Who dies on Shortland Street

Even though we can't watch Shortland Street anymore since we're not in the country...we can still read the recaps!

So, it turns out someone dies on Shortland Street!  The Facebook fan page, and website give all these clues as to whom it may or may not be.

Let's try to debunk them...

http://shortlandstreetclues.tvnz.co.nz/

Each day until Shortland Street returns on January 13th 2014 we will release a clue for you to piece together the secrets that no one else knows. Follow the clues and you and a friend could win a morning tea with Shortland Street stars and a chance to be walk-on extras in one of the 2014 episodes of Shortland Street. Enter the competition here.

Oh man...morning tea and being an extra...

CLUE #1
It sounds like Bella making the 111 Emergency call

CLUE #2
Sarah tries to text message TK but gets no response.  Does this imply that TK is the one who dies?

CLUE #3
This is a trailer video clip that shows a hearse 1) Rachel, who looks to be sitting in the back of a car or hearse, 2) Roimata standing in a cemetary 3) Chris 4) TK 5) Emma 6) Josh.  The it says "for one of them, this is the end"   So a couple of theories here:  it is one of the people in the clip (perhaps one of them is in ghost form); it is no one shown, since they must all be alive if they are shown.

CLUE #4
They even drafted up a fake article about the explosion!

The key points in the article are the witness account saying
- I don't know what happened - but I think the deck went down
- they saw four to five body bags being wheeled away from the scene.
...does this mean that all the people from CLUE #3 die?

CLUE #5
A fake FB page, with pictures from the Warner Bach Explosion.  Not having seen the actual episodes, I would not know what the characters were wearing before the explosion.  You see a pink jandal, a blue jandal, and two articles of clothing or accessories, a shattered photo of the Warner family.
Some of the comments are hilarious, like RIP towel.

CLUE #6
It's a police report listing items of clothing as evidence.  Reading the comments below the clue, it looks like the majority of the clothing belongs to the people in the clue 3 video.

CLUE #7
This looks to be clue 3 all over again, but there is a 7a AND 7b version with the text "Can you notice anything different? " Do you see anything?

CLUE #8
A ripped up police report about Josh.  He committed an offence on Nov 5.

CLUE #9
An encrypted audio recording which sounds like Josh.

CLUE #10
It's an internal police call.  One of the commenters does a superb job cleaning up the audio so you can tell what the other side of the conversation is.  The gist of it, is that evidence has leaked to the media.  It surrounds some documents the police are focusing on.  The media will not know the list of victim(s) until all the families are notified.  So...does one person die? or more than one?

CLUE #11
The clue highlights some words "EVIL KEY VIRUS".  If you unscramble the words, you get "Kylie survives."

CLUE #12
A diagram showing the layout of the bach, where everyone was during the explosion, and the blast radius.  The closest to the blast were Roimata, Harry, and Chris.

Leeeegend!

There are some things that are really memorable about our time in New Zealand.  The following commercial is one of them.

It is an anti-drunk driving commercial.  If you travel to New Zealand, you will also see signs along the road warning against drunk driving.

Some notable things about the commerical
1) the accents
2) bro
3) ghost chips
4) puzzle time
5) internalizing a complex situation in my head (heeed)

This commercial is soooo New Zealand...

Decks and Caulk

So maybe you have read my other posts about me being misunderstood due to my "accent".

Well here is a taste of the New Zealand accent.

Yes, they really do pronounce 'deck' like that.

* warning: humourous  yet a  touch on the vulgar side

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkmeoYKYctw

Those out-takes at the end make reference to a squirrel being on the guy's deck.  Firstly, I never ever saw a squirrel in New Zealand.  As far as I know, New Zealand does not have squirrels.  But squirrels are more well-known to the rest of the world (at least those in North America).  If he said, "Hey, get that pukeko off my deck" there would be alot of head scratching and much of the humour might have been lost.

Rihanna visits New Zealand and gets tattoo!

I get a little nostalgic when I hear any 'news' about New Zealand.

The latest thing I heard on the radio today was that Rihanna marked her recent visit to New Zealand with a tattoo...etched into her skin with a chisel, mallet and ink pigment.

http://tvnz.co.nz/entertainment-news/rihanna-s-maori-tattoo-etched-hammer-5643554

But when they said 'may-or-ee' instead of 'mow-ree' when describing the traditional Maori tattoo, I felt like calling into the radio station to tell them how it should be pronounced.

And if you still don't know how it is pronounced...see link here...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2YwfHazDSc

The things I miss

It has been a while since the last post.  There are still many things to talk about, and perhaps one day those topics will end up on this blog.

While I missed 'home', I do find myself missing aspects of New Zealand.

Lifestyle.   Many people told us that New Zealand is about lifestyle.  They even have things called Lifestyle blocks!  Lifestyle blocks are essentially big plots of land with room for livestock like sheep, horses, etc.  The pace of life is more relaxed.  Ever since we got back to Toronto, it has been go go go. Maybe this will all settle down, but in the meantime, it has not.

The traffic in Toronto is horrendous.  Now, they say the traffic in Auckland is terrible too, but in Hamilton rush hour seemed to add no more than 15 minutes to your travel.  Keep in mind that this is significant when it takes like 10 minutes to get across town.  But, more to the point, it takes 10 minutes to get across town!  Now, back in the GTA, if you drive 10 minutes we would be lucky if we hit our destination.  But it is more likely that we have only hit the halfway mark.

New Zealand is beautiful, I will give it that.  Canada is beautiful too...but Canada is quite spread out.  Hamilton was very central to lots of places: 1.5hr from Rotorua, 30-45min from Raglan, 1.5hr-1hr45min to Auckland, 2hr to Taupo, 1hr to Waitomo...there were lots of places that we were able to visit.  Although some attractions were quite expensive, much of NZ was quite accessible.

We left alot of things behind.  One of them was a stroller.  A Steelcraft Eden four wheel, reversible handle stroller.  I wish we knew that it was free to take onto the plane.  Now that we're back in Canada, we are finding it difficult to find a reversible handle stroller that we like.  We miss it lots.  We miss the four wheel drive, the large basket in the bottom.  Sigh.

Good produce.  It was expensive produce, but for the most part, it was generally quite tastey.  Markets! There was always a market going on somewhere.  And now that we have left Hamilton, we hear that there is a pretty good Nightmarket!  http://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/8663278/Hamilton-gets-first-taste-of-night-market.  This would have been a 7 minute walk from where we lived!  Oh well.

SPACE.  No, not the final frontier.  SPACE stands for Supporting Parents Alongside Children's Education (http://www.space.org.nz/).  It was a great program, where other first time moms could gather with their babies and interact and learn.  We sang songs, learned about some important topics (Emergency aid, baby movement, eating...), read to babies, let them play, learned about what types of play were good at different ages (ages = weeks).  I can't reiterate enough, how great a program this was/is.

Shortland Street.  That's right.  Watching the evening soap opera centered around a fictional NZ hospital was a daily ritual.  While we cannot watch it from Canada (it's blocked), we can still read about what's going on ...http://tvnz.co.nz/shortland-street/episodes-3341561.

Our friends.  There were lots of good friends made in NZ.  Many of them were actually foreigners.  People in general, were pretty nice - foreigner or NZ'er.

What I don't miss?  The lack of well insulated housing.  Turn up the heat you say?  Well, when most of the heat escapes, and you feel large drafts coming from the sliding doors, it feels pointless to turn up the heat.  Besides, the underfloor heating that came with our flat was an expensive heating method.

I also don't miss Rugby.  Mostly because I don't get the sport.  It was still good to see the hype that surrounded the Rugby World Cup back in 2011.  But it didn't get me hooked.

I still turn on the windshield wipers accidentally sometimes, when really I intend to signal a turn.  My mind still thinks about driving on the 'wrong' side at times, but that habit is mostly gone.

Maybe one day we'll be back for a visit.  But New Zealand is far from home, so it probably won't be any time soon.  One day.

New Zealand Drought Makes the News in Toronto!

There was an article (blog post?) in The Toronto Star today about the drought that New Zealand is experiencing at the moment.

http://thestar.blogs.com/worlddaily/2013/03/worst-drought-in-new-zealand-in-30-years.html

It's true.  Last year I was blogging about how it was raining everyday for weeks at a time.  I had also described it as torrential downpour rain, and not just the pitter patter type.

This year, there is a stark contrast in the weather.  This is what summer should have felt like.  It has been quite warm and humid in the past couple of months (since maybe December).  We actually had to turn on the ceiling fans for the first time to help circulate the air.  Oh yes, I have not blogged about the lack of central heating / air conditioning in New Zealand.  Ceiling fans.  That is what we have relied on to help cool us down.

It's March now, and it's still very warm.  It's still singlet (tank top) weather.  People still walk around with no shoes...but don't be deceived...this happens in all sorts of weather / seasons - including winter.

- Last year, the weather was kind to the farmers bringing about great crop yields.  This year it's a very different story
- straw was shipped from the South Island to the North Island for the farmers in crisis (http://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/8422683/Straw-sent-to-North-Island-farmers-in-crisis)
- dust devils blow across some North Island cities like Hamilton, which can be seen from the mall
(http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8358294/Dust-devils-blow-in-as-big-dry-continues)
- dust devil hits the Pasifika Festival in Auckland while we're there...but we didn't see it (video)

First Long Weekend of 2013!

Happy Auckland Anniversary Day!  It usually occurs on the Monday nearest January 29th.

It's a regional holiday...like if there was an 'Ontario Day' or something.

Accidents Happen

There was a Zorbing accident in Russia where one man was killed as the Zorb flew off-course, an into a gorge.  There is a video on Youtube, as well as an article here.

Now, extreme activities and adventure sports such as Zorbing and Bungee jumping were born in New Zealand, but they are no longer unique to this country.  Earlier last year, there was a young Australian woman who survived when her bungee cord snapped when she made a jump in Africa (video interview here).

Speaking of accidents...there were a few things that happened last year in New Zealand that stand out in my mind:
1) Hot air balloon flies into power lines (article here)
2) Tourists drown crossing alpine river near Franz Josef (article here)
3) Tourist dies in car crash near Waitomo Caves (article here)
4) New Zealanders fall off cliff while hiking Paritutu Rock (article here and here)
5) Skydiving plane crashes (article here)

Hope I haven't scared you.  I still say go out there and have fun!  But, be weary that sometimes those thrilling, fun activities do end tragically.  Exercise caution and common sense, please!  Oh, especially while driving.  In New Zealand, you are driving on 'the other side' ... sometimes there is heavy rain...and sometimes the roads are very windy...the roads are unfamiliar.  Be cautious when overtaking traffic (much of New Zealand is connected by two-lane highways) and when approaching those one-lane bridges!

Come visit =)