Jackie - it is a beautiful thing you are doing.

Last year my wife, who is one half of Tory and Ko Jewellery in Wellington, decided to collect presents for children in Refuges in the Wellington region. Sse contacted them and was told that the Wellington refuge does OK and would she mind collecting toys for children nationally. We were gobsmacked to find out that there are over 200 children in refuges on Christmas Day. As the parents of a 5 year old this blew us away.
They ended up collecting 250 presents and these were distributed all over the country. My wife was constantly amazed at the generosity of people.

They are doing this again this year and are well on the way.

If PA'ers in Wellington want to donate presents they can at T&K Jewellers in the Old Bank Arcade. You will receive a little something for your trouble....

Great job Jackie at raising awareness for the Refuge and their needs.

Only reasonable coffee I've found in CHC is C4, and anywhere rural is a write-off.

Lack of tattoos and piercings, you see. The freakier the barista, the better the coffee. If they're clean cut, they typically won't make decent coffee.

Heh heh.
I found myself in Fairlie for the New Years Day parade this year (long story....)
Saw a little place called Cue Espresso.
Went in and saw this clean cut south-canterbury looking likely lad and thought oh-oh. Then saw that he had a Faema E61 coffee machine and that he had ristretto's on the board....
Had to try, it would have been impolite to not to....

Well blow me down with a feather.
He threw the first one away, because it wasn't up to his standards, but the second came out perfect.

So yes, you can find little surprises in rural NZ.

Espresso is just one way to extract a bean with water, there are plenty others. I'd love for some of the NZ cafes to start experimenting with other methods (they probably already are, I speak in ignorance at the moment).

George - Check out the Supreme cafe on Ghuznee Street.
They do coffe 4 ways, including with a Clover (NZ's only?).

For the sake of comparison, what's the going price for a HK Starbucks regular coffee these days?

Not sure.
I go into Starbucks, buy a muffin, then sit down and talk to my wife on FaceTime for an hour.
I've never looked at their coffees and prices.

New Zealand styled coffee isn't as common but it's also not often demanded unless done so by tourists and expats,

Yeah kind-off.
The aforementioned Fuel in Hong Kong has queues out the door. Even at 10pm at night. Proof that really good coffee crosses cultures, albeit educated ones.

The best caffeine hit I've had anywhere on this planet can be found in a small riverside retro cafe in Ratchaburi - slow dripped black syrup onto a bed of sweetened milk.

Oh yes.
Coffee slow dripped onto condensed milk.
You can either drink the coffee from on top of the condensed milk and get a small hit of sweetness, or stir the whole lot in.
Hmmm.....

Hong Kong is filled with Starbucks, Seattle's Best Coffee et.al.
I always struggled to find a good coffee anywhere.

Then I discovered that Sanjay from Fuel Espresso (Wellington) had opened an espresso bar in the IFC Mall in Hong Kong.

Firkin expensive (HKD$45 for a flat white, about NZD$7.50), but really, really good to this antipodean coffee snob, who was willing to pay any price....

NZ's largest coffee retailer?

BP's Wild Bean.

NZ does have a strong coffee culture, but that doesn't mean that people don't mind fast-coffee which is OK.

I saw my primary school bully on the bus once, he'd just got out of jail ... sometimes the last laugh is a knowing smile out the window

heh.
I had the opposite happen.

Went to school with this real bad bastard.
Leather jacket, smoked, bullied, stole money from the Telethon jar, you name it Terry did it (and this was intermediate!).

Bumped into him on the street about 10 years later.
Said he would buy me coffee...

The first words out of his mouth as we sat down were..."Have you thought about God recently....?"

I think I scalded my mouth trying to drink my coffee as quickly as I could.....

<guote>The local agent round here refuses to use Auctions, he reckons it's the best way to get the second best price for your house.

ie: you get slighty more than what the second bidder was prepared to go to, you don't find out what the highest bidder was prepared to go to</quote>

That is completely true... but only in a rational market.
Which, unfortunately, Auckland's has been anything but.

I am happy to go to 500K, someone else is happy to go to 420K. In a rational market they stop at 420K, I bid 430K and win the house, saving myself 70K in the process (and conversely stopping the vendors getting the extra 70K).

But in an irrational market people are willing to go beyond their limits to secure a house, and a feeding frenzy occurs. This is what auctioneers are banking on.
Auctions tend to work best in markets with speculative bubbles, hence Auckland and Nelson.
This is why auctions are not popular in places with steady, incremental growth, like Wellington.

I would never sell my house by auction, but that's just me....