Im here!

Hey, so I have arrived safely in NZ! The whole process took awhile, but I’m finally here in Roturua where our orientation is. Im soooo tired because while it is 7 here it is about 1am yesterday at home. Yep im in the future!!!

It is really beautiful here! Kim would love it because here there is all sorts of “geothermal activity” and steam is coming up out of the ground all over the place. The whole town smells like sulfur. There is a big lake here called lake rotorua (which in maori means lake 2). Its really beautiful and blue and there are really interesting birds everywhere. There are black swans! They are incredible looking, straight out of a Tim burton movie.

So its really neat to hear NZ accents everywhere! Its also really funny to hear all their slang words. During orientation we actually got a list of a bunch of slang terms so we wouldn’t be so confused. For example “togs” means bathing suit, and “gummy boots” are like rainboots or “wellies”. Our bus driver says “chur chur” every time he is finished talking to us over the speaker. We found out it means cool or something like that lol. We also kept hearing every one say “sweet as” which means awesome, but it just sounds funny placed in a sentence. Anyways, a lot of the time its like a foreign language.

O and Miller was actually right. Apparentley its an old wives tale that the toilet spins the other direction (according to our orientation packet) But I could swear it went the other way in Ecuador! There is no way to tell here tho cuz the toilet water sucks straight down like in an airplane toilet. They have two buttons, one for half flush and the other for full flush (number one and number two?). It is supposed to conserve water.
Dinner was pretty good. We had pavlova for dessert!! I was so excited because I havent had that since Ms. Pat Stranger made it for us at her house a long time ago. It was delicious!
Well, I think I’m going to head to bed because we have a big day ahead of us tomorw Cheers!