If life is about the journey...whatever, glad that plane ride is over!

There's a little taste of kiwi humor :)

Good Bye NYC!! (taken from airplane window, 6:30am)

Alright, so been in NZ for a week now, and a lot has been going on!

The flights over was not wonderful, and 3 hours into that 6 hour flight when I was totally annoyed that it was only halfway, I realized that the 12 hour flight from LA to Auckland was going to be quite the adventure.

However, I we flew right over the mountains of Colorado (I think?) and the grand canyon, and it was SO COOL, except I of course failed to take any photos of them. woops. BUT did get a pic of myself with my lovely Aunt Gigi! We had a nice day in LA, best layover ever!

 On the flight to Auckland I think I may have watched about 4 movies, slept for 5ish hours, flirted with guy in Navy shirt, drank 3 glasses of wine to try to sleep more but failed and genuinely desired to be exercising instead of sitting, tried to sleep sitting backwards, sideways, and every way in those uncomfortable seats and just plain old failed at it. I did make friends with the person next to me though, she was pretty cool. Her dad has travelled the world training horses for a living, seems like that's a fair-sized industry here, or at least farming is huge and that's a part of farming.

This is what it looked like approaching Auckland at 5:30am! Quite a relief after only seeing the dark Pacific Ocean most of the way.
Anyway, once off the plane next step was customs. After hearing horror stories about the NZ biosecurity I totally feared for the fate of my honey glazed pretzels, but they made it through ok, not to worry! (Ha. There you go NZ biosecurity! I'm going to spread pretzel seeds on your fields and all you will grow forever will be pretzels) jk.

Took a bus called nakedbus to Hamilton. Nobody on it was naked. Hamilton's weather is very similar to Seattle's weather; has been cloudy and drizzly a lot, but it can also be bright and sunny in the same day. Bummer that it's winter here :( I figured it couldn't be too bad because the winter here is just in the 50s, no where near how cold Providence was this year! I didn't realize though that when I'm leaving 78 degree weather 50 may well be 40. But I think I can get over it, I'm in NZ afterall!

There have been a few things here that are particularly shocking:

Taken from the passenger seat (left side), so much wrong here!

• roads go the opposite way from in the U.S. and the driver and passenger are swapped
• bagels cost at least $10 (that's about $8 American)
• the buildings are extremely low, most one story, some two story, nearly none with more
• here everyone's expected to keep up with the drinking, though I'm not shocked that I can't
• I brought a six pack of Guinness to a party on Saturday and I'm still getting made fun of (today is Tuesday) because they only drink Guinness on St. Patrick's day! all in good nature though

On the western coast of the North Island most (or all?) of the beaches have black sand from the iron from the volcanoes, and it's really cool! Cat took me to see Raglan Beach which is big for surfing and there were actually surfers there even though it was only like 58 degrees. The black sand was really cool, and we saw a waterfall called bridal veil falls that was super pretty and in the middle of a forest that is lush and green despite the fact that it's winter.
 
Work is alright, the project is having slow progress and my project group can't make any decisions and it's painful to hear them talk in circles even though their decisions have no weight on my part of the project. My work while I'm here is to study the environmental impact of wave energy technology on the ocean's environment. The main goal with my efforts is to figure out what it will take to get resource consent to implement a wave energy park off the west coast of the North Island. Basically just how to prove to the government that it would be valuable to have a wave energy park there so that they give permission to build one.

Most of the signs are in both Maori and English. This is my department.

One of the big obstacles for a project like this is the claim that the Maori people (who were here before the English came) have on a lot of the land and natural resources in New Zealand because of an agreement with the English. They have a history of claiming that anything natural is culturally valuable so that white people can't use it. A recent claim gave them rights to the surrounding ocean floor and stuff so that is likely to make my job difficult. However another group recently got permission to implement a tidal system in an estuary, so if they can do that I have absolute faith in being able to gain permission for the wave energy system.

I wanted to pick up something to have for breakfast at work, so I got Weet-Bix (as seen in the background). It's pretty difficult to choose snack-food and stuff because all the brands are different here so I chose that one because it said it's NZ's #1 breakfast cereal and I might as well while I'm in NZ. I like it, but it's very different from anything that's in the states. Since all the American cereals have a lot of sugar it took a bit of getting used to. The first bite definitely tasted like cardboard, but the people on the box look like they're having so much fun so I knew I would have super fun times if I stuck with Weet-Bix :)

A really popular food here are pies. The typical one has a mince (ground beef) and cheese filling, and they look quite harmless from the outside but this one nearly turned me vegetarian. They'd be much better if they were just the pastry without the inside. It was good for the first half, but then I got to the middle and looked at how much meat was left inside it and became very annoyed and squeezed some of it out so that my next few bites would be more pastry than meat. I guess it's not for everyone. If there were pies without filling I'd be all over them!

I've also been trying to have each of the non-American candy bars at least once, definitely a good cultural experience :) Crunchie bars are pretty darn good, they are some sort of crystallized honey thing covered in chocolate. I've also tried Mars bars and Moro bars (which are pretty similar to each other and similar to Milky Way) and had a Flake bar too which is just flaky chocolate and it's delish!

Apparently I'm in that category :)

At work there is a tea room and they religiously observe "morning tea" and "afternoon tea" at about 10:45am and 3:30pm respectively and totally separate from lunch. Today I definitely had a late lunch and so went straight to tea from lunch and it was quite wonderful. We should totally have tea time in the states. Although we definitely don't need the coffee machines there are here (they are the bane of my existence). At least the coffee in the machines is from real coffee beans and not instant coffee which is surprisingly really widespread here (I've never seen so much instant coffee in my life!). They have the capability to make special coffee drinks like cappuccino etc, but I would prefer that it just made normal coffee really well, than all kinds strangely.

I would be so much happier with a normal coffee machine.

The problem is that for most of the coffee options the machine puts in an inch of coffee, half inch of milk, and about 3 inches of water. Water in my coffee! Well, that doesn't fly so I've figured out that if I get 3 short blacks then put milk and sugar it's like a normal cup of coffee. Yay. Iced coffee in the cafés here is kinda strange. I've gotten it three times and twice the coffee came with a scoop of coffee iced cream in it. The first time I couldn't figure out why the coffee tasted like ice cream, but it's kinda gross to get something ice cream in it that I'm expecting to be more bitter and savory. Oh well, I suppose that's all part of the experience!

I also had my first Kiwi vegemite toast the other night! very exciting. I'm also learning some Kiwi slang bit by bit; my progress is debatable, I definitely can't try to pass as a Kiwi. My accent is too American to actually put on a New Zealand accent. Next weekend however my flatmates and I are hosting a 4th of July BBQ! Super exciting! American stuff is a huge novelty over here, especially the cups that we have at college parties, pretty hilarious. Our BBQ is going to be "American Style" and I'm going to make sure that everyone dresses as American as possible and puts on American accents! Kiwis are sooo funny when they put on American accents so this is going to be great :)

Me and Cat from the Kaimai

 Sunday Cat and I went to Tokoroa for her soccer game and driving through the country is really pretty. Driving in this region you pass through mostly farmland and hills and it definitely looks like it could have come out of lord of the rings even though this isn't the region where it was filmed.

 

There are cows everywhere!

 Went to a pulp and paper mill with a group of woman engineers from Waikato University (where I'm working on the wave energy project), and it was really cool! We got to see the whole manufacturing process from wood chipping to the final product of the paper, this is the group of us in our safety gear in front of the plant, but you can't see any of the plant. You can see that we look very safe in our safety gear for sure :P I'm the one on the end on the left.