Doctors' visits

I've been feeling off-colour for the last month, so yesterday I forked out a whole pile of money for the doctors', but they can't find anything wrong. The doctor thinks I might have gallstones, so I have to fork out more money again soon to have an ultrasound. Sigh. Hope not, cos that would require operations. Which would not be happy.

The First Big Trip to San Jose and Beyond

We went on a trip to Ikea in East Palo Alto, to get the rest of our house stuff, on Sunday. We took the light rail (lucky Brendan gets a free pass from IBM) to San Jose, and a bus from there to Ikea. Which is huge, and I liked it. You go around the top floor in the "showroom" - basically a whole pile of made-up rooms and furniture, and in some cases whole apartments worth, right down to the cutlery and picture frames, so you can see what it looks like. Everything has a little tag and numbers - you go downstairs when you're finished and take a big flat trolley and try and weave your way through the warehouse to pick up your couch in a box, and find the pretty chairs you liked. And fight other people for the last one. (Kidding!) Then you discover there are no chairs and everything you need to make the couch is there: pillows, mattress, couch cover - but no frame. So you rush upstairs and ask the couch department when the frame will arrive, and they say six weeks. Instead, you decide to get another couch. You look longingly past the small dingy couches and at the pretty black leather ones, but remember you can't really take it home with you anyway. And get the smallest couch there is.

So today our couches and coffee table and table arrived, and Brendan and I played with the Ikea lego. They are very pretty (the couches not so much - grey-blue.) And now our house looks a bit more like a house.

Things we learned this weekend:

1. San Jose's streets are lined with trees. Where does all the water come from to keep them all?
2. Light rail is called "light" cos it's small and travels along the streets next to the cars with no barriers. The heavy rail is called the "CalTrain" and has two stories, kinda like Sydney's.
3. San Jose seems full of people with hoodies. What is it with the hoodies?
4. Pita Pit is a yummy alternative to Subway and they have feta cheese.
5. Many many streets are named after tech people - it's as if the computer geeks designed a city. Streets like "Woz Drive" after the co-founder of Apple, and "Java Drive". Traveling around is like playing a who's who of tech companies.
6. Station names are funny. I can see how America gets place names like "Beaver" - a sample of stops on our train included "Great America" and my favourite, "Lick Mill".
7. Ikea is like adult lego - but you can only make one thing, and you get to keep it afterwards.
8. If it's not in stock at Ikea, on the ground floor, then it's not in stock, no matter how many people you get to look for it.
9. Sometimes the difference between a safe area of town and an unsafe area of town is an overbridge.
10. Weird people travel on buses late at night.
11. People can run faster than the light rail (or at least two kiwis can).
12. Having no car is a PAIN.
13. Delivery people do not have a sound knowledge of world geography.
    

Nominations for Top 10 Places to Get Drink, Drink Drink and Be Drunk in Wellington

Hello all, this is collecting nominations for the Top 10 Places to Get Drink, Drink Drink and Be Drunk in Wellington. We're looking for the best Bars, Clubs and Alcohol Stores in Wellington, at least for people our age. You can make as many suggestions as you like, just post a comment with:

Name of Place
Reason why it's great.

Here's a few to get you started:

• The Shack. It's tiny, it's scungy and it exists primarily as an addendum to Bazu, but it serves the cheapest shots (made from the cheapest alcohol) in Wellington. Unlimited $3 doubles.
• Moore Wilsons. For the small inconvenience of signing up for a Moore Wilsons student card, you can gain access to some of the best bottle prices available.

EDIT: Will leave people a couple of days to post their ideas.

Sure Catch Trout

On the way to work there is a place called "Sure Catch Trout". It is a small lake where you can pay a fee to fish for trout which have been specifically put in the lake for you to catch. I find this a little odd, since surely the whole point of fishing is that you're not sure of catching something, and your incredible manly skill saves the day. But nonetheless, it seems like a peaceful way to spend an afternoon if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Or at least it would be, if not for a couple of minor details. The reason I can see this place on the way to work, is because the lake is 10 meters from the highway. Beside the lake is a huge, coal-fired power station, and the entire thing is also surrounded by a 2m high chain-link fence. There were a couple of fishermen attempting to make the scene look rugged and idyllic. Needless to say they were failing.

It's raining!

Today and yesterday, it rained. Big fat raindrops falling from the sky. We had just bought a bed, and had to call Duncan to come and pick us up. It would have taken a half-hour to walk home.

(Photos of our new apartment will be posted.)

It only rains a few times a year in San Jose.

The rest of the time, it's sunny.
But a haze hangs over the hills and in the light. I think it's dust and pollution. The sky was a lot nicer and clearer afterwards.

The Salad Bar Delusion

On my first day at the office my supervisor and I went down to the cafeteria for lunch. The cafeteria includes a number of smaller shops serving different kinds of food, and amongst these is a Salad Bar. Steven informed me that as he was on a diet, that was where he would be getting his lunch.

There seems to be an impression that anything you eat will be healthy and slimming provided you acquire it at a Salad Bar. In search of customers wanting to feel like they are eating healthy without having to actually deal with all that unpleasant leafiness, this salad bar exploited the Salad Bar Delusion to it's fullest potential. While there was certainly salad available at the salad bar, there was also:

• Mini Pizzas
  
• Those folded over pizzas I can't remember the name of
• Fried, Crumbed Eggplant
  
• Fried Chicken Wings
  
• Deep-Fried, Crumbed Mozzarella Nuggets
  

Now, while I understand that all salad bars do this to some extent (I distinctly remember getting shrimp crackers at more that a few salad bars), deep fried mozzarella is evidence enough that the US is still comfortably leading the world in this regard.

We have an apartment!

So: all about our apartment:

The day before we were due to move in, we finally got confirmation of our apartment. It's a one-bedroom one. I'm pretty excited, as it's our first 'proper' house. We moved in last night, after spending an hour signing our lives away at the leasing office.

So we went on something resembling a shopping spree at Walmart last night. After all that time NOT buying house stuff - I feel a bit sad cos I can't buy pretty stuff to ship back to NZ.
There is so much space! The kitchen is huge - we can't possibly fill all the cupboards. After our time flatting, to have a house just for us seems almost a waste. That said, we don't have much to fill it with yet.

I'm excited because the possiblity of buying a cheap piano has suddenly occured to me, as we won't be needing it after. I would love to have another piano to annoy the neighbours with. Ingrid also used to play piano, which is good. We have scarily similar backgrounds in some places.

More on Walmart later - just for you, Kat. This one was a mini-Walmart. We spent time earlier making "The Definitive List" of what we needed - but I forgot it. We bought around $800 worth of stuff, including two kitset "offices" consisting of a desk, little bookcase and what will become our bedside tables. We finally finished making one set today - I'm exhausted. I don't really want to look at the other set just yet.

And, amazingly, we only forgot two things on the entire "Definitive List".

People also looked at us really strangely in the shop because Brendan and I had four trolleys. Four! Also today when I mentioned to various people that we had bought stuff at Walmart cos we needed an entire house worth of stuff, they looked at me strangely. It was only later I realised it would be like telling someone you went to the Warehouse and how they had all this stuff there! Oops! *blush*