So the week of my birthday dawned, and thankfully I was not required to go into work on Monday. This stroke of good luck ( bad luck for our finances) carried on until Tuesday  -my birthday - so I enjoyed a very lazy day. I treated myself to phone calls with Ella, Rebecca and my parents and my sister called from France where it was Midnight the night before and sounded fun. I had a little birthday money and spent some of this ( becuase the dollar goes far) on some boots and a new top ( and I still have some to spend!) I had a nice dandelion coffee in my fave cafe and read my book, hung around the hostel and then got ready to go out. Spent much of the day wondering where to go but in the end decided to keep the Ocean's 13 theme and booked a table at the casino. On the way out Graeme, the hostel owner passed me a notice to pop on the noticeboard about a car for sale for 500 bucks so as I put it up I texted the number and 20 minutes later Evan and I were viewing a 1987 red mitsubishi mirage with racing seats ( and lots of lovely features like corroding plastic and ash trays - oh how retro!) Two czech boys were selling it - Robert and Martin - and they were sweet and more to the point the car had it's WOF ( MOT) until December - bargain! So we bought it - he's called Bobbique which is czech for Little Robert, obviously Not spelt right but then my written czech is slightly rusty ( unlike my spoken czech which is naturally fluent!)

Back to my birthday - one car bought ( for princely sum of about 160 pounds)  we ventured to oceans 13 where we were 2 of 4 people in the cinema. We then trundled to the casino where they have an eat all you can buffet of delicious food ( prawns, mussels, salads, roast meats and veges) and I tucked in to the smoked salmon which I haven't had since Christmas. The best bit was that as it was my birthday I got free drinks and a gift - personal pocket radio! Then after we'd indulged in a few mouthfuls of dessert for a special treat we went to pay and found that becasue it's my birthday my whole meal was FREE - hooray!! So we celebrated by putting 5 dollars on roulette. I kept the chips near 10 - my birthday - and won twice so trebled my stake - even more hooray! then as we collected our coats we discovered that the casino do a  free lift home... so we didn't even have to brave the cold :-)

The day after my birthday I was working at my recruitment agency doing some phone work for them, and at lunchtime filling out car paperwork. After work Robert and Martin came to drop Bobbique off and we parted with the cash....

The rest of the week was fairly work orientated until Friday night when, becuase it was several peoples' last night or last weekend before travelling on, most people (all the long termers anyway) went out on a large night. This started well as after much deliberation we invested in a bottle of absolut vodka at the offie, knowing that it would last a few weekends. First we went to the grumpy mole where I chatted mostly to Liz and Libby, Matt ( in French, badly due to the vodka) and Ana  (not in German, neede many more drinks for that) then we went on to Boogie Nights which is a cheesy club with a camper van on the lit up dancefloor. How good is that? You can view images if you go onto my page on facebook and navigate to the vagabonds group that I'm in.

Saturday was a hungover errands day of much lazing and sorting out car insurance then Sunday we had booked the Trans Alpine railway. This travels across NZ to Greymouth and back. You can do it in a day trip - as we were to do. It travels through the mountains over several viaducts and through 19 bridges. The scenery was really nice - seeing the southern alps at close quarters, although not that much snow, and it was nice to have a relaxing train journey with a picnic. Most exciting was that Bart and Homer were on our train - they were journeying to Springfield, a small town outside Christchurch to celebrate the launch of their Simpsons movie next week, so we had our photo taken with them which was lots of fun :-) although I think Homer fancied Evan and he kept tickling his back?!

This week I started back at Crane - same place that Evan is and where I was before - helping put together a bathroom catalogue which involves lots of checking numbers and excel formulas. Yesterday we had a lovely suprise as cooking tea when Cecil from Blenheim walked in - so excited to see him. He joined us at the launch night of the Christchurch short film festival which we spent more of our birthday money going to see ( only 7 dollars each though so not v expensive anyway!) There were about 9 films all between 2 and 11 minutes long. Some were better than others. There was a very funny short animation of two sheep talking about baa-ing and practicing their Baas. Very Nick Park. And a couple of really well shot pieces.

and now it's just work work work til the weekend - just like the Hard-Fi song - where we're going to go out not just for Evan's birthday and for my birthday postponed but our friend Gavin in the hostel shares Evan's birthday so it's going to hopefully be a nice big party! Watch this space for photos.