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Если интересно, то вот кусочки моих впечатлений, как я их описывал Наташе. Все по-английски, т.к. писалось с разных компьютеров. Да мы и сейчас переписываемся по-английски, правда, английский плохой :-)

The airport in Auckland is like Simferopol’s one but with palms. There are so many other wonderful things but I am crazy about left side traffic.

For the first night I chose the cheapest hostel with a single room for NZ$20 (US$9), but I could not imagine that such a room is possible! It was 2.5 x 2.5 m without any window, furniture, linen and even a hook on the ‘DSP’ wall. So some next nights I spent in another hostel for backpackers in the very downtown for $35.

Auckland is very beautiful. I've seen a little beyond the centre (the City) but some houses are wonderful, they are made of bricks and dated 1910, but absolutely terrific! The city is similar with Yalta but with skyscrapers and many western type shops and eastern type cafes. They are wide open, often with automatic glass doors. Girls at receptions say " Hi, dear!" and every shop assistant says "Hi!". There are many eastern youngsters in the streets (Chinese or Japanese or Korean). It seems everyone speaks by mobile phone in the street.

Yesterday morning was sunny and it is hot when you are not in the shadow. But in the shadow you feel cool breathe and I think it is quite possible to catch a cold. The temperature in the shadow is about 20 degrees but the sun seems hotter than ours.

In the evening I went to eat something but after searching for awhile I was to choose McDonalds and even there it was very hard to me to realize what I should do, what  I should help myself and which are the usual combinations of meals. And shop assistants (cashiers) could not realize what I was not able to realize. 

Yesterday evening I saw a magnificent view of TV tower (Sky Tower) which was hidden on 2/3 by low clouds and lighted through them.

In Auckland Library Chris got me across the procedure of borrowing a book. You can do it in person or you can do it with a machine. Every book has a bar code and a magnetic sticker. So at first you lay down your member card which is scanned by something high over the table, then you lay down a book over the card and its bar code is scanned and then you should take away your card which means you have taken all books you wanted. The machine prints you a slip or receipt where books and terms are shown. Then you lay the book in your bag and pass through a 'turniket' and if you do not lend the book correctly or it is not allowed for taking off, a beep sounds. The common term is 6 weeks. Membership and books are free. The library has 3 levels with newspapers, magazines, cassettes, CDs etc.

NZ notes (money) have a transparent zone and coins are very big especially 50 cents. All of them have a portrait of the Queen but the portrait depends on the year of issue. So from time to time the queen becomes more mature and aged.

In my fist interview I had a conversation with a Russian programmer. It was the first time I was speaking Russian. He said 'zdes ne byvaet teplo, seychas takaya zhe pogoda kak budet letom, maksimum 25 gradusov. Zharko byvaet tolko iz-za solntsa. Te, kto priezhaet is zharkih stran i hodyat po privychke razdetymi, bystro obgorayut. Poetomu nado ispolzovat kremy.' I feel it is true. In a half an hour under the sun I began feeling it. And now my face is quite more tan. And the sun and rain can really change each other several times a day. Clouds in the sky move rather quickly.

Today I have explored the supermarket. The exchange rate is 0.42 (to sell USD). Here are some interesting prices. As for exchange rate, 0.42 means 1 NZD = 42 US cents, that is 1/0.42 = 2.38. So I get NZD238 for USD100 

A gigantic bra is hanged over the main street: "Breast Cancer Awareness Month"

There is a special 'sell' shop where everything sells for $2 including aroma oils 15 ml, some tools like screwdrivers, toys, underwear and thousands other items.

Bus stops here have an electronic table with time and nearest routes departures. Buses have electronic tables too, with no., destinations and some messages like ‘Sorry, not in service’. They are quite empty. A couple of times I was a single passenger.

A lift gets to the 20th level in some seconds. A table begins to count levels from 14th (in 3 sec).

After a week of living in another rooms for $145 per week I found a room in 3 km away from the centre for $60 plus expencies. Now my room of ~9 sq.m. has 2 windows with a small country view: somebody's yard with a meadow, green grass, some flower, some trees and some palms. There is a hall with 2 regular windows and a French window, or maybe it is an open plan kitchen because it has all necessities: a sink, a fridge, a microwave and something like a table. There are also a sofa, a newspaper table(?), a TV and a VCR, and a computer P-II with free Internet.

I've observed Auckland Domain - huge and magnificent park with duck's pond, geese, fountains etc.

At 16 o'clock I went to climb the Mt. Eden. It is the highest volcano in Auckland, a bit higher than One Tree Hill and about the same height as the restaurant on TV tower. It also has a crater. What a wonderful view there was, what a magnificent outlook! It has a park on its slopes and I walked a bit through somehow jungle, and had little bird watching (some black birds with strange voices and songs). Sometimes the sense of unreality arises when I can see some huge palms. And mountain bikers fly on those steepest slopes!

It is hard to say what the environment is like. It is not our village, sometimes it looks like our ‘dachas’ but much more tidy. Except this, it is in 100 m distance from a town’s street. Shop streets in good suburbs (or villages) seem like American towns in movies: 2-storied houses with cafes and shops on the ground floor. So the contrast is not big. In private areas, streets are absolutely empty except of parked cars along the street. And you look like a stranger there, something like you are walking по нашей лестничной клетке. If you meet somebody he looks at you with wonder and sometimes says ‘Hi!’

Yesterday I tested NZ wine as a celebration of accepting a job offer. I bought a bottle of ‘Cabernet
Sauvignon 1999’ because failed to find pure Cabernet. All sorts of it in the supermarket were mixed. It cost me $9. The taste was better than our cheep Cabernet, milder than that, maybe because of Sauvignon. So it was not bad at all. Some Australian bottles may be bought as cheep as for $7. But there are more expensive bottles of 1998 and 1997. Prices differ for various manufacturers. There were mainly dry wines and sparkling. As a rule there were Sauvignon, Shiraz, Cabernet and Merlot, I guess more than 100 different sorts.

Some trees are blooming. And the sun in deed goes counter clockwise. And stands very high. But I still cannot watch stars, only some of them because of clouds and lights.

I went to Takapuna, a suburb on the North Coast. It looks like Simeis without mountains. I walked to Takapuna beach. He was beautiful. Sand was of a strange colour. It is very dens, coffee brown underneath and some beige upon it with somehow waves. So it was of two colours actually. The beach is very flat and пологий as in the Sea of Azov. Then I returned to the City (it is possible to say ‘to Auckland’ when you are in a not central suburb). It took me half a day because of searching right bus’s stops and waiting for buses. The view from the Auckland Bridge was very interesting!

It is very comfortable to live near the City because many buses pass Mt. Eden and New North Road where I get off. So they go every 5 – 20 minutes. But if you want a concrete number it may take 1 hour and more, especially on weekends.

Today I visited free Art Gallery. It is not big, maybe 7 halls on the ground floor. The 1st floor was closed. It seems to me that an exhibition is changed from time to time. There were some old NZ artists, some unknown to me Europeans (XIII, XIV centuries and so on) and some contemporaries. Two or three works were extremely exciting! But one of them is not painting at all. It is something. There is most unusual fountain before the entrance. But you should approach from the right
direction to have a wonderful view.

Today on the Queen Street a giantic 4-storied St. Claus was established.

I picked up a leaflet about summer culture events (up to March) – джаза до фигища! Generally speaking there are so many free leaflets everywhere that I cannot gather all of them. Every tour operator advertises himself as much as it can.

Today I took a long walk to One Tree Hill. It was sunny and at last became hot while I was exposed to the sun. So I put off my anorak but most people were in T-shirts and shorts. I tried a sunscreen on practice – it had an ultimate effect! At least during 4 – 5 hours. On the way I discovered Russian Orthodox Church – very small house with a cross, there was a service but I didn’t come in. Reading the advertisement the 3rd time, I realized that it was written in two languages :-) Then I turned left and walked along the Epsom suburb (or maybe still Mt. Eden). There were some labels advertising ‘Open Home’. One was in deed open in the moment and I had a look. It was ‘a 2 bedroom unit’, i.e. a part of the long brick house of 5 units. There was a label ‘Please put off shoes’ so everyone put off his shoes on the porch. It seems to me that it is a common practice because a family still lives there. There were furniture and clothes but everything was very tidy. At last I could see that ‘2 bedroom’ has a big living room and 2 small bedrooms. There was a kitchen, a toilet, a shower, some embedded wardrobes and a small garden. It looked nice and cost $205,000. An agent said that if I am looking for something for 200,000 and have 2 children, I should consider more distant districts where I can have ‘more home for the same money’. Then I saw a big 2-storied house open but when I had seen its interior on a stand I changed my mind and passed by. It should cost not less than $500,000. Generally speaking, cool houses cost $1.5 million. Further there was a remarkable house with a garden where Xmas trees were grown. There was some kind of pine, very fluffy and rounded, with prices on branches. On the foot of One Tree Hill there was, of course, a park with green meadows, many people on barbecues and picnics and various huge trees aged a century and more, 2 m in diameter and more, and crowns up to 40 m. There was a stall with ice-cream. Girls filled waffle cones by hand. There were 4 portions: kid, single, double and triple. Single was approximately 100 g and cost $1.80. It was quite good, not as Sevastopol’s but maybe fat free and more chocolate. At least better than our ice creams made with imported technologies. They are crazy about fat free. All food, even butter, has labels like ‘98% fat free!’ It seems to me that I pay more for that ‘fat freedom’. By the way, there are quite many fat people in the street, as a rule Maori or Polynesian people. So they worry about this problem and suggest to introduce ‘fat tax’ for fat food. Higher on the slops there were some sheep and a view was remarkable. But alas! Now it is ‘None Tree Hill’, there is only a stub of the tree :-( and it seems to me it is quite fresh…

My job is the next new world, I have like a child to learn how to use a lift, a coffee maker, where is a kitchen, where is a copier and so on, and so on... Tim (a manager) showed me 5 levels of the building, from the basement for parking to our 3rd level, with security systems etc. I obtained a heap of PIN codes, logons, passwords and other numbers and even a special distant key (a small cylinder) to access doors and some buttons in the lift. I am not able to remember where everything is, and to understand what there happens and what are people's names.

The most funny thing is that I am not a developer. So I am actually an analyst, maybe a bit architect, maybe I will do some coding, but I should analyze something and describe classes and advice to developers. It is a big project for Telecom to test their equipment(?). It is a Telecom's building and most people were transferred from Telecom. So it is the very beginning of a project and I should research Beowulf architecture of obtaining a kind of supercomputer from many regular PCs under Linux(!). It is American and international company actually. It has 130000 employees,  implements  solutions in 55 countries and EDS NZ has 1900 employees.

In the morning I go 3 min to a bus stop, wait not more than 5 min, a bus goes 10 - 12 min to the midtown (at 5pm returning could take up to 20 - 25 min, it depends on traffic lights), and then I go 5 - 7 min to the office. After 7pm buses go every 20 min.

McDonald’s offers on Mondays hamburgers for 85 c, on Tuesdays cheeseburgers for 95 c. Before I visited a supermarket I thought that there are no prices less than $1. But they are, 1 kg of kiwi may cost < $1. 

The biggest 4-storied bookshop finished annual Christmas sell and set Xmas trees inside. 4-storied Santa Claus is set over its ground floor and very slowly подмигивает и манит пальцем.

The level of unemployment is the lowest during the last 12 years (approx. 5%). The largest growth is observed in the tourism industry and then in IT. Some managers went to India to search staff.