Left my flatshare today, back to the hostel and limited internet access. Details later.

Auckland with its population of 1.5 million is New Zealand’s biggest city and home to one third of the country’s total population. It is the northernmost of the major cities which means that it gets the warmest climate. That doesn’t mean much though, temperatures have been in the low 20s and rain poured down almost non-stop for the last week. Yesterday moments of sunshine brought the opportunity to join a local group of photographers for a walk around the city.

Days went by without any notice from the company or the job agency. I gave the agency another call and was told that the company had decided not to hire me. Why I had to call these jokers to get that information is beyond me. Why the company went through hours of interviews, reference checks and negotiations is obscure as well. Might have been the permanent employment/visa thing, I’ll probably never know.

Still no news on the job front. The agency apparently had a bit of trouble and I had to call them twice to get things going. By now all my referees have replied to them and hopefully they’ll provide some feedback to the company early next week. Can’t stand this waiting around without anything to do. The job is so attractive that I’m not seriously interested in applying for other offers and thus there’s not much to do other than wait.

The job application is still ‘work in progress’. The recruitment agent taking care of me has been sick for two days. Looks like I won’t get a decision from the company this week. Other than that I had a fairly quiet time. I went to the biggest weekly couchsurfing meeting I’ve ever seen (100+ people) and got in touch with some of the locals. New Zealand doesn’t feel that different than Australia to me, although the Kiwis wouldn’t like hearing that.

On Tuesday morning I showed up at the recruitment agency for a little chat with my agent. It really was just a quick chat, after five minutes everything was settled and he sent me off to an interview with their client, the actual company I’d be working for. There HR greeted me and gave me a short briefing about the company and it’s history. It followed a 1/2 hour written test on C# and SQL (programming for those unfamiliar with the terms).

Over the weekend I met up with James, whom I met in Ha Long Bay. He’s been in town for a couple of weeks and has some information about the accommodation situation. I’m intending to stay here for quite a while and asked him about flat-shares. On Thursday I’m moving in. This morning I rang a recruitment agency that had an ad about a software development job on a popular Kiwi website.

Arrived in the morning after a quiet 10h flight. Strange to be back in the western world, I really miss SEA. But probably the world looks brighter after a good sleep, didn’t get that on the plane.

Almost exactly 1.5 years ago I was sitting at the airport in Singapore, heading for Australia. Now I’m at the airport again, this time with New Zealand as my destination. I wouldn’t have expected that back then.

Singapore has been most interesting during the time after sunset. Not that I could afford to go out for drinks here, not with $8 and more for a beer. Yet there are some interesting things to see. Like the part of a tunnel where people engage in all kinds of activities. Dance lessons, break dancing, inline skating and another group sitting around and answering questions to the police. Singapore has miles and miles of these underground tunnels, connecting malls and MRT stations.