Monday, May 9, 2011

Mundane life in Opotiki

It’s been quite sometimes that we are here in Opotiki already. Our everyday life here is like go to work, think what’s the menu for lunch and dinner, watch tv or play mahjong. Haha, yeah we don’t really have much life here as you already expected. Let me try to break down what we did here every day or occasionally.


1) On a good sunny day, we packed our lunch, which mainly consist of bread and some fillings such as tuna mayo or sausages or hashbrowns and head down to the river bank to have a picnic. Our lunches are normally simple, easy to make kind of food to save time. Either we will be having sandwiches or pasta mostly. We only spend more time and effort on our dinner.


2) Occasionally when there’s sales, we will sample some wines and beers. It is one of my wish to sample as much wine and beer as possible here. Short of you labeling me as alcoholic, I would very much like to point out that liquor here is actually really cheap. Definitely cheaper than back at home. Wines here can go as low as NZD6.99/bottle. Beers are ranging between NZD15 – NZD25 for 12 pack bottles. Frankly speaking, drinking liquor here is cheaper than drinking bottled water. No wonder the locals here likes to drink a lot. It is bloody affordable to drink here!


3) On a clear night, the sky here is sprinkled with stars. Literally the whole sky is filled with stars, big or small. As winter is approaching, the sky here’s almost pitch dark by 6pm. Everyday after work, on our drive back home we can see lots of stars. Too bad I’m not good in astronomy so I can’t make out the star shapes or zodiac.


4) Every night, we are kinda glued to the tv. We watched mainly American series from 7:30pm onwards. In fact we practically memorized the series for most days already.
Monday – Amazing Race, CSI Las Vegas
Tuesday – Hell’s Kitchen, CSI Miami
Wednesday – Survivor
Thursday – Bones, Project Runway, The Next Great Restaurant in America
Friday – American Idol
Saturday – American Idol Result

Yup, that’s how we spent our nights here. Watching telly.

5) We tried to limit ourselves to do laundry once a week in order to save on the dryer’s cost. Our house only has a washing machine and no dryer. To dry it, we need to bring our clothes to the town’s laundranette which charges us NZD1 per cycle (Big dryer= 5mins/cycle & Small dryer= 7mins/cycle).

I still remember our first time using the dryer. We thought, “hey, that’s cheap, only NZD1!” Boy, how naïve we were. We didn’t knew then that one cycle is NOT enough to dry our clothes. You need at least 3 – 4 cycles! Which means at least 3 – 4 dollars. If your clothes are quite dry, then you can spend 2 dollars or so.

We didn’t knew then what we know now. No wonder our clothes weren’t dry the first time and we keep putting coins for one cycle and checked our clothes and still it’s not dried, then we insert coin for another cycle and checked again. We repeat the process for 3 – 4 times I think.

That’s our embarrassing but funny experience with the dryer.

6) We watched the news every morning and night to catch up with the current happenings in the world. Also, we keep tracked the weather forecast to speculate on our work schedule. Not only that, we get to save money on the dryer as we now tends to do our laundry on sunny day and leave our clothes to dry on the drying line. Let the sun and wind dries our clothes ^^

That’s all for now. Will update more next time. Bye bye^^

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