level.

After the performance we rushed over to a block party that the ward was hosting in one of the neighborhood's. Oh man, the food was so tasty. There's a brother in our ward who owns a food truck (I am so sorry, I cannot remember his name) and he brought loads of good stuff - his seafood chowder is just the best, as well as fried dough balls (paraoa parai - essentially a Utah scone in ball shape). He also makes steamed pudding with custard (remember pudding here - and in the UK - is like cake). He sent home so much steamed pudding with our family! We were eating it for days. 


Brad with the aforementioned steamed pudding with custard.


The missionaries were there dishing up the food for us.

I was out shopping when I came across the neatest little thing. I'm not even sure what it is, I think it was supposed to be a book end, but it was so cool, you looked into the side and it had all these details, like you were looking down the alley of a magical street. It wasn't Harry Potter, but pretty darn close.

Here it is.

And I tried my best to get a picture to show you the details of the inside.

I found an American brand mayonnaise here and took a picture to show you. Yup, $11.90. I did not buy it. The generic mayonnaise I buy costs about $8 for around that size.

Daniel and I cannot remember what he is holding or why we took a picture of it, but there you go. Enjoy!

Just some interesting greenery along the walking path.

I'm pretty sure Brynn asked me to take this picture for Sis. Birch. Hopefully she got it.

At one of the thrift stores (called opp shop's) I was at they had this big ol' wood basket of spoons from different places. I couldn't find one with Nampa on it.

Okay, funny story. They had these (what I thought were) cookies (called biscuits here) which were actually called wafers and they were pretty cheap so I was like, I have to try these. The picture made them look like giant strawberry creme wafer cookies (which I love, well, the vanilla flavored ones, not the strawberry or chocolate ones). Anyways, when we opened them up we discovered they were just the wafer part, no filling. Apparently you're supposed to fill them with ice cream. Well, we didn't have much ice cream, but we tried. I had a good chuckle at myself.

This is a picture I took of the organ at our building, trying to figure out how to play it. It didn't have the "fake the pedal sound" button, so I didn't sound great on it, but I tried!

And there you have it, what was happening in our lives around the middle of August!

With love from New Zealand,
Lyndsay


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two weeks ago my entire life changed…

Image
  Well, actually it also changed 100 days before that. On March 12, 2024, (our 25 th wedding anniversary) Brad moved to New Zealand. By himself. Without me. Without our children. It was a temporary separation. 100 days to be exact. The kids and I would join him mid-June, as soon as school was out (and James had graduated). I’ll make another post about the adventure leading to that day as well as the adventures during those 100 days of separation, but suffice it to say, we’re glad to be together again. And we are together again in New Zealand. Not because we don’t love America, not because we don’t love Idaho or our friends and family there and definitely not because we don’t love the amazing charter schools where our children attended. But, for some reason, we felt a strong pull to take this step and see what it is like to live in a completely different country, a different hemisphere even! And to give our children this experience and know that they can do things that people...
Read more

Let's go back to the beginning...

Image
 You may be wondering what on earth let the Bodily Family to New Zealand? Let's get into that. There is a bit of disagreement as to when the idea of living in New Zealand first occurred to Brad. I thought he had talked about the idea of living in New Zealand years ago. Like when Ryan was just a little boy. Not seriously, mind you, just kind of like, how cool would it be to live in New Zealand? And we talked about how we had heard you had to have a million dollars in savings or something to even apply to live there. So, who knows if that ever actually happened or not (though I visualize this conversation happening in Mom & Dad Bodily's kitchen in their house on Howard - does anyone else remember this by any chance?). Anyways, whether that was the first seedling of feelings for living in NZ or not, a few years back, I believe sometime in 2020, Brad saw a wallpaper on his computer and something about it appealed to him enough for him to find out the picture was taken in New Ze...
Read more

Getting a Job

Image
 Oops! I know I said the next post would be about obtaining a visa to New Zealand, but before we could even apply for a visa we had to have a job offer in the country, so I am going to chat about that first. I think the very day that I told Brad I was on board with moving the family to New Zealand he started applying for jobs here. Any job that he might remotely qualify for he applied for. We received so many "I'm sorry, but no" replies. Mostly because we were not in the country. For a company in New Zealand to offer a job to a non-citizen they have to go through a bit of a process. First, they have to be approved by the government to even offer jobs to non-citizens/residents, and many companies simply don't get that approval. Second, they have to prove to the government that they tried to fill the position with residents but were unable to. Also, your job position has to be on a government approved list, so certain jobs here you can't even consider hiring a non-r...
Read more