After our non-stop weekend away we returned to settle into our little beach front flat, which would hopefully be home for the next six months. It is basic with a very youth hostel feel in the bathroom and kitchen. It had the essentials - a dodgy looking oven, top loading washing machine, yellowed fridge and, of course, a chub...but unfortunately no furniture. We had already managed to acquire a bed from one of the nurses in work. It was around 10:30pm when we began constructing the bed so that we could climb into it, multiple attempts later, it was up and standing, although the lack of any screwdriver or Allen key meant it was fairly wobbly for the first few nights. Oh...what was that we mentioned a minute ago? A chub? Well, a chub is the hip new thing in these parts for the up and coming executive who doesn't have need of both a bath AND a shower. Oh no, the chub beautifully combines these resulting in the optimum for both - a shower that comes up to nipple height and a shower tray that you can fill with knee high water so you can get that warm relaxing feeling all over your shins.

Over the next week the flat started coming together, we discovered a local second hand furniture shop. The magical array of ancient furniture, old bikes, used wetsuits and even church pews meant Claire and Greg spent many an hour hunting out the contents of their flat in this place. What they came away with was nothing short of gold - two gorgeous faded salmon sofas (which have definitely come from a dead person's house), an old school desk as a dining table (which was fit for purpose after Claire put Greg in detention and he was forced to remove all the hardened chewing gum from its underside) and six different chairs. It surprisingly looks alright jazzed up with a few cheap blankets and cushions.

Having only arrived with three suitcases between us, our belongings were few and far between, making it fairly difficult to make the flat homely. To combat this, we took to spreading out our belongings, making sure almost all of them were on display, add to that a few chunks of driftwood from the beach outside our patio doors and the place almost looks homely.

Since we've been in Gisborne, we've had two earthquakes already. One 4.5 and one 5.1, neither of which Claire or Greg even noticed, somewhat exacerbating their anxieties about tsunamis that they had already been warned about. We've been keeping to our landlady's advice though, reversing into the driveway, for a quick escape in such an instance. Unfortunately Greg's reversing skills are less than optimal, leading to a somewhat exhilarating reversing experience and two reversing related incidents in two days. The first of which involved Greg trying his best to reverse into the driveway taking the gate with him, the gate got off quite lucky as it only lost 80% of its paint to the side of the car - which Greg tried to remove with a Brillo pad! Greg maintains that the ability to run a gate post along the side of a car is not his fault but rather a genetic fault in the Davies family. Also people will pay good money for 'go faster' stripes down the side of their cars...Greg merely added these to the Grape of Wrath at no extra cost. The second incident was in a shop car park. Greg was reversing out of a space and, instead of turning, just headed straight backwards...into the parked car behind. All Greg could think to say was, 'why did I just do that?' followed by 'Claire, look at the car'. He received the response 'I am, there's a massive dent in it'.