December was a nice month in Christchurch. Our social life was picking up the speed at an impressive rate.
Petra’s friends organized a surprise for her bday.
Maki participated in his first surf and lifesaving competition that even included an open waters swim. Honestly, I was not comfortable with swimming in the ocean but he did fine.
There was also a charity effort that involved artsy penguins being placed all around the city and then people would ‘collect’ them by checking in at their location with an app. Since we were living in the City Central, we got to collect a lot of penguins in our immediate and extended area.
This is probably the month when I started to be aware that I have fallen in love with Christchurch skies.
Maki played Ultimate with some younger teens too. Nina and I went on hikes around town on our own.
Pepi’s Ultimate club celebrated the end of the season during which she received the Female Player of the Season award.
I got invited to attend our neighbor Olivia’s graduation ceremony. That was a wonderful experience. I loved that the ceremony was both in English and Te Reo.
I remember thinking how we have been in NZ for almost 9 months by then and we didn’t come across one person from ex-Yugoslavia. At this graduation, I was scanning through thousand names and didn’t see a single one that ended with -OVIC. Then that same week, Nina and I were out food shopping and I again thought to myself “Will we meet any ex-Yu person while in NZ?”Just a few days later, we were invited to 3 different holiday parties on the same day. Our social life seemed to have exploded. During our second party, I mentioned to someone that we live in the US but that we are actually Serbian by nationality and this lady said, “Oh, I know this one fun lady from my kids’ school. Her name is Dana and she is Serbian.”
She sent a message to Dana that same moment and then Dana and I connected a few minutes later. I learned that, at that exact moment, she was at another friend’s house celebrating Serbian Saint’s day. Then I pretty much invited ourselves to this celebration (where Dana was also a guest) and we crashed their party after 10 pm, completely unorthodox for these types of celebrations (where the host makes a point to invite specific guests to their Saint’s day).�
That night, we made instant friends with a group of Serbians and Croatians and our fun in Christchurch just grew exponentially.
I baked a lot in December and we celebrated Xmas with our dearest neighbors. Kiwi tradition is to eat Pavlova for Xmas and our neighbor Willy made a great one for this festive affair.
Refresh Journey 