This weekend I went to Waihi Beach with Hannah, who is a girl from my Geochemistry paper. Her family lives there and it was her sister's birthday on Sunday. Her home is two blocks from the surf and every time that we walked the beach I picked up shell upon shell. Apparently I was picking up all of the boring ones according to Hannah, but I thought that they were pretty! :O)

Saturday morning, we went to her Grandparent's house which is on the water. They have avocado and kiwi fruit orchards and also raise sheep. Man, it was a neat place and the lambs had just been born, so I was in love. Hannah's Nanna put out an amazing spread and because I'm an American, she made me my own pot of coffee while the others had tea. I would have been fine with the tea, but hey, put some coffee in front of me and I will not complain. I must admit that seeing Hannah interact with her grandparents made me want to hug mine.

We then headed to Mt. Mangokino in Tauranga and hiked around its base and picked up even more seashells. We passed a couple who had just pulled a younger couple off of the rocks who were soaking. They could have been pulled out to sea and it reminded me that while the sea is beautiful, but pretty brutal... not something to messed with.

The next day we went to the hot pools for her sister's birthday party and then hiked through the Orokawa Scenic Reserve to see the most beautiful untouched/preserved beach I've ever seen (probably the only one too!).

Today, we hiked through an old mine and a beautiful gorge that I cannot remember or say the name of. We then went to a wonderful cafe across the street and I indulged by getting a strawberry milkshake and a chocolate muffin. :O) Delicious.

On the way home, Hannah insisted that she take a picture of me in front of the L&P bottle in the town of Paeroa. L&P (Lemon & Paeroa) is New Zealand's most famous soft drink. It was originally made from water from Paeroa's natural springs, carbonated and mixed with lemon. It's a more diluted/softer version of Sprite, but stronger than lemonade. I'm beginning to become a bit addicted to it, not to mention that it shares my initials: L&P. The saying on the bottle is "World Famous in New Zealand".

International friends and myself were talking and said, "do they realize that that saying doesn't actually make sense?". I've been told by the Kiwi's that it's a pretty typical Kiwi saying, which in general don't make sense. Oh New Zealand. :O)

Hannah had taken it up herself to show me all the unique things about New Zealand and it's a well founded goal because when I'm talking with Kiwis I usually interupt the conversation no less than 5 times with "what does that mean?". So... here's a list of what I've compiled thus far (and can remember):

dear = expensive

togs = swimsuit

jersey = light jacket/sweater/shirt

bubble log = rice krispy treats

torch = flashlight

heaps = lots/loads

tramping = hiking
College = high school/secondary school

Uni = tertiary school

biscuits = cookies! (which are really dry here)

chips = fries

common sayings:

she'll be right = no worries
'good on ya'' and 'sweet as' = cool beans

eh? = you know what I mean?

cheers = thanks

flash = (something is...) awesome/extravagent/over the top (but in a good way)/ neat-o
gutted! = man, that bites!
wicked = awesome

They also really enjoy chicken-flavored potato chips, cheezy weezies, deep fried mars bars, their hot water bottles for warming their beds and think that 55 degree F is freezing. I have to admit that I'm not that miserable here, though I have been told not to fear, spring is coming! Whoot!

Ok. So, it's been about a month since I last wrote and so much has happened! My papers have really begun to get underway and tests/essays are flooding in. We're coming to the end of the sixth week of classes and we have a two week teaching recess coming up. Some friends are going down to the Southern Alps to get some skiing in, while others are trying to head to Fiji for a few days in the sun (totally opposite ideas, really).

I plan to stay in the North Island for further exploration of this awesome place. Beginning tomorrow, I'll first be going to my friend, Hannah's house on the East Coast for a few days of beach, horses, what-I-would-call mountains and relaxing. When I come back to good ol' Uni, Ashleigh, who's from the Chicago area, and I are going to be heading to the Coromandel Peninsula, also on the East Coast. We might try to go way up north to the 90 Mile Beach before heading to Amanda's parent's house for the last weekend of the break. I'm pretty excited about taking a break from school and getting out of Hamilton.

During the last four weekends, I've been blessed in being able to travel to four different parts of the North Island. Two of the adventures were field trips for my Geochemistry class and two were simply for the pure enjoyment of going.

The first was a weekend-long field trip to the geothermal fields in the Rotorua and Lake Taupo area. We spent two days in the rain taking water samples from mud pools, hot springs, steaming lakes and the Waikato river (a volcanic basin lake that runs from Taupo to the sea via Hamilton) and smelling of rotten eggs.

It was amazing! Definitely one of the best trips that I've had to date. When we finally arrived at our cabin, Annie, the lab technician for the class, had a three course (hot) meal waiting for us. We got to swim in the resort's hot pools and have a tutorial of the day's work. Also, because we were no longer technicially on our field trip for the day, they also provided us with wine and beer, because the chemistry department and all of its student's have a healthy appreciation for alcohol.

Next weekend, my friends and I traveled down to Lake Taupo again and spent the weekend relaxing on the beach. I wanted to go Bungi jumping, because Lake Taupo has a famous jump and the sport was invented here in New Zealand after all. However, no one would go with me and well, its one of those things that I would definitely want to experience with someone else. They seemed to be of the opinion that Sky Diving would be less frightening... I don't get it, but alright.

It's a beautiful town and we seemed to have a propensity that weekend for climbing things...

The first weekend of August, my Geochem class went out for it's final field trip. This time we went to Miranda, a tiny bird-watching town on the East Coast. We first tramped through some soaked peat bogs and of course, one of my gum boots has a crack in it's lining. :O) One foot was nice and cozy while the other was quickly flooded with 12 degree C water. The wet foot aside, I'm continously amazed at New Zealand's landscape. There are hills and mountains anywhere that you look and they're mostly covered with sheep and dairy cows. My camera has been filled on more than one occasion with simply what's outside the car window when driving through the countryside.

Anyways, when we arrived in Miranda, we went to a bird watching/information building where a guy talked to us for over an hour about the birds that come to this region of New Zealand and of their migratory patterns all the way up to Alaska and northern Asia (some fly to Alaska in one go!). He also showed us birds that make Miranda unique, like this one bird who's beak is curved to the left! Such a weird thing to see, but apparanently they use the beak to dig under rocks to catch their food. After eating lunch there and air-drying my feet, we went through a bog that came up to the top of our gum boots and often threatened to remove them for us due to the amazing sticking power of the mud. Our destination was the shoreline on the other side of the bogs and bushland. The tramping was all worth it when we finally got to the beach area because, from the waterline and back to the bushland, the entire ground was covered in thousands of shells that spanned the shoreline for as far as one could see and was a few feet deep.

After taking some water samples from the sea, my teacher suggested that we walk to beach awhile. So off we went and while the guys were stomping along, hoping to crush the biggest shells under their feet, the girls were walking along slowly trying to find the most beautiful shells to take home with us. By the end of the walk, my jean pockets and all the pockets in my two coats were filled with shells that I just had to have. I think I may have gone a bit over board now, but I'm beginning to have quite a collection of sea glass and shells from all my travels to the coastal beaches on the North Island.

Last weekend, Amanda (Canadian), Susi (German), Aishah (American) and myself rented a car in Hamilton and headed down to New Plymouth and Mt. Taranaki on the southern West Coast of the North Island. Though the rest are all older than myself, I seemed to be the one with the most cofidence behind the wheel and was thus asked to drive the whole trip. Man oh man, was I a happy camper! It was such a cool experience to drive on the wrong side of the road and only the first twenty minutes of so (when we were still in downtown Hamilton) were truly terrifying. I'm proud to say that I only drove on the right side (their wrong side) of the road once and quickly mended my mistake. I had Amanda, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, yell "Far lane Laura, far lane!" whenever I was making a right turn, so we made a pretty good team.

We spent the first morning on New Plymouth's gorgeous Fityroy beach before heading to Chaddy Charters for a boat trip out to the Sugar Loaf Marine Reserve. When we arrived, we were met by a very chatty skipper who calls everyone sweetheart and talks endlessly. The sky was pretty cloudy, but we all thought that we had dressed appropriately in jeans and rainjackets. Boy, were we wrong. The skipper and captain gave us huge life jackets that were then covered in oversized yellow raincoats and rainpants, saying that it can get a bit wet out on the water.

We then walked into the next room where I then realized that we had just boarded the boat and we were in a boat garage of sorts. The skipper told us the boat was an English lifeboat and if we flipped during the ride, just hold onto the boat and it'll flip back over in under 15 seconds. We all stared at each other wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. One of the men opened the garage door and another released the cable holding the boat in place and we zipped 30+ feet down a ramp to the water... a bit of a roller coaster ride, one could say, which should have prepared us for the ride ahead. Inside the harbor, the water wasn't too choppy, but it was getting progressively worse. By the time we were on the open the sea, the waves had escalated to 20-30 foot swells, so it felt more like a roller coaster ride than a pleasant, relaxing boat ride. It was awesome. We were all hanging on for dear life to whatever we could grab, getting face fulls of sea water and loving every minute of it. The boat would rock so violently or crest a wave and slam down to the trough that we were, more often than not, unseated and slidding around a bit. Amanda and Aishah probably had the right idea in trying to stay in one place and shielding their faces with their hoods, but Susi and I on the other side simply knelt on the benches, leaning over the edge, and watched every wave coming at us. The whole point of the trip was to go to the Sugar Loaf Islands and see a ful seal colony there. We saw them for about 2 minutes out of the whole hour long ride, but I would definitely say that the trip in getting to the islands and coming back was the best part of the whole weekend.

We then went back to the hostel to change. I was definitely the wettest out of the bunch, because so much water had gone down my jacket that my shirts and pants were totally soaked. After lunch we traveled back to the beach and went to the area's rain forest gardens. Then, being the romantic girls that we unabashedly are, we bought some pizza and drove to Oakura, another beach town that was got its name from the Maori words for "red sky" or "beautiful sunsets", to watch the sunset. Though the sunset wasn't spectacular (it was mostly behind clouds), it was quite gorgeous and we had a great time huddling together and trying to stay warm. The next morning we got up early and headed to Mt. Taranaki to do a 3 hour hike. When we got there, the information lady looked at our small packs, light raincoats and tennis shoes, and kindly suggested that a less involved 2 hour hike might be a better plan. We took her advice and were soon tramping up and down stairs in the heart of a green forest and headed for the lookout of Mt Taranaki's summit, which is covered in the only snow that I've seen since coming to New Zealand-in-the-winter. We definitely got a workout that day and were pretty wet by the time we reached the lookouts because the slopes/stairs were covered in water/mud puddles and it rained quite bit. It felt quite rewarding to finally reach the lookout and see the summit and see where we had begun and the surrounding country. We also ended up driving to the other side of the mountain (about 45 minutes away) and climbed to see the beautiful Dawson Falls before coming back to Hamilton.

Though New Plymouth was only 220 km from Hamilton, which should have taken about 2.5 hours to drive, the roads were SO windy and hilly (we were driving through and over mountains) that it took over 3.5 hours to get there and I felt as though I was driving one of those racing games where you're continously turning the wheel back and forth to stay on the road. It was such a great trip and I was extremely reluctant to give back the carkeys when we finally got back to Hamilton on Sunday.

It may sound like school is a small priority, I am actually getting some work done and am learning heaps about the environment and culture of New Zealand. The New Zealanders have an incredible appreciatation for their land and the ocean, because that is where they derive their resources from. They rely heavily on sheep and daily farming, along with mining, for their income and through my Geochemistry paper and my Anthropology paper, I've been able to see what that's doing to their local communities and how these exploitations are changing the environment of the land.

Classes (or papers rather) started over a week ago now and I'm settling down into a routine here on campus. I've come to discover that I love the toast here and that, though I haven't always been a breakfast girl, I really don't go a day without it here. :O)

I'm taking two chemistry papers and an anthropology paper on the Oceanic societies and how they're changing. I'm most excited about my Geochemistry and Environmental Chemistry paper. For the lab portion of the course, we'll be analyzing water samples from different areas around New Zealand. In order to obtain these samples, we have to go on field trips. So sad. We have one required weekend-long trip to Rotoura and Lake Taupo, which starts this Saturday. There's also three day field trips and we have to participate in at least one of those as well. Most of us will be going on two or three of these optional trips, because they're already included in our tuition and they're awesome!

The first trip was last Sunday, July 15, and we drove down to Te Aroha, a town about 45 minutes south of Hamilton. The plan was to climb a mountain (literally, a mountain... I was soar on Monday) and travel into the abandoned Tui mine near the mountain's peak. We first collected water samples from the various streams and springs coming off the mountain. Then we began to climb.

The mine has 5 levels, the fifth being at the top, which is where we were going to enter the mine shaft, though we did stop at each level and examine the minerals and water present there (and the view, of course). Now, I'm not going to pretend that this mountain was a rock face, but it had a decent grade that got me huffing and puffing pretty quickly. After we passed the fourth level, the path went from being wide and rocky to forested and quite narrow. I enjoyed this part of the walk more because it reminded me of the woods behind my home in A2 and because scrambling over rocks and trees made me think about something else besides how much my legs were not enjoying this exursion.

When we finally made it the the fifth level entrance, which was several hundred feet from the base of the mountain, the path had reduced to about a foot in width and then you were staring down a cliff. I wasn't terribly comfortable about that, but the view was incredible. We could see for miles.

The mine, which was operated in the 60s and 70s, was in operation to extract zinc, copper and iron from the mountain. It was neat to see all the mineral deposits on the walls and to traipse through the mine shaft and to see where the men had left off. The mine was intended to run for 20 years, but the market for the minerals dyed out only three years later. When we got to be the end of the shaft, we found filled rail carts and explosives wiring. It was as if the men had heard the news that the mine was closing and simply walked out.

My mountain goat of a professor then told us that we would be heading down the back of the mountain, as it was about half the distance back to the vans, though it was also a bit of a "scramble." We soon found ourselves climbing over huge fallen trees and down rocks. It was slippery and the pathes were extremely narrow. By the end, most of us were sliding down on our backsides and grading onto nearby trees, which I have to admit was a lot of fun. It was a great day and I feel really blessed to have this chance to travel and learn for a class!

As for campus life, I really do enjoy this campus. It has a great little shop and food area in the middle of campus which sit on the edge of a huge pond. Most students hang around in this area and its quite beautiful. The rest of campus is quite hilly and the buildings, which all have their own names, are also lettered and thus referred to. Instead of saying that I'm heading off the the Maori and Pacific Development building after finishing this blog, people here would say they're going to S-block. It makes life a bit easier, because for the most part the buildings are named alpabetically, so navigating campus isn't terribly hard.

I've discovered that when they say its winter in the southern hemisphere, its rainy season on New Zealand's north island. It's chilly yes, ranging from the high 40s to low 60s, but never like Michigan's winter weather. Its very green here and for the most part, I can walk around in a fleece or sweatshirt and be fine. As for the locals, the guys can usually be seen in swim shorts of some kind or another and the girls... lets just say that the baby doll fashion is alive and well here; much more developed than in the States. Most girls can be found wearing leggings or tappered black jeans with boots and a shapless blouse. But hey, thats fashion, right? Another common fashion statement: No shoes. I've been told (and have seen ample examples) that wearing no shoes at all is an acceptable thing to do throughout New Zealand. Its funny to see students in class or people walking in downtown Hamilton with no shoes on at all. Definitely not in the United States anymore. :O)

Let me start off by apologizing for how long it has taken me to post an entry, but now, exactly a week after I left Michigan, I will do my best to que everyone in on what's been happening:

Most of you know that I have never been a huge fan of traveling via airplanes. However, after flying 24+ hours across the world, I feel as though some of those anxieties have now been cleared away. This came about no doubt through prayer and relying on God to take care of me, but I also think that He used the shear length of the trip to help me focus more on when we would finally arrive than anything else. And arrive we did! With the time change, I left the United States on Wednesday, June 27, and arrived in Sydney in the morning of the 29th, even though it was only a 14 hour flight. Talk about going over the dateline!

I flew first to San Francisco and then onto Australia, where I spent upwards of 9 hours in the Sydney airport walking around and discovering unique merchandise like Emu jerky and authentic Aboriginal boomerangs. Finally, I boarded my Air New Zealand flight and arrived in Auckland 3 hours later and was driven to the University of Waikato in Hamilton, where upon being shown to my room, I crashed on my bed and slept for what felt like days.

Since arriving, it has been an adventure to say the least. It's definitely a different world here in New Zealand. When most of us think of winter, we think of snow and icey roads. Not the case here. The best I can describe the weather here would be to associate it with a warm fall day in Michigan with the temperatures being in the 50s and the sun shining most of the time. Everything is still quite green, though a lot of the trees have lost their leaves, and there are a lot of palm-like trees and plants here. The days are very short (the sun sets around 5:30pm here) and I'm beginning to discover the truth behind the Kiwi saying "New season every 5 minutes." While it is sunny and warm here, it also rains a fair amount and usually it starts quite suddenly. However, I'm told that this is the most miserable I will be here weather-wise, so I am definitely not complaining.

The people here are extremely friendly, helpful, and have an ardent love for the All-Blacks (their national rugby team who just smashed the Australian Wallabies in the international tournament). I got my first taste of rugby the morning I arrived. My dorm room faces the university's sport fields and several games were underway by the time I woke up Saturday morning (Friday afternoon for the Americans). I don't pretend to have a clue when it comes to understanding the game, but I'm officially an All-Blacks fan now and hope to learn the rules soon, as it is the nation's favorite topic of conversation.

Most of the student's currently on campus are international students because the Kiwis are on holiday. I've been able to meet and get to know people from Norway, England, Germany and of course from the good ol' US of A and am excited to see the campus filled next week when classes begin.

Please write or email me. I would love to hear from you all!