jajpe

Hi all,

Not a lot of time and even less energy but i just wanted to post a quick update on here to say that we have just returned from our fact finding/job hunting mission from New Zealand and can say we are very, very happy on all fronts!!

We did a quick tour of both islands but spent most of our time in and around Christchurch and absolutely fell in love with the place, especially the people!! Oh yeah, and also the blue skies and full sun!! We got a quick inland jaunt to Queenstown and up the coast via Timaru and also took trans coastal train to Picton and ferry to Wellington for three nights. From there we travelled to Lake Taupo via Napier and spent 2 nights at the lake and also stopped for three nights in Auckland, briefly taking in Rotorura on the way past!!

I should also mention (not that i want to gloat or anything) that I very thankfully got the all important nursing job offer from Christchurch Hospital. We were really thrilled about that and have come home planning to lodge our application personally in London on Thursday of this week. We went feeling that Christchurch would be our first choice and have come home convinced that it is the right choice for us out of everything we saw. That's not to say that we didn't see other great places, but just that for various reasons it seems right for us!

There is so much that i would like to post on here about our trip but i really don't want to be a holiday bore and besides i don't feel at my most coherent today so i think i will leave it there for now and if anyone has any specific questions, fire away and I will do my best to give you our impression of what we found!

terryg

Hi Shirley

so pleased you enjoyed it - hope it becomes a reality for you soon, In the meantime enjoy the rain in the UK


All the best

Terry

stephen john

Hi Shirley

Have been reading your threads with interest over the last month or so. Really glad to hear you liked Christchurch so much and got the job offer. I got a job offer from Chch hosp via phone last week, so would love to hear more about the hospital and Chch its self. We went to London last Thursday and lodged our application, it was really straight forward, no queues or anything.

Look forward to hearing some more.

Claire

hanley

hi shirley,

wow thats wonderfull to hear you got on so well, what did you think of Timaru my husband got his job offer there as a plumber and we are hopefully going for a visit in the next 6 weeks,would love to know your thoughts good or bad?

kerrie

jajpe

Hi again,

Sorry I didn't get back to this yesterday. We went to visit friends to help us stay awake until bedtime! Anyway thanks for the replies and good wishes etc. - much appreciated!

Claire , congratulations to you too. Delighted that you also got a job in Christchurch! Which department is it for and did the immigation officer you saw give you any indication of processing time at the minute? I think you will like the hospital. I was very impressed. I had fears that it would be behind times in terms of equipment etc but from what i saw it seems they are certainly better equiped than we are in NI. I don't know what you are used to but it certainly seemed modern to me plus shining clean and very friendly. It looks quite large although Central Otago School of Medicine is incorporated into it so i'm not sure how much space it takes up. The only bit I wasn't sure about was that they seemed to work with maybe even less staff than we would here (in particular they seem to have very few nursing auxillaries) so I will be interested to know how that works out!

Christchurch itself we were very fond of, as were the children (not sure if you have any) It has a fantastic location between the coast and the Alps and manages to have a small town feel to it even though it is a city. The weather was very good too! We actually had better weather all of our time in the South Island than in the North and even though temperatures didn't sound that high i was busy putting suncream on as it felt much hotter. The main difference I found was the night time temperature. It certainly got cooler in Christchurch at night than in Auckland.


Kerrie, we actually really like Timaru. So much so that I actually called into the hospial while we were there and had a chat with their human resources and was shown round the hospital. It again was modern and clean and almost fully carpeted!! in the end we just liked Christchuch that little bit more and perhaps mainly for the fact of the children growing up there and unniversities etc being handy, that kind of thing. Haing said that Timaru certainly looked like a nice option. The town itself was much bigger than I thought it would be with a good range of shops and a beautiful golden strand of beach and a harbour. It seemd to us to be a nice mix between a rural town and a seaside resort without being either tacky or all green wellies and baler twine!! We certainly came a way feeling that if it ended up being our only option in New Zealand it would not be a bad one at all. Will be interested to hear how you get on in six weeks.

Lee, sorry we don't have a digital camera and although I took heaps of photos I won't be able to get them on line. Will look forward to your winter ones though! The flights were excellent. We flew with Singapore airlines and although I was really nervous about SARS before we left once I got to the airport and realised all the shops etc were running as normal and obviously the folks working in them weren't dropping like flies and they were there every day, I relaxed a bit. We actually saw very few folk even wearig masks etc. I had realised from the news before we left that folk from badly affected areas were being dealt with in a separate department of the airport and otherwise from what we saw everthing else was pretty much as normal. We even got to do the city tour which we had thought might be cancelled and swam in the rooftop pool between flights which was great.

To be honest our biggest problem has been since we came home again. The kids ran round to see a couple of their friends and within 10 minutes we got a pnone call to say that since we had travelled through Singapore it would be preferred if our children didn't go round to play!! I was a bit shocked to say the least and then further shocked when I told my mum and realised she had no intention of coming anywhere near us for at least 10 days either!! It was nice that we were so missed wasn't it? Anyway apart from that the flights were very good and the kids were thrilled to have all the inflight entertainment on their individual screens and were very pleased at being able to play more Nintendo games than they ever saw in their lives!!

I really must go now as there is hardly a scrap of food in the house and I also have to put together our application for Thursday. Any tips for that will be gratefully received!!

N.Finn Fan

Glad to see another kiwi story on this message board, good luck on the South Island, all the best with your application.

Watt Dabney

Hi Shirley,

So glad you had a good time and that you got the job offer you were looking for. Hopefully we will be able to get together when you make the big move. I am just recovering from virtually 2 months of constant visitors at the moment(took my mum, dad and dads wife to the airport yesterday). It was really good to see them but I must admit it is nice to have our little family unit back! Got chatting to a woman at the airport who was also saying goodbye to her parents, ex-pat from Macclesfield with no intention of going back been here 6 yrs, we swopped phone numbers.
We still love it here. We have made some fantastic friends and the kids are really enjoying and excelling at school. Our police checks are back so we just have to get meds and we can put our residency app in, can't wait.

Speak soon.


Paula & co

Roger

Shirley,
Congratulations on the job offer and I am glad that you liked Christchurch. May have chosen to go to Christchurch but got a bad feeling about the A&E. Shame as a specialist nurse you do become limited.

After being offered the job in Nelson with a six week time limit (rejected) I managed to get an interview with Wellington Hospital and hope to hear this week.

However now concerned that I will not be qualified to work there as Nursing Council NZ have registered me as a psychiatric nurse!! Typical. I originally trained as a RMN but converted (is that the problem?) in an 18 month course to RGN. Worked in A&E for 16 years and have many relevant certificates/degrees. Hopefully this is just another of there many cock-ups after not sending forms, then losing references.

Glad it is working for someone.
Roger

jajpe

hi roger,
thanks for good wishes and also really sorry to hear about the problems you are having. About the registration thing i can't see how you are registered with nz as psychiatric when your experience is in general. i am confused as i am also trained in both and although i sent the money to have both qualifications registered in nz my registration came back with general nurse only. when i queried it by email they wrote back to say that i could only work as a general nurse in nz as all of my post reg experience on my C.V. was general. fair enough, although i can't see then how they could say you are psychiatric only if you have 16 years A& E experience. have you emailed them to query it?

sorry if this doesn't make sense but i really wish you all the best in getting in sorted - it certainly sounds like a mistake to me so hopefully it will work out ok. this process certainly requires patience doesn't it!! will be interested to hear how you get on with welling ton too. i really liked wellington when we were there - very clean and classy and also safe enough for Kathryn (7) and i to walk back to hotel from the theatre at 10 pm without feeling vulnerable. not something we could say in Belfast sadly! hope it works out!

Roger

Shirley,
Thanks for the post. Did you qualify as an RMN or RGN first?
Roger

jajpe

i did the general bit first and then RMN in a year post reg but from my correspondence with nz nursing council it was my post reg experience that seemed to be what counted and if i could have provided evidence of psychiatric work experience, i gathered i could have had it included too!

i really think you should be ok from what they said to me. have you been in touch with them yet? they were very speedy in their replies to me by email. i''l keep my fingers crossed!

jajpe

Hi Paula,
thanks for your good wishes. really sorry i did not get a chance to get in touch while in Christchurch but unfortunately our time did not stretch nearly enough to do a lot of what we wanted. thankfully though it looks like all might just be in place for doing this for good so i will hang on to your phonenumber for another while yet. glad you had a good time with your folks. was it hard saying goodbye again or did it unsettle you at all to have then stay?!!

glad to hear too that the kids are getting on well at school and also that you are all still v. happy! has Ian got a job offer for PR. i seem to remember that he needed that for you to apply - really hope everything works out quickly for you and then you can be totally settled!

we actually did drive through kaipoi one night and it seems nice as did Rangiora which we hadn't really considered. what do you know about it, especially the schools/house prices. it looks a bit bigger than we had imagined and enough shops to avoid going into Christchurch for every wee thing!! also seemed to have little bit of character to it! paul thought from something in the papers that it might have a slightly higher crime rate and that also might have congestion problems getting in and out of Christchurch not that we saw anything like what we know to be congestion here!!

have to go now to get the kids, but i look forward to keeping in touch with you and hopefully meeting up one day in the not too distant future!!

hanley

Thanks shirley, for a great post about Timaru you covered everything we wanted to know.Can`t wait to get out there and visit ourselves now.
Good luck with taking your application in this week we hope to follow next week, please let us know how you get on.
Really enjoying reading this post,

best of luck
kerrie

stephen john

Hi Shirley

Wrote a long note to you earlier but it seems to have disappeared! I am new to all this!! Glad to hear Christchurch was good both hospital and city. I have a job on a medical ward. Did personel give you any indication on how long they would wait for you to take up the post? Im still waiting for written confirmation, it may tell me more in that.

Did you look at areas to live and schools whilst you were there?Did you check how the property websites compare to whats available, price wise etc locally. Does the cost of living seem less or is this a myth?

Have you a house to sell, this is our current dilema dont want to sell house and then find weve been rejected! NZIS wouldnt commit to how long it would take but quoted 6 to 9 months without a job offer, but as we had an offer it should be quicker. We presented the info in a folder and indexed everything for them, including a converson to NZ dollars of our settlement funds, she was pleased with this as not many applicants do!

Would love to hear more

Claire

jajpe

Hi Claire ,

Good to hear from you again. the job offer i have states on it that the commencement date is to be confirmed which i think gives me a fair bit of leeway! at interview i was asked about how soon i thought i could start and i said that realistically i thought it could probably be about six months assuming visa came through and house sold in that time. initially i thought they looked a wee bit surprised at that length of time but then seemed to realise that that was probably reasonable and in the end the sister was saying for me just to keep in touch with her and let her know when i got to NZ and when i would like to start work. she has been really lovely and i think she understands that a lot of it is out of my hands!

selling the house could end up being our headache to be honest. it has actually been on the market since october with very little obvious interest. it is a good house in nice area but it seems that very little on the market is actually moving here at the minute so we just hope that it doesn't hold us back in the end. i reckon that where house sales are concerned you're better with too much time than too little. you could always rent if it sells quickly.

while on the subject of houses, we didn't actually look specifically at any in christchurch. we spent more time driving round actual areas to try to get a feel for them. this is partly because houses seem to sell much more quickly in nz and as we are not in a position to bid or anything there seemed little point in arranging viewing. the other thing was, i didn't really notice any 'for sale ' signs anywhere. perhaps they don't do that there - i'm not sure. we did look in a couple of estate agents windows and to be honest if anything, prices appeared slightly higher compared to what we had seen on the net, also most seemd to have sold slapped all over them! the areas we liked were mostly south-west of christchurch. we like the idea of living a bit outside the city with maybe a couple of acres of land (me being a farmers daughter and all that!) so the places we liked were in the Lincoln and Tai Tapu direction. in saying that we would also consider the region North of Christchurch around Rangiora - it seems a nice small town!

Cost of living would definately seem cheaper overall although there are certainly quite a few things about the same or even more than home. i think it is hard to guage until you are actually living there but things like meat and petrol are amazingly low yet milk and bread seemed about the same or even a tad more. Paula would be able to answer this better and i would appreciate her opinion too as its hard to judge on a holiday since we weren't paying any of the big bills. eating out is very cheap compared to home and it seemed to us that kiwis ate out a fair bit themselves which we thought was a good sign!

as for schools we are still trying to glean more info there ourselves. from our point of view we heard people say a coulple of times that lincoln high was a good school but didn't manage to get any more detail than that. it would be good to know if it is good compared to the mediocre ones or up there with the really good ones!! any concrete info gratefully received!

The trouble is with the school/ house thing is that you really need to pick the school first and then worry about finding a house. i think some of the best public schools are in the north west of the city; christchurch boys and girls and Burnside, although a couple of people hinted to us that there is a lot of snobbery attached to going there (i think muppetking may have said something similar) and it is maybe perceived as a bit flash by the locals, if new seemingly wealthy migrants buy into those areas. hope i haven't offended anyone there - just the impression we got!

Do you have kids yourselves and if so what age? would love to know more about how you came to choose christchurh or nz for that matter? sorry if i missed all this while i was away!

look forward to keeping in touch!