kiwis are all feckin mad. be careful out there now.

Good news for some perhaps



http://www.thejournal.ie/new-law-could- ... 0-Dec2011/

2 weeks in and....Wellington is feckin awesome. Kiwis are so relaxed, friendly but organised; work the same, chilled and relaxed but organised and Stuff gets Done properly; great cosmopolitan wee city with people here from all over the world, loads of interesting cafes, restaurants and bars; decent music scene, seen some good bands already; found meself a decent flat a 20 minute casual stroll to work in the morning; Wellington is a nice size of city, big enough to always have something on to go see or do but not a big sprawling mess, nice compact city centre; everything was so easy to get organised, bank accounts and tax numbers and payroll and all the usual stuff, like I said Stuff here just Works, none of the banging-your-head-off-a-brick-wall of incompetence, byzantine illogical bureaucracy and general stupidity that always annoyed me so much at home; seems so far to be a great lack of croneyism, very egalitarian society with little time for pretension or people seeing themselves as "superior", and where jobs are given entirely on merit, if somebody is in a job its usually because they know how to feckin do that job...weather is a mixed bag, when it's nice it's glorious but you get the odd day when it's pissing down just like home...but even on those days it's still a good bit warmer than it would be during an Irish summer, so I can live with that...huge need for IT, medical and construction staff in particular if any of you are thinking of doing a year or two away...loads and loads of things to go do and see just here in the city, looking forward to doing a mad tour of various parts of both islands in a camper van in a few months time...

All in all, no real downside that I can see so far, it's all been very positive! Not the cheapest place to live though, price level wouldn't be all that different to home really, so you'll need a decent job organised before you arrive, and a couple of thousand dollars for deposit/rent/food etc till you get your first paycheque.

See that wasn't hard to keep in touch with old auntie pinney was it! Sounds great ya lucky ducker. All the best in your new world and do please keep updates and cerebral ramblings flowing this way.

Best of luck out in NZ, Sidewinder...

There's been so many stories in the papers of emigrants coming home for Xmas, as you might expect.

Now for some "hard" numbers:

http://www.independent.ie/national-news ... 73241.html



I say "hard" because this is the Indo after all.

I was back in Ireland for a few days before Christmas. I stayed in a B&B in the midlands where, on Monday night, I watched a few minutes of The Frontline programme about emigration. Very 80's stuff with lonely mothers and Home-for-Christmas emigrés waxing lyrical about their lives abroad.

The following morning my full Irish breakfast was served up by an Eastern European lady. I went to a supermarket where the guy on the till had a heavy foreign accent.

I couldn't help but wonder what might happen if we really do have an EU break up and millions of people wake up one morning to find they now require a work permit and a residence card.

I visited a client's factory in the Netherlands last month. Out of 180 shopfloor workers, precisely one was Dutch. The rest were all "new" Europeans and Kurds.

Do the EU doomsday merchants ever pause to think about these people I wonder?

As someone who has spent quite a while abroad, I have no problem with others doing the same - and if abroad for those others happens to be this country of ours, that's fine by me.

But can anyone please tell me where the sense is in importing labour in large quantities while labour is also being exported in large quantities?

And yes, I know that these lower paid jobs are below (many) Paddies' expectations. Can anyone here resolve this conundrum without talking about "send them all home".

Not being a smart arse, but your major downside is the fault line Wellington sits on. But, I'm sure you took that into account before you moved there. Even after Christchurch's disaster. Have you experienced any quakes since you moved there?

Would not worry. It a 7.0 every three hundred years plus kind of place. And a 8.0 every thousand year or so. So I'd expect fairly regular 4's and 5's with the occasional 6.

An 8 would ruin your day but a 7.0 is not a big deal unless you are very very unlucky or it was a very shallow quake right under the metro area. The damage in Christchurch was almost totally in the high risk soil liquefaction areas, which were already mapped. Most of the fatalities were in a single office building that failed partially due to resonant frequency issues but mainly due to partial ground failure due to liquefaction.

Basically if a once every few hundred year quake is really a worry then just check out the ground motion maps and live in a zone with low predicted ground motion.

http://www.gw.govt.nz/Earthquake-hazard-maps/

http://www.gw.govt.nz/assets/Emergencies--Hazards/combined_earthquake_hazard_map_wellington.pdf

The usual rule is live on bedrock and on top of a hill to be safe.

Having lived in earthquake country most of my adult life I decided I rather risk the volcanoes (and better weather) of Auckland than the earthquakes (and rain) of Wellington. There is just so much excitement a person can take. A 7.1, a 6.9 and a whole bunch of 5's. The recent cluster of mid 4's / low 5' in the Bay Area are a sign that there is probably a least a 6 plus on the way in the next few years. I dont plan to be around for that. Just in case its a lead in to the next 7 plus. Which will be a godawful mess. Think Katrina, only more so.

At least volcanoes clear their throat before they erupt giving more than enough time to bugger off out of the danger zone.

Jaysus, typical Paddy, always looking for the most catastrophically morbid possible negative scenario! I get exactly the same from family back home. "But what if the whole town is destroyed in an earthquake, but what if you die with those killer jellyfish, but what if [insert wildly implausible but theoretically possible morbid event here]". It's just weird. No offence.

There's been two minor quakes since I got here and I'm only here a few weeks. It's just part of life really. They're no big deal. 7.0+ quakes, which you would need to have any possible real danger, are extremely rare events. There will, doubtless, at some point, be a massive quake here - last really big one was 1855 - but the more smaller ones are happening regularly the better. Christchurch is built on silt which liquifies in certain circumstances which is what caused all the damage there - only the reclaimed land down at the waterfront in Welly is likely to suffer the same sort of damage in a large quake.

In short the chance of a big one in Welly has been estimated as between 10% and 40% at some point in the next 100 years i.e. reasonably low. Seeing as I plan to be here for just 5 or 6 years the chances of it hitting when I'm here are probably around 1%. Even if I end up here for the next 40 by my reckoning I'm odds-on to miss it. And as neither the house nor the office are built on reclaimed silty land, chances of either collapsing are miniscule. The risk is feckin trivial and not something to be wasting my time stressing about!

reminds me of how people would exclaim how dangerous places like the US were with all the violent crime while forgetting all the bombs and murder up North the 9 o clock news had on.

I spent some time living in Tauranga and Christchurch, the people never spoke about/feared quakes in Christchurch. It was always Wellington. Points taken though.

You're so right, I remember heading to the states on my J1 back in the day and everyone and their uncle were assuring me it was dangerous. To be honest on a Saturday night I'd felt safer in a lot of their big cities than I would in an average Irish town.
The main headline in Perth today was that last night a 16yr oldd was caught trying to steal a car and the second item was about a sign on the motorway giving the wrong speed limit. That was it! A city of 1.7 million people!

Meanwhile in Cork (A VERY small city) I wake to the news that 2 died of taking dodgy/overdosing at a house party in the city, and a 51 year was murdured in Ballyphehane.. we are some society

No shortage of violent crime in Perth. Not dissimilar to Ireland IMHO.