Adam Fletchers – The Zig

GOodbye New Zealand, Hello?

// January 17th, 2009 // Uncategorized

The detectives amongst us may have sniffed a few clues hidden the depths of that last post. So I guess absolutely no-one will be surprised by this post and our bit of good news….

We’re leaving New Zealand and returning to Europe!!!!!!!!

A year after arriving (where did that go? Somewhere down the back of the sofa probably, I’m sure I’ve seen a month or two lying around here somewhere) we’re packing up and heading off. As lovely as NZ is, and it is lovely, to look at, it’s just too remote and at our age I think a year here is just about perfect.

Annett’s never found a job she’s happy in, we’ve seen a fair bit of the country, I will have worked pretty much a whole year (unbelievable I know), we were able to setup and live in a beautiful, quaint little home stuffed full of cushions and other assorted big ideas.

Now back to Europe, but where in Europe I hear you ask?

Not a $m dollar question this one, I guess especially when you consider the following factors:

1. Annett is German. Very German. Very, very German. Which is fabulous entertainment no matter how often I make it sound like a disease on this blog. It’s also a bias for future relocation.

2. I’m completely in love with East Germany. It’s always documented here to the point of me sounding like a stuck record, a stuck german record presumably with a chorus something along the lines of “Liebe Deutschland, Liebe Deutschland woo, woo, Leibe Deutshchland, woo, woo.”

3. We need somewhere cheap, as I have no plans to get anything more than a part-time job (if I absolutely have to).

4. Most of our friends live in the small town of Leipzig.

Can you guess? Okay, enough already! We’re moving back to the Fatherland. But not Leipzig, instead……Berlin.

Just one and half hours from Leipzig, yet different enough to be un-comparable, many more jobs and still an adventure.

It’s going to be great, I’ll be all confused and exotic again being back in a country where I don’t speak the language. We’ll buy beaten up old bicycles with baskets and peddle as if they contained E.T. himself.

We’ll go to weird little hidden clubs in shabby basement or car parks, places with no signs which play freaky german electro music that I’ll hate, but love, because I’ll get to try and understand what must have misfired in peoples brains to make them not understand that they’re dancing to fuzz, electronic fuzz.

We’ll hold BBQs in parks with our friends and drink beer until sunset and then all climb on bikes and cycle to a bar or houseparty. We’ll have friends again. They’ll like meeting up with us, they’ll appreciate that we’re a little odd, flippant, fight a lot and have no interested in talking about sport or the news or the real world or sub-prime mortgage induced gloom.

We’ll, we’ll, we’ll….I don’t know but I’m excited because I don’t know what it will be like but I know it will be alive and buzzing like a city should be and like Auckland isn’t.

I’m aware that people like specifics, things that can be circled or underlined, so here is a small itinerary.

5th April – Headless packing chickens

6th April -  Airport waiting chickens. Packed in coup on plane chickens. Irritable jet-lagged chickens.

7th April – Free range chickens – in Tokyo, Japan.

You’ll be pleased to know I’m going to break the chicken theme now to elaborate on that one. My main goal once we’d agreed to leave (which happened when we were in Sydney over New Years and reminded what an alive city feels like) was to work out a way to get myself to Tokyo the one place I want to go most in the world. I used all of my man imagination skills to concoct an evil plan that would sweep us off to the land of weirdness. It involved bribery, theft and disguising ourselves as vending machines….

I was immensely proud of it.

So proud I wanted to tell somebody, having no friends I called a travel agent. She said and I quote “why you’re a criminal mastermind” yet I felt she was patronizing me. “Well tell me your brilliant idea then why don’t ya!” I said with just a hint of disbelief, because I knew she has nothing, nada. But I was wrong. “How about I sell you a flight to London stopping at Tokyo on the way for a few weeks and I’ll make it really cheap because the worlds gone into financial meltdown and a planes just crashed into the river in NY and had to inflate its fun slides and now everyone’s too afraid to fly because of bird terrorists”. “You’re on, lets do it” and so it was done, and now we’re going to Tokyo.

Back to the plan

7th – 16th April – Arrive in Cambridge Stansted, some people call it London Stansted but that’s a lie to trick tourists because its closer to Cambridge but if they called it Cambridge Stansted no-one would fly there, but I call it that because it gives me a smug sense of one-up-man-ship that I can see through their marketing con tricks.

16th – 20th – Fletcher Family reunites for bonding with special guest.

20th April – Special guest (Annett) fly’s on to Leipzig. I stay to do further family and UK bonding.

27th April – I fly on to Leipzig.

Then after some friends bonding and memory re-living we get stuck in with house hunting and new life building in Berlin.

That’s about it. I’m off now to finish sewing my vending machine disguise just in case, just in case….

Possibly related, hopefully entertaining other posts:

• Learning German and German Class
• Partially Hinged
• Rainbows
• That’s regrettable
• The Future of the Design Contest