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For Assistance in Immigration and relocation to New Zealand

Daniela and Carlos' adventure:- From Brazil to New Zealand

In October 2001, Carlos a 27 year old physiotherapist, and Daniela a 25 year old psychology student, decided that they needed to travel and learn English to get experience and then go back to Brazil for better jobs.  In December we bought tickets to New Zealand as the travel agency told us that NZ was a great country, safe, clean, growing country and winter place, cold but not snow everywhere. As we were from south Brazil, very cold winter, we choose a place that didn't have snow all winter around. By the way our first choice was Australia, but because of the difficulty of visa, we came to NZ (all Brazilians get 3 months tourists visa at the airport and can re-apply for another 6 months)

As English is not our primary language, we decided to pay for an English course for 2 months and home-stay. We spent a lot?.... In January 2002, after Daniela's graduation, bags ready and we flew to NZ from Buenos Aires.  A friend came along with us also; she spoke more English which helped a lot. Daniela just spoke hello, how you are, thanks, colours, numbers very basic and Carlos, well, not really just yes, no, hello, bye, thanks.

We arrived in NZ and ah my God, nobody told us that here you drive on the opposite side of the road to Brazil! Everything looks so different.  We are in Auckland, in a house that has no rubbish bin in the toilet, where a shower needs to be 5-10min (once a day) ? well in Brazil we took showers twice a day early morning and when back home a night a very long 20 min?

On one side we had luck because a Brazilian student was at this house too, so he gave us a lot of tips, such as how to pick up a bus, where to change money, where to eat, where is the school,? In our first month everything was new and different, after few weeks we decided we didn't like Auckland it was too big and busy. We came from a small town, so we wonder what we are doing here. We decided to travel and get out of Auckland. We met few people that helped us to find a job picking fruit, we just loved, all the country side, small and friendly.

Our adventure had now changed to real life: we loved the country and we want to live here. As our English is still not enough to find jobs in our areas, we lived for 2 years in Kerikeri, 3 hours north of Auckland and it was excellent.  After 1 year and half here, Daniela went back to Brazil to visit and Carlos decided the time had came to find his career job. After 2 months searching, Carlos got a business offer to move to Hamilton working with Futsal. First we were scared to leave everything that we had in Kerikeri, but we decided that it was time for a move.  Carlos has been in the Futsal world since he was born, as his dad was a coach and he played all his life. He played from age 2 years old to national tournaments. But took physiotherapy as a profession, as a degree.  In January 2004, we moved to Cambridge and after few months we opened the Brazilian Futsal School.

Time has passed fast since that, as we now have our beautiful daughter Luiza now who is 2 and half years old.  We are very happy in NZ. We miss our family and friends, but this is our home now!

For all Brazilians that want to come over we suggest try get as much information as possible, maybe find out in Wellington with the embassy some details about people living here. The best start is find good people that will help you to go to the right place straight away, not loosing time and money with simple tasks.  For us the hard thing was language, language, language, but for this time is the only help! To have had someone like RelocateNZ helping us would have been much easier.

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