Svetcovs' Kiwi Experience: A Year and a Quarter... Reflections on Our Kiwi Experience

It's pouring cats and dogs... and all the sheep and cows on this "God-forsaken island" (a phrase I have grown fond of using freely for the last 15 months... which reminds me: E has lived in the US as long as he has in NZ now). I have been bitching and moaning about living in New Zealand for almost as long as we have been here. It was not until a few months ago that I actually started appreciating this experience.

Behind all the great pics and tongue-in-the-cheek commentaries on our website, there are moments of great frustration and anger, feeling homesick and lonely, arguments and hurt, fears and doubts...

Truth be told, we have been trying to make the most of this adventure: travelling all over, exposing ourselves to and accepting and/or managing many cultural idiosyncrasies without a sense of too much of an identity compromise. And yet, at the end of the first year, it seemed to me (and I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to "Maths" and "checks and balances") that we had lost much more than we gained by moving homes from San Francisco to Auckland.

At that point, the choice I faced was to either resign myself to the sad status quo or to use the experiences of the last twelve months and turn them into a much more positive and constructive future. A part of me was not ready to accept what was. It did not take much convincing at all to pull Eric into my corner. We have made some changes to our life since and started working together more than against each other and three months later I am in a much happier place: I went for a walk the other day and discovered, to my own surprise, that I felt lucky to be on this "God-forsaken island"!

I took these that day (sorry, Nancy, more sand and rocks!):

Do not get me wrong, I still want to return to the US next year but I started perceiving our Kiwi experience as an amazing opportunity rather than "an unfortunate event that ruined our lives." This is a marvelous place where the natural wonders are at an arm's reach. Even though I am much more of a "city girl" and "urban traveller" than the "outdoorsy type," I have never appreciated more or been closer to nature than here.

I am so happy (mind you "HAPPY" is a rarity in my lexicon) that E can tell a horse from a donkey (not that I believe this knowledge will ever make him stand out from a crowd of mute, self-absorbed teenagers), plays in mud, rolls in sand, throws stones and picks up sticks, runs barefoot in the summer, and gets soaked by unexpected waves regularly. He is so much freer to learn of himself, others and the world around him here... and this, and this alone, I guess, made those first horrid twelve months worthwhile.