HOME

At long last, I am home!!! I seem to get a lot of questions about leaving NZ and about being home again, so here are all the answers:

Yes, it is fabulous to be home, to be in my own house, to see the lawn completely covered in Christmas snow, to order a latte and not feel self-conscious about that stupid American accent that I just couldn't lose. Those are all luxuries, though, and I honestly didn't even know that I'd missed them. Mostly, and more importantly, it's so good to be with my parents again, and now I'm just counting down until Brian and Laura are also home.

On the other hand, it was hard leaving New Zealand. I can live with the fact that we drive on the right side of the road here, that public toilets aren't as nice, that coins are practically worthless, but I already miss all the incredible people I met in New Zealand. My home feels so very empty with only my parents and me, after living in my flat in NZ with six of my friends. It's also a bit strange being on the internet. While I was in NZ, it was always a little frusterating that my US friends were never online at the same times as me, because of the rather large time difference, but now that I'm back in the US, it's my NZ friends that I never see online at the same time.

It's all good, I suppose. I will get used to all the funny quirks of American culture that I had forgotten, get used to the new time zone, and figure out all the best ways to keep in touch with my friends from NZ. And it is good to be home!

Coins

To anyone actually reading this who is still abroad (or I suppose to anyone who will be studying abroad), this is my shameless begging: I collect coins from other countries and I would LOVE LOVE LOVE it if you could bring back a coin for me (as long as it isn't worth too much! just something along the lines of a penny). I'll have NZ coins if anyone else is interested in such crazy things. Also, safe travels to everyone, both coming home from abroad and just generally travelling for the holidays!!!

Roadtrip Day 4: !!!!!!!! (Doubtful Sound)

Sorry, "!!!!!" was the most articulate I could manage to describe our day in Fiordland without writing an entire novel. Amazing, incredible, beautiful, and holy-son-of-a-gun-I-can't-believe-how-pretty-this-is also came to mind as adjectives to describe the day, but they all seemed rather overused or too long for a blogpost title.

For our day in Fiordland, we went on a cruise of Doubtful Sound (which is actually a fjord and not a sound, but anyway). We started with a bus ride from Te Anau to Manapouri, an even smaller town on the edge of Fiordland (this part is red on the map).

From the town Manapouri, we took a boat across Lake Manapouri. It was so gorgeous we thought the boat ride would be the highlight of the day (it wasn't, the fjord was even prettier, but it was still that good). It had rained the night before, so the mountains were all misty and there were literally hundreds of waterfalls just everywhere. We even saw a few rainbows :) (yellow on the map)

When we got to the other side of the lake, we stopped briefly to tour the Manapouri Power Station. It generates hydro power (Lake Manapouri is quite a bit above sea level, so they have man-made shafts to drop the water to sea level and generate power, and then the lake water can just go out to sea) and most of the power goes to supply an aluminium smelting plant (try pronouncing it a-lu-MIN-ee-um instead of a-LU-mi-num, you'll get to sound rather British :-D) (the green dot on the map)

We even got to go down into the underground tunnels to see the power plant from the inside!

After we saw the power plant, we took a bus across the pass to Doubtful Sound. Again, think heaps of waterfalls everywhere!!! So pretty... (blue on the map, I know, blue probably should have been one of the water bits, but I figured you could handle it :-P)

After the second bus ride, we were actually at Doubtful Sound and we got onto the catamaran tour boat. I'm told the Norwegian fjords are even more spectacular, but I was pretty happy to spend my days seeing views like this one :) (all of Doubtful Sound is marked purple on the map)

Seals!

The white-ish blob in the bottom of the cave is a Fiordland crested penguin. So cool!

My parents and I, Doubtful Sound in the background.

A little bit of history- apparently Doubtful Sound (and probably other parts of Fiordland) were originally explored by Spanish sailors but the English came after them and renamed everything. I don't know what the Spanish name for Doubtful Sound was, but the English named it because they thought it was doubtful that the place could be used as a good harbor. They named it a sound (instead of a fjord) because they wanted it to remind them of the sounds from home (I think a sound is the inlet where a river meets the ocean whereas a fjord is an extension of the ocean inland causes by a glacier, but don't quote me on that one).

Roadtrip Day 3: A Long Drive

The day after Mt. Cook was mostly just a long drive to Te Anau (which is the red line, the grey lines just show where we had driven on the previous two days).

It was a very pretty drive, lots of mountains and flowers. Mom particularly liked the lupines that we saw everywhere.

Dad was more a fan of the fences, which sounds a little weird, but you have to understand that pretty much everything in NZ is fenced. The pastures, the houses, everything has a fence around it. It's very different from home.

We stopped and had lunch by Lake Wakatipu, which was very pretty :) If you've ever seen the movie "The Waterhorse," I'm told this was the lake they used as Loch Ness. Also, the lake is next to Queenstown, which is the adventure capital of NZ and the place where the first permanent bungee jumping site was built. However, I'm afraid I couldn't quite convince my parents to go... ;-D

This was our first view of Te Anau and Fiordland. Fiordland is the largest national park in New Zealand (I think...) and it is supposed to be one of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand. If you look across the fields in the photo, you'll see Lake Te Anau and beyond that are the mountains of Fiordland. I just wish the picture did the place justice...

Roadtrip Day 2: Cave Paintings, Epic Lunches and Aoraki

Part 1: New Zealand has this amazing system of little brown signs pointing out any and all sites of interest for tourists. It's great. We passed a sign for cave paintings by early Polynesian settlers of New Zealand, so we had plenty of fair warning to dock the spaceship (okay, I lied, we really just pulled over and parked the minivan...) and take a look around. It was super interesting!!! This is one of the best pictures we took of the drawings.

Part 1 and 1/2?: Dad was really excited about all the irrigation that is done here. They use these massive things to irrigate pasture land (mostly for sheep and cows, although there are also some deer farms here), and we have lots and lots of pictures of fields and cows and fences and irrigation, so I figured I should give it a mention :)

Part 2: Lunch was epic. (That is not entirely the correct usage of epic but we can ignore that for now.) We had smoked salmon sandwiches on fresh bread with smoked cheddar cheese and pesto, and fresh strawberries for dessert. Yes, it is indeed strawberry season :) The best part, however, was the scenery- Lake Pukaki and Mt. Cook!!!

Part 3: You guessed it, Aoraki/Mt. Cook again :) This was my favorite picture, after sunset when the valley and all the other mountains are dark but the tip of Mt. Cook is still in the daylight. It was very pretty!

We did some hiking around the base of Mt. Cook that afternoon, on the Hooker Valley trail. The view at the end was great, with Mt. Cook, the Hooker Glacier and the lake from the glacier. There were some pretty fun suspension bridges too!

Roadtrip Day 1: Of Spaceships and Penguins

Still backtracking on the trip with my parents...

Once we left Christchurch, we drove to Oamaru. It's only supposed to be a few hours drive south of Christchurch, but we took significantly longer than that so that we could take many, many picutres of New Zealand, the Southern Alps, cafes, fields, fences, and pretty much everything else that exists in the region... Our bright orange spaceship featured in many of these road-side photo ops :)

Oamaru probably wouldn't even be on the map except that it's famous for the penguins. They have both yellow-eyed penguins and little blue penguins, both of which are very cute and very funny to watch when they are walking on land. This is the beach where we saw the yellow-eyed penguins.

These are the little blue penguins. We actually had stadium seating to watch them all come en mass onto land, but we weren't allowed to take pictures, so I borrowed this picture from Google Images...

This was in the Oamaru gardens near the campsite where we stayed.

Parentals in Christchurch

Sorry it's taken me so long to post about all the adventures my parents and I had while they were here!!! It was really good to see them!!! We spent the first two days in Christchurch doing all sorts of fun and touristy things.

Christchurch Cathedral at Cathedral Square

We climbed the tower in the cathedral, which I think my dad really enjoyed. My dad is also keeping a blog of New Zealand and my mom said he wasn't allowed to put this picture up on his blog. She said they looked too jetlagged. I think it's a great picture and they both look wonderful!!!

We also visited the Antartic Centre, which was really interesting. There was all sorts of information about what it's like to live and research in Antarctica for a season. There was a small enclosure with little blue penguins, which were incredibly cute. There was also a small room that they kept chilled and full of snow. They would lend you jackets and you could go in and experience an "Antartic Storm." I was pretty impressed with the amount of work it must've taken to build and maintain the cold room, but really, the storm was sub-par. It might have briefly gotten as cold as -5F or so, which is cold enough to be glad of the borrowed jackets, but not cold enough to even do justice to what many of you have walked through to get to your J-term Middlebury classes, let along what the real Antartic must be like.

My parents came to visit my flat briefly. My dad was quite amused by the random "Give Way" sign that my flatmates have. Apparently collecting roadsigns was what you did in college back in the day :)

Bus 21! This is the bus I use to go everywhere, so it was kind of fun to take my parents for a ride :)

We also visited my dad's cousin John and his wife Margaret. It was a lot of fun talking about New Zealand and all the places they had seen and recommended!

After two days in Christchurch, we headed out on our trip! We rented a spaceship as our preferred mode of transport. I think I'm going to make you guess a bit as to what a spaceship is, but I'd be willing to bet that you'll figure it out from all the pictures we took of our spaceship in various locations :)

They're Here!!!

My parents flew in this morning!!! I can't believe how good it is to see them!!! We wandered around Christchurch for the day, being rather touristy and enjoying the sporadic sunshine. We'll be in Christchurch tomorrow as well, and then we'll leave first thing Wednesday morning for a week long road trip around at least part of New Zealand.

An Impressive Birthday Cake

My flatmate Michael had his birthday this week and we celebrated yesterday. Shanna, another of my flatmates, made him the most incredible birthday cake I have ever seen. It's so incredible that it gets it's own blog post. Michael is hugely into poker, so that cake was a poker table, complete with playing cards handmade out of edible icing and a winning hand for Michael. (For the record, I made the poker chips for Shanna to use, mostly just round cookies dipped in icing and too much food coloring, but we had good fun with it :-D)


Michael is the guy on the right (the guy on the left is a friend of his). They were hugely excited about the icing cards.


Adam, another of my flatmates, caught me writing this post, and he wanted to make sure that he got a special mention. He's moving out tomorrow and going back home for the summer, and he postponed moving back home just to celebrate Michael's birthday. He'll be back for classes in the fall something like February, I think. Unfortunately, that's long after I go home to VT, but we might be making a road trip as a flat to go visit him. Kane is also moving out, although he'll just be a few minutes drive away in a different flat. Finally, I think I may have forgotten to mention that I have a new flatmate (well, he's lived here for a while now, I'm just not very good at this blogging thing). His name is Cole, he's cool. He moved in because he's friends with all my flatmates (they're all from Nelson, a smaller city on the north part of the south island).



On a completely different note, my parents are coming to visit! They are currently flying somewhere over the Pacific Ocean and will land in Auckland early this morning before flying into Christchurch. We'll stay here for a couple of days and then rent a campervan (think a cross between a minivan and an RV and then paint it bright orange). We're not really sure what we're doing yet, but rest assured that it will involve lots of fun, too many pictures, and more details in blog form at some later date. Hope everyone is doing well!!!

New Zealand Politics

Jess, thanks for the reminder :)

New Zealand has a Prime Minister and a Parliament, both of which are elected. The two main parties are Labour and National, both of which are pretty moderate as far as I can tell (it's not quite the left-wing/right-wing differences that Republicans and Democrats have in the US). There are also several smaller parties: the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are the Green Party and the Maori Party, both of which are pretty self-explanatory. I think the smaller parties actually do have some power in NZ, as opposed to the US where they rarely get elected for anything. When I arrived in New Zealand, the Prime Minister was Helen Clark (Labour). I think she will be leaving office at some point in the next week or two because in the elections on November 8th, John Key (National) was elected as the new Prime Minister of New Zealand.

A few of the issues in the elections that I heard people talking about were the possibility of a universal student allowance and some sort of plan to financially help people who lose their jobs due to the current economic crunch. For the student allowance, some students are currently receiving money from the government to help pay for university but it depends on age and parent income, so it's not a system that is helpful to everyone. I'm pretty sure that one proposition was just to give a student allowance to everyone- you can guess that was a pretty popular idea with many of my friends who studying!!! As for the plan to help people between jobs, I think both Labour and National had proposed plans. The choice wasn't so much if it was a good idea so much as which was the better idea. I'm not sure what the other issues in this election were.

The voting system in New Zealand is quite different from the US- there is nothing like the Electoral College here. Instead, each person gets two separate votes on their ballot. I think this is how it goes: one vote is for the party they would like to see in power and the other is for the local representative (who can but doesn't have to be the same party as the first vote). Parties that win more than 5% of the total New Zealand vote and parties that win one or more local elections are entitled to seats in Parliament. There are also a certain number of seats reserved for Maori, who can choose to vote either in the general election or to enroll on a separate electoral roll and vote for the specifically Maori seats. None of that is a very good explanation, sorry. There are some good articles in Wikipedia if you're interested. Try:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_New_Zealand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_zealand_elections
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Politics

That's actually a lot more reading than I intended, it's like a "New Zealand Politics 101 Course Reading List," sorry! And Jess, feel free to add anything relevant in the comments, you understand all this way better than I do!!!

A Little More Aoraki

These are pictures of Mt. Cook from pretty much every possible angle :) (please note that I was actually being very restrained when I chose only these few pictures to post.... there are many more, like over 150 more. Not kidding) I don't think I mentioned before that the Maori name Aoraki means something like "Cloud-Piercer." Lastly, for the record, I did not climb Aoraki/Mt. Cook. It takes about 3 days, plus a few extra days to wait for good weather, something like $4000 to hire a guide, and waaay more knowledge and experience than I have (if it gives you any idea, this is the area where Sir Edmund Hillary did his training for Everest). Maybe someday (when I'm rich, hardcore, and don't have to hurry back to university for exams...) All good, though, and in the meantime, I have more than enough pictures of the mountain :)

Back to Christchurch

I'm back from my road trip of the south island. I arrived back at my flat this evening, tired, with a headache, sick of carrying my luggage, much poorer, and absolutely thrilled to have had such an amazing trip. PJ and I took a shuttle early this morning from Fox Glacier to Greymouth, which is a port city on the west coast. We spent a few hours in Greymouth, toured the train station and the Subway next door and then caught the Tranz Alpine scenic train from Greymouth back to Christchurch.

Now bear with me while I go on a momentary tangent about New Zealand weather patterns. I promise it'll all make sense in a minute (or at least I hope so...) Usually wind blows from west to east, coming in off the Tasman Sea and carrying quite a bit of the Tasman sea with it. The wind then hits the mountains and has to rise to get over them. The air cools, all the water from the Tasman condenses. The result is something called rain. You may have heard of it before; we experienced quite a bit of it on the west coast... Once all the rain has fallen on the west coast, the dry wind goes over the mountain and the east coast gets a dry, windy day with a few scattered clouds and usually a lot more sunshine than Vermont.

Anyway, today we saw just that sort of weather. It was rainy and grey in Greymouth (bad pun, sorry) and the expensive scenic ride was less than scenic because all the scenic mountains were in the clouds. However, once we crossed the mountains, there was suddenly a moment when everyone noticed the sunshine. By the time we reached Christchurch on the east coast, it was a glorious evening. Anyway, the lack of obscuring clouds made the trip much more scenic and hopefully there will be pictures to follow. Unfortunately, I have to wait until I can steal PJ's pictures because my camera died (again). All the rain on Fox Glacier didn't really agree with it. C'est la vie.

West Coast and Fox Glacier

The west coast of the south island is quite different from the rest of New Zealand. It is mountainous, wild, sparsely populated. Oh yeah, and they measure annual rainfall not in mm or cm but in meters. Today was a good example. As the Kiwis would say, it was pissing down rain all day. Despite the weather, it was gorgeous (just be patient with the pictures, my camera didn't really appreciate the rain).

One of the nice things about all the rain on the west coast is that most of the wilderness is actually classified as temperate rainforest. It's incredibly dense and lush, and it's very beautiful!

This is the Tasman Sea (the ocean from the west coast of NZ). There are supposedly seals in this pictures... Well, even without the seals, it was still a pretty spectacular coastline.

The bus driver claimed that this lake was the base location for the filming of Narnia, although I didn't get a good enough view to guess which one he meant. I thought it was pretty sweet, though. Apparently I've now been to multiple fictious worlds: Narnia, Middle Earth, and Oz (ok, Oz is a bit of a stretch, it's really just a nickname for Australia, but it makes a pretty sweet sounding list :-D)

This is Fox Glacier!!! (or the tip of it, at least)

PJ and I in front of the glacier! We didn't have time to take a tour on top of the glacier (it's one of the few glaciers in the world that is safe to hike around on without ropes and things), but we were able to walk right up to it, which was still pretty sweet. The picture doesn't really do it justice, though; it was much taller, more impressive, and less dirty looking in person.

This trip is nearly over. Tomorrow PJ and I are taking a bus to Greymouth and then catching a scenic train ride over the Southern Alps and back to Christchurch. It's been a pretty amazing trip!!! Once I'm back in Christchurch with proper internet access, be prepared for many more pictures... :)

Twizel and Wanaka

Day three of this trip was mostly bus rides. PJ and I had to go south to Haast pass to get to the other side of the Southern Alps , so we went from Aoraki/Mt. Cook to the tiny little town of Twizel, mostly just because it was the easiest way to catch a bus to Wanaka. There wasn't much in Twizel (think Tw-eye-zel, don't make the unfortunate mistake of pronouncing it like the Twizzler candy like I did...). There was mostly just the bus stop, a playground with a sign saying that I was too old to play on it, lots of sunshine, and a very excellent pizza place.

After a few hours of sun and pizza in Twizel, we took a bus to Wanaka. Wanaka is a small town next to the gorgeous Lake Wanaka, devoted almost exclusively to tourism (especially the adrenaline rush sorts like bungee jumping and skydiving... I have to admit that I have no intention of trying either!).

We didn't have much time in Wanaka so we just wandered around, enjoyed the gorgeous scenery, walked along the shore of the lake, and entertained ourselves by taking ridiculous pictures :)