I don’t know if I’ve explained this very well.

No, we’re not moving to New Zealand.

But I think the confusion I’ve heard from people this week (in the USA) comes from their knowing that we’ve gotten jobs here in New Zealand.

We have temporary jobs here.

Carrie has a long-term position with the Auckland City Council.

So far, I’ve been at Best Pacific Institute of Education and the Heart Foundation of New Zealand.

I have liked it both places, and Tuesday (today) was/is my last day at the Heart Foundation.  By the time you’re reading this in the USA on Tuesday, I’ve already completed my last day at the Heart Foundation of New Zealand.

But Jonathan, I thought you didn’t want jobs?  Is your business okay?

Thank-you for the concern.

Yes, business is good.

Yes, at this point in my life, I don’t want a long-term career inside someone else’s company.

At the same time, we’ve loved New Zealand.

We’re not really ready to move on just yet (since we’ve only experienced winter here – and summer’s supposed to be fantastic).

So we figured that we could work at temp. jobs during the day, and work on our business interests in the evenings.

That might not be most people’s ideal way to travel the world, but it works for us.

We also have definite reasons for wanting to do this now, and here in New Zealand.

Reasons:

• Meeting new people:
  Meeting people in a country you really enjoy is always a good thing – work gives a structured place to meet new people.
• Finally Paying it off:
  Finally paying off our consumer debt (which we can do in 3 months of working here – leaving just Carrie’s student loans from grad. school and our house payment).
• Needing Upgrades:
  We need to put a new furnace and A/C in our house (in the US), which is expensive.
• Feeling less pressure:
  For the rest of our travel (We’re currently putting about 49% of our after expense income toward debt repayment – and gaining on the debt rapidly, but ready to be done with it.)
• Being comfortable:
  We’ve seen most of New Zealand and love it… it’s a good place to work and mellow out before we move into the more “foreign” places where we stand out due to the color of our skin and our height… places like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Dubai, Egypt.  We experienced this standing out a lot in Central/South America… There are only so many times you can *nicely* tell a taxi driver that you really, truly, honestly just want to walk, before you just say no and rather rudely push by.  It’s fun to clash against and work to effectively resolve differences, but it’s exhausting too, and it’s nice to be somewhere that we aren’t having to work around/deal with that daily.

Since we have working holiday visas for New Zealand good through 2011 (and can only get them one time in our lives – those are the New Zealand rules), we decided we’d stay here and work through the end of the year.

I had actually written a post about the entire process around 4 weeks ago, and then didn’t post it because it was kind of overly critical of the whole process.

However, in retrospect, finding temporary work here in New Zealand wasn’t that difficult, thanks to the help of Madison Recruitment and Randstad.

It was just a time consuming process, but one which already has been worth it to have gone through.

We’ve met some great people and had some fun working experiences already.

Oh, we also have moved into a super-cool apartment here in Auckland, which I’ll show in a video in a different post.  It has a really fun view.