Outsider's Insight

Tracks in NZ One of the best ways to spend a day in NZ is to go for a walk on a track. There are thousands of them across the country. I go on tracks a lot, and most of my videos are filmed there. The photo shows the Donald McLean to Whatipu Caves track, one of my favourites. This video was filmed on this track. A bonus hi-res photo is in the comments. A few notes about tracks: - the best place to choose a track is alltrails.com (they also have an app, the free version is fine) - there are lots ...

Happy New Year! It’s already 2026 here - everything happens here first, then the rest of the world catches up.

Nano Banana Just a quick tip in case you don’t know this yet. You can take any photo - for example, a black-and-white, damaged old picture of your great-grandfather. Upload it to Google’s free Nano Banana image AI with a prompt asking it to restore, colourise, and adjust it if needed. After a few iterations, you can get an excellent result. My prompt for the image was: 1. Colourise. 2. Change the background to a strongly blurred evening beach. 3. Make it look like a real, modern photo - HD quali...

Christmas mood I’ve seen a few Christmas decorations here and there around Auckland, but, honestly, not many. To me, it feels like people here decorate their houses more for Halloween than for Christmas. Maybe the summer weather dampens people’s enthusiasm for celebrating Christmas and New Year. That’s the only explanation I can think of. It could also be that I’ve just been unlucky and haven’t seen the best examples of decorations. Please prove me wrong and share beautiful Christmas and New Yea...

Video version of the post about digitalisation in NZ and in RF.

Motivation I had wanted to move for many years, but I knew that simply wanting it wasn’t enough - plenty of people plan to move, yet few actually do. For years, I kept doubting whether I could really do it. Moving to another country felt overwhelming and too difficult. 2022 gave me a huge boost of motivation. Honestly, though, I’m not sure I would have had the willpower to move without a few key lifestyle changes and achievements that came before. Here, I want to share how I gradually stopped do...

Why I made my channels A few people have asked why I created these channels - why anyone would bother spending time writing or filming content for others. Some assumed it was driven by nostalgia or by unhappiness after emigrating. I understand why someone might think that, but that’s not the case for me. Let’s go over the reasons here. Why I started the Telegram channel 1. Talking online. I’ve been involved in online discussions for decades, long before I moved to NZ. I’m one of those people who...

MP3 version of the video above

Pick your own (PYO) PYO farms are popular in NZ. The photos show the strawberry and blueberry farms we visited over the New Year break. It works the same way as in Russia - you get a bucket, pick berries, eat some (the owners are usually fine with it), then weigh and pay. There are lots of these farms in NZ: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, cherries, mandarins, plums, apricots, peaches, nectarines, apples and pears. I’ve even seen sunflower and corn farms. The...

Snorkeling Thanks to friends, we discovered a great snorkeling spot near Auckland called Goat Island. The fish, mostly snapper, are fearless and hardly notice people. The water is calm, and everyone’s out scuba diving, snorkeling, paddleboarding, etc. NZ is not tropics, so the water isn’t warm - more like summer lakes around Moscow - quite refreshing. There’s also a small museum nearby where you can explore marine life under microscopes, see fish skeletons, and interact with a few species in a s...