Rachel – Te Atatū Peninsula
“I’ve got my cousin over from the Netherlands at the moment, and I made a nice shepherd’s pie – thought I’d throw a bit of a New Zealand meal into the mix, so we had that together last night. He’s my second cousin. I’ve got quite a big family that live over there. My grandfather comes from 10 brothers and sisters, so I’ve got a massive extended family. So he’s come over here for three months to have a look around the country.
I’ve lived here my whole life – always lived in West Auckland, my whole life. There you go; 32 years of living in West Auckland. It’s changed a lot. I think particularly in the last 10 years it’s changed a lot. What I miss is actually being safe, Te Atatu is pretty safe, but I think there’s just a lot more burglaries and things like that. It’s not what it used to be.
I always think back to when I first started driving. I think now there’s no way I’d want to be learning to drive in this city anymore; it’s just gotten so big. I still love it, but there are a lot of changes going on – even in the community that I’m living in. Some of it’s for the good, and some of it’s for the not so good. I love living in Auckland City. It’s great; lots of diversity and lots of different cultures. It’s awesome.
It’s funny, because I guess growing up you used to know all of your neighbours and now I only know my neighbours from across the road, because I couldn’t find my cat. Other than that, I don’t know my neighbours anymore. Although when you go out for walks and stuff – I walk every day – everybody’s friendly and everyone says hello – it’s just getting the other cultures to adapt to how we live, and getting them to say hello. I think we’ll get there. It’s probably just going to take a bit of time.”
