So far I really like Auckland. I get to eat lots of sushi and I am loving making food in my flat. What we’ve been doing a lot is everyone will bring over an ingredient and a bunch of us will make dinner together. A few days ago we ate lamb with rice and veggies and it was soooooooo good. Lamb here is really cheap, its like chicken. There is also a lot of fun events going on here. This weekend there was a lantern festival and a bunch of us went to the beach. Unfortunatley the weather as of late has not been that nice, and I didn’t get to go to the lantern festival, but I got a glimpse of the decorations in Albert Park. This park is amazing, it has tons of these huge trees with sprawling roots and branches that are impossible not to climb. They are probably the best climbing trees I have ever seen in my life.
I think I pretty much have my papers (classes) worked out. I am taking an independent study and since it is worth sixty points I wont be taking any other papers. Its really different tho, I get my own studio space and I am expected to be working in there monday-thursday and sometimes we have workshops. We are supposed to come up with our projects and the workshops are supposed to enhance our ideas. Dad, you would be really excited, I get to work with a letter press for one of my workshops. And Aunt Wendy squared, you would be super excited because I also get to work with a knitting machine! This semester should be really neat, and Im excited to see what I come up with. I am a little nervous because it is so different then what I am used to, but I think once I get started I will really like it.
O I almost forgot! There is an amazing market where people sell artwork, incredible handmade clothes and all sorts of other things every Friday and Saturday. Kim would be in heaven. Maybe I will have to go gift shopping there . . .

auckland

So now I have arrived at my flat in Auckland. It is not the most beautiful city I have ever seen, but I have not been to the harbor yet. Our Apartment building stands 14 stories tall and I am on the 6th floor. Our flat is amazing!!! There are four individual rooms two bathrooms and showers, a kitchen and a living room ( all connected). Our living room is on the corner of the building so it is nothing but windows! Its an amazing view of the city! My room is about the size of my room at UMBC, but the storage is much better (also I guess I have way less stuff). Our orientation is not till Thursday so we have a night and a day to get settled. We went out to find a Warehouse ( pretty much the equivalent of Wal Mart) top get some basic supplies. I was so good at finding deals everyone wanted me to help them shop lol. I have found that when I put my mind to it, I am pretty good at budgetting myself and being thrifty.
There is so much asian culture here. The Auckland (and NZ in general) has a high asian population and you can definitely tell by what produvts are sold in grocery stores and even in the style of the internet cafes. Its kind of like the way there is so much Mexican culture now in the US. There is asian candy everywhere and posters and games and music. Wesley you would looooove it. And Alex you would love it because there is sushi everywhere! I think I am really going to like it hereJ

Gloworms: check!

So today I conquered my fears. I went caving.
We split up into small groups and chose between three different caves. St Benedicts cave was a dry cave with beautiful limestone formations, enormous caverns and a zipline at the end. Toomo Toomo Tubing was a wet cave that was supposed to be a bit relaxed and had black water rafting/tubing. It also included an incredible view of the gloworms that hung from the ceiling of the cave. Haggas Holes was a wet cave that included repelling down a waterfall, crawling through small spaces, and other more challenging ventures. Most imporatntly, that also had glowworms! I was feeling adventurous so this cave was my first choice. Unfortunately the list for this cave filled up fast so I settled for tubing. It didn’t matter too much to me because this cave actually had the best view of glowoms anyways.

So to prepare for the cave we were all fitted with full body wet suits, helmets and gummy boots. I looked pretty dorky because they had to tape my glasses to my helmet lol. Then, we walked in our gear across some cow fields to get to the mouth of the cave. It was an odd sight.

And there it was. The smallest little gap in the ground I’d ever seen in my life. (ok not really but I could not squeeze down without some manuevering). To our group’s surprise it wasn’t quite as relaxed an experience as everyone made it out to be. We were really happy about this because now we felt extremely adventurousJ The tubing was actually only about 10 mens out of the 4 hours we were down in the cave. The rest of the time we were crawling through cracks, navigating our footing on uneven ground and even swimming across the deepest parts of the cave through freezing cold water. At one point we were all told to army crawl on the ground keeping hold of the ankles in front of us. We had to turn all our lights out and we crawled through what our two guides called the “rebirthing canal” lol. It was about a 3 minute crawl through a tunnel where if I raised my back it would hit the ceiling. I had a feeling that if our lights had been on, we would have all freaked out because of how tight a space we were in . I was so proud of myself for being able to do this, and without panicking! The part where we actully did tube was amazing. As we lay in our tubes we gazed at what looked like a milky way of bright stars. These were the tiny little gloworms I had been waiting to see. They were scattered throughout the cave, but this was one of the biggest concentrations. It was breathtaking.

Gloworms have a pretty interesting life, in that it seems pretty uninteresting. They are actually maggots not worms and they let down tiny sticky strings from their resting place on the ceiling of the cave to catch their pray. The light that they give off happens because they have no way to get rid of waste. Aka they can’t poop. So basically they burn their poop and it gives off a pretty little light. After a few months ( and only about 3 pray) they transform into these little gnat like creatures. Unfortunately at this stage they don’y only have no way to poop, they also have no mouth. So they procreate, lay eggs and starve to death. They also serve as food for the other gloworms. What a life.

So I made it out of the cave safely and feeling quite proud. It felt like a real caving experience, not just a walk through a stone tunnel under the ground. I’m so glad I was able to do it!

i am a zorbonaut

Today was amazing! To start off the day our group took a trip to The Agrodome. What is an agrodome? It’s a pretty much a farm animal arena, and when I say farm animal I mean sheep. They showed us all of the diifferent kinds of sheep they have in NZ and what they were used for (some for high end wool, some for course wool, some for dinner . . .) Anyways, all the sheep were huge!!! They also had a sheering demonstration which was pretty neat. And I wish Emma had been there because they also brought out a few sheep dogs who herded some animals on stage and did fun tricks like jumping from the back of one sheep to the other. It was really fun!

After that we had lunch, and prepared for our next course of action . . . to become zorbonauts. For anyone who doesn’t know what zorbing is, its basically being like a giant hampster in a hampster ball and getting rolled down a hill. It was sooooo much fun and no I did not throw up. You can do two types of zorbing, wet or dry. With dry zorbing they strap you in Divinci style and you roll with the ball. With wet zorbing they have a ball within a ball, and the insisde ball has a small amount of water. The zorbers ride in the inside ball and slide around while the ball rolls down the hill. I did wet zorbing with two other people inside the ball with me (my roomate Melissa and a girl we met named Megan). It was soo much fun, but it was short ride. This boy named Tim who is also going to AUT filmed us going down the hill in our zorb, so hopefully I will be able to post that soon.

After zorbing the fun was not over. We got to go see a Maori village renactment and eat a traditional hangi dinner. The Maori culture I very respected here and they really try to keep their traditions and history alive. So, a hangi dinner is where they heat up river stones over a fire and bury the hot stones along with the food underground to be steamed and cooked. It was incredibly delicious!! They had all the lamb I could eat and mussels, and potatoes, and carrots . . . it was the best! And they don’t have mint jelly in NZ, they have mint sauce which is pretty similar and tastes great with the lamb. We also got to see some traditional Maori dance and song which is quite fierce. Tim (who films everything) also filmed one of their performances, so I will hopefully post that as well.
Overall it was a pretty jam packed day. Well, I gotta go because tomorrow I get to check off another goal on my life list . . .

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!