I've been listening to a lot of Astronomycast ( http://astronomycast.com ), which is an, um, astronomy podcast :-)
Episode 33 covers basic amateur observing equipment, and binoculars are a really good thing to have. The received wisdom (listen to the podcast or read the episode transcript at http://www.astronomycast.com/transcripts/AstroCast-070423_transcript.pdf) is that 10×50 is a great start - big enough to be useful, small enough to be useable.
And now that I'm living in Wainuiomata, there is a lot more dark sky available - for 180 degrees behind the house there is basically no light pollution, and for the rest, what there is is generally at eyelevel or below. The hills take out several degrees of the sky all around, and the remaining sky is often crisply clear.
So I took myself off to a couple of camera shops in downtown Wellington after work, had a look at a lovely Meade 9×63 (very big, very nice, $330), compared Nikon and Pentax models around the 10×50 range (compact and all pretty much the same, around $200-$230 … plus an optional camera tripod mounting kit at $45), and then found a Tasco 10×50 (“Essentials” model 2023BRZ) for $99! Sold! http://tasco.com/single.cfm?s=Binoculars&family=Essentials&product=2023brz
Back home I shot outside as soon as it was dark and food was finished. The first overcast night in days! But the eastern sky was clearing up, and Jupiter was visible. A little shakey, so I trolled around the area, and eventually came back to the planet, but this time bracing the binocs against the wall to help stability. A perfect Jupiter came into view, with three moons visible … back indoors to ramp up Stellarium on the PC (http://www.stellarium.org)(or http://www.shallowsky.com/jupiter.html for an online applet, which can't parse NZST, but you can edit the time manually to GMT) to check what I saw against what should be there … “..o.” is what I remembered, which was more like “. ..O .” - Callisto, Europa and Io, Jupiter itself, and Ganymede. Result! $99 well spent :-)