Dec 25 – Merry Flying Christmas
Alarms going off at 4am are never fun... especially when you won't be catching Santa sliding down the chimney. We were up and off the catch a 4:45am shuttle bus to the airport. Unfortunately we weren't all that clear on which airport we were going to so we got off at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. AirAsia doesn't fly out of this airport though. So we had to run for the shuttle bus to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal and of course had to pay for that too, oops. We arrived at the LCCT and went to check in only to find they wouldn't issue our boarding pass until we could prove we had an onward flight out of New Zealand. We hastily logged on to the airports free wifi (yay technology) and booked our onward flight to Melbourne for March 3rd. Hopefully we don't want to stay more or less time than this :S. We finished check in and went through boarding pass control, immigration and security. We picked up a little duty free before finding a seat. We had much less time waiting around than we thought we would. Beau attempting to Skype his parents but the internet was too slow. I found us some buns for breakfast although Beau wasn't to sure about his chicken curry doughnut but I enjoyed my red bean doughnut. Shortly after we boarded for our flight. The aircraft was very nice and very basic, pretty much everything is an add on. It didn't have a plane wide movie although you could rent little personal movie players. The flight was quite empty too but hey it's Christmas. The flight went fairly quickly and I guess we slept a little. We landed in Christchurch around midnight. We cleared customs and bio-security easily. They didn't even ask us about onward travel. I traveled on my British passport and can stay for up to 6 months and Beau on his Canadian can stay for 3 months. Not really sure what the point is in having to have an onward ticket when you can stay for so long. Now we need to kill some time in the airport till the buses start up at 6am.
Dec 26 – The house-sit
It seemed like forever but 6am finally rolled around and we set off the get a bus. We had been given some instructions to catch a bus slightly away from the airport so we didn't have to pay the $7.50 for the bus only the regular fare of $3.20. We did have to change buses once but made it down town. Down town was bizarre after being in Asia. It was deserted. Granted it was 7:30am on boxing day but the bus station is right next to the area that is cordoned off due to the earthquake last February. We wandered a little to find us some breakfast. We found a little mall that had a Subway and split a sub for breakfast. We still had some time to kill so we went into the mall and explored a Zellars like store called Warehouse. We headed back to the bus station and purchased a Metro Card. This gives you a discount on bus fares. We took a bus to Halswell and found the house. We met Tracey there and the two little dogs, Jackson and Molly. Tracey showed us the ropes and we got ourselves settled in. Jackson is a Pomeranian, a sweet little fluff ball, and Molly is a Pekingese cross Spaniel, who is also very sweet. We had a nap on the couch, we've been up over 24hrs with only little naps on the place. After napping we had a short walk to the grocery store and picked up some food for the next few days. We had a nice dinner of lamb, pasta and salad. We also bought some wine and enjoyed a nice glass of red. We last had wine when we were in Canada, actually I tried a glass of Vietnamese wine but it wasn't good. We watched Braveheart, which was on TV. We went to bed fairly late though but we don't have to go anywhere tomorrow!
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