Two Years in Thames

Shopping Mile in Thames - not exceedingly beautiful, but well prepared for all kinds of weather conditions

This is my walkway to work in Thames

A garden scene, featuring three of our boys (with friends in the background)

One of the lovlier pubs in Thames: The Brew

In The Brew - with friends

By the way - exactly one week ago it have been two years since we arrived in New Zealand and I believe today it is two years that we arrived in Thames. What have we found? A new home within a quiet and beautiful country, overall pleasant weather, new input to our journey with God, new valuable friendships. What do we miss? Not much really, but the distance to our old friends, and even more to our relatives in Europe is sometimes hard to take...
Yes, Thames has become a home for us... A home away from home.
Our plans? Flick us an email, and we'll tell you our actual plans - they may vary from day to day...   

Thames Coast Impressions

Fishing - favourite pastime

Fishing

Rare guest at Thames Coast

also a fisherman - by his own means

A nice place to relax

Coromandel Gold!

First Pohutukawa Blossoms

Typical settlement close to Thames

At Hunua Ranges

Today we spent a day exploring another region close to us, Hunua Falls and surroundings, South East of Auckland. We started at home when it was raining, but our God gave us a marvelous day with plenty of sun and no more rain. We loved to hike through the thick and mountainous forest and to listen to the many birds: listen to the Tui in the video on rhe post below this!

Listen to a Tui

The Tui has two voiceboxes. We love it's exotic chants which we hear more often again as spring gets closer.

Favourite Kiwi Sport

Different attitudes

Within the last months, I am becoming more impressed about the social determination New Zealanders have. There are some initiatives for the poor that I can hardly grasp with the attitude I've grown up with. Nurses and social workers take so much patience visiting poor or self-neglecting people at home and going with them through their issues like diabetes, immunisations, domestic stuff like violence and neglect etc.. The willingness to share is much bigger. Everywhere initiatives to raise funds for poor groups or individuals. A strong attitude against disrespect and neglect. 
I tended to believe that it is important to leave people a much bigger piece of self-resposibility than what they do here. A different kind of society, but surely not inferior.
On the other hand there are less fixed believes on how a person has to be. In that sense more liberty and self-responsibility is given.

Circular Thinking

Why do we always want to go back? Even if we have settled well into our new circumstances? There is like a longing to go "home". Why? Intellectually we are striving forward, farther, towards more, bigger, higher etc.. Emotionally we strive back... perhaps not back, but in circles. We like to believe that life is a circle. From dust back to dust. We talk about the circle of life and get emotional with it. Same with space. In our spontaneous intellectual understanding it is linear. But there is some evidence that it is curved. And we don't like going forth and back, we love to walk in circles. Returning to the origin by performing a circle. I believe that there is a notion of an area we cannot fully grasp with our human intelligence, that perhaps emotionally we are able to go a step further than our minds are able to go, on some terrain which is not fully accessible our intellect.
OK, this stuff just arouse from my feelings around having lived here two years and not knowing where I will spend how much time of my life.

As for me, I believe that our real origin is God and I long to go back to this home. That is easier as I never had a kind of a tribal home as many people have. My immediate relatives are distributed all over Germany and some of them even outside. No one of them lives close to my parents origin anyway and they come from very different backgrounds themselves...