O hai

(Funnily enough, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohai)

(http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=O%20Hai, for those who may not be as into the internet as others!)

Hello once again from New Zealand!

It has been a while, yet again.

I'm not going to lie, the main reason I avoided posting for so long was because I guess I didn't want to make my decision about next year completely and utterly final, which is silly because pretty much everyone down here already knows.

When I come back to the US in January, I won't be coming back to New Zealand on the return flight.

Yes, I have a return flight, and yes, my trip back to the US was originally supposed to just be a visit, but I'm no longer doing the chefing/culinary/cooking course so New Zealand wouldn't really appreciate it if I came back without a valid visa.

“What?! No more cooking course?”

I know, right?

This is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, though. Staying in New Zealand wasn't really because of the course. Yes, when I came here it was a significant reason for being here, but after the first few months it was no longer the focus. I may have come here to learn how to be a chef, but I soon realized that wasn't really what I want to do. Despite that, I stayed here to work through some things and figure some things out while also doing the course.

I feel that I have pretty much accomplished that and, well, I'm ready to come home. It's not an ideal stopping point, but now that I know that I don't want to be a chef or even go into hospitality, it seems rather unnecessary to continue the course especially with the restrictions that the student visa has as far as work goes and the fees that international students have to pay. Yes, I could get a different visa and stay for a bit longer, but I'm kind of anxious to get other things started now that I'm finally off of the fence. It's a rather bittersweet thing, as I've built a little bit of a life up and pretty much enjoy all of it, and I won't get to do quite as much sightseeing as the country deserves, but it's not like it's going anywhere. I definitely hope to be back a few more times.

Long story short, I'm coming home!

So anyways, about everything else:

Work

The job is going well! It's actually my last real week, as I'm leaving shortly after the new year to start my whirlwind tour of New Zealand (most of January). I've been doing a decent amount of baking, which is fun, although I'm finding that I actually kind of miss doing dishes sometimes. Weird.

Field Hockey

Is over, sadly. I played my last game two weeks ago (I think?). On an awesomely positive note, we won our last game 8-7! Not only that, but after finally scoring a goal the game before and getting all of those jitters out of the way, I scored four of the eight goals in the last one. That felt pretty awesome. Of course, it would've been nice to start scoring more goals a bit earlier....but ah well. At least we got a win in there.

Christmas

Belated Merry Christmas! I had my first summer Christmas yesterday, which was an experience. I had an awesome time spending the day with the family of someone I lived with at EIT (thank you so much yet again if you're reading this, by the way), but it was definitely odd being outside, putting on sunblock and sitting around in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt on Christmas. I even got to play some tennis, which A) I'm not sure I've ever done in December and B) I think it's been at least three or four years since I've actually hit a tennis ball for more than ten minutes. Another neat little side note is that I got to see the sun rise in the first city in the world to see the sun on the new day, so that was cool even if it did involve getting up stupidly early.

It would've been easier to do that in the winter, I suspect.

Also I managed to forget my camera (I realized this while I was on the bus going to Gisborne), which was smart. So no pictures, sadly. It's beautiful there, though, and there are a lot of beaches that look amazing. For whatever that's worth.

Also, that could probably be said of most places in New Zealand.

Ah well.

New Year's

Early happy New Year's!

I'm not sure what's going on there for me - nothing major, though, no trips or anything. I hope you all have a good one, though!

Quiz night

So one of the local bars/pubs/whatevers has a quiz night every Wednesday, which is fun to go to even when you don't drink much (like me). I've only gone twice (and that will be all, sadly, as I won't be in Napier any more Wednesdays that they do the quiz), and the frst time we (me and some folks from work!) did pretty well. The second time we went we won something!

We may have won because we were second to last and they give that team a prize as a consolation.

How was I supposed to know the first female sports person to win $1 million?

(I've already forgotten who it was – it was someone I've never heard of)

We'll just leave that as a “may have” and pretend it was glorious and that we kicked all kinds of butt.

(yay for winning something!)

Life in general

I'll be starting that whirlwind tour of New Zealand early January, where I'm basically away from Napier during the week and back for the weeks for the whole month. It's going to be a month of bus trips and plane rides, which will be fun. I get to spend some time prancing around the north island visiting people and a bit of time on the south island by myself. I'm looking forward to both!

So that's pretty much the news! Other than that it's mainly just been work and the gym, atlthough I've been a bit slack in the gym department for the past...well, since field hockey ended. I'll start that up again tomorrow, though, since that's when work starts again. It's easier to go to the gym after doing other things for the day, oddly enough...if I have a day off, I end up just puttering around and being like “ah, I'll go to the gym later” and then never going.

Oops.

But yes, that's pretty much the news!

Also I still owe you a post on that last one with pictures (the A&P wine awards), I haven't forgotten.

Also I'll hopefully do a better job of remembering to bring my camera on my travels, as the exchange rate between pictures and words is something like 1:1000 so I've heard. Also, they're prettier to look at than a wall of text.

Until next time!

A new house!

Ok, so it's not new in any sense of the word other than it's new to me in that I've only been living there for a day. Everything else about it is pretty old, but that's ok, it has character!

Also, that's not a very exciting picture but that's ok.

Also also I still owe you text for the last post, I haven't forgotten! Hopefully that will be coming up tomorrow or so, since course is pretty much over for the year.

Which is scary.

Hopefully more tomorrow!

The A&P Wine Awards and Other Things!

Text to come soon!

A few pictures!

So!

This past weekend I got to take a little trip to the new Mitre 10 Mega store in Hastings, which is the flagship store (I think?) of Mitre 10 in the area and it opened on Thursday. They have a shiny new cafe there as well, which is where I went to work on Friday since they're still sorting out staffing it.

It really is shiny and new, and of course I didn't take any pictures of it.

It's also incredibly busy, or was on that day I was there. Man, that was an exhausting day! It didn't help that I got a little walking tour of part of Hastings because I went the wrong way courtesy of not knowing that Karamu Road has both a north and a south branch.

Oops!

So I got a map of it and used paint to edit it!

Yay paint!

Although now that I look at it on a map it's not all that far, it just seemed very far at 7:30 in the morning.

On the bright side, if I hadn't taken that lovely detour to visit all three of those spots (with the correct one being last, of course), I wouldn't have seen this lovely place:

I probably looked rather strange taking a photo of that at 7:30 in the morning in a Columbus coffee uniform, but oh well.

As for the Hastings Mitre 10 Mega, I did take a picture of the outside! Not that it shows much other than how ridiculously huge it is. It does show the lovely shade of orange that all Mitre 10s are, though.

Incredibly big!

And now for the last picture - the cafe where I actually work.
















I wish I had taken a "before" picture, because it looks very different now with the renovations. The gal standing in the middle of the picture is Zoe, one of the two baristas. The dude on the left is exactly that, a random customer, and you can just see the top of Mikaela's head behind the cookie jar in the middle (it has Anzac biscuits in it!).

Side note, cookies = biscuits here.

So I guess it's a biscuit jar.

Other side notes I may have mentioned, dessert = pudding and dinner = afternoon tea. Strange!

Ok, that's it for now! We're doing the A&P business tomorrow, so I'll definitely take some pictures of that. The appetizers we worked on today were a soy tuna with a coconut dressing, a gazpacho, and we'll also be doing some scotch eggs using quail eggs and black pudding (ew) instead of regular chicken eggs and sausage meat (also ew).

We'll see how that goes!

Ttfn!

So about that update!

Why hello, cats and kittens!

Hello to the people as well, because I doubt there are many literate cats and/or kittens, and those that are literate probably have more important things to do than read my blog.

Hello everyone!

First, a disclaimer: this is going to be a text-only post, despite my constant promises for more pictures, mainly because 1) I can't upload pictures on this connection at the moment, 2) I keep forgetting to take pictures and 3) the weather has been gross lately so biking around and taking pictures is a no-go at the moment.

Hooray for getting that out of the way!

So, what have I been up to, you ask?

If you aren't asking, well, too bad, because I'll tell you anyways!

Let's start with that gap in September.

Everything is fine, so don't worry about that! I just needed a bit of time to evict some skeletons that had been hanging out in my closet for waaay too long, on top of spending some time to just figure some things out. I'm not quite sure where the skeletons went off to, but they had been squatting for a while so it's about time they moved somewhere else.

So, updates!

Class: We had our second in-kitchen assessment, which I passed on the first try (woo!). The assessment was to make seafood chowder (with mussels and prawns and smoked fish), sushi covered in tempura batter and deep-fried, and spring rolls in three hours including weighing up and cleaning down. It was a little bit rushed, but was definitely easier than the first assessment.

We're done with our stints in the on-campus restaurant for the semester, for better or for worse - it ended on a good note, with me getting to do desserts (woo!) and a couple of pretty good services despite having a decent number of people in to eat, so that was also a plus. It wasn't super-awesome to make about 4 liters of creme anglaise for roughly 45 individual bread puddings in one sitting, but at least now I know how to make creme anglaise. We're now back to the old schedule of two days in the kitchen and one day of theory, so it's nice to have a schedule a bit less...bizarre than the one we had with productions. We're starting to work on/study City and Guilds questions for the exam coming up in November, and next week we'll be doing some work at a local wine thing. Last week we made chicken satay with peanut sauce, which is probably the highlight of the year since peanut sauce is fantastic and I can pretty much eat it with anything. We're finally done with the fish streak (pretty much every class in September and even a few in August focused mainly on fish - it was awesome in a very not-awesome way), so that's also a plus!

Boo on fish.

Next topic: Work!

Work has been going pretty well - I get to be on the register at times now, which is a nice change to running around trying to clear tables or serve people their food. They keep giving me more hours, which I hope means they like me because I like them. This weekend I get to go hang out in the newly-opened cafe in the Hastings store because they're a bit short staffed, it seems, so that'll be neat to see. They've also started putting more people on at one time, which makes things a bit more enjoyable as well since there's slightly less "oh dear all of this needs to be done at once" going on.

Also, a customer went out of their way to mention my excellent customer service to my pseudo-boss and one of the guys from Columbus who was training her. Yay for me!

...still not 100% sure what caused that, because I don't think I did anything quiet extraordinary, but hey, don't look a gift compliment in the mouth.

Or something like that.

Anyways.

Next up, volunteering!

Unfortunately, it's still a bit haphazard at the moment. Work is still quite in the way of times for volunteering with the coast guard, although I did manage to squeeze a bit of it in last weekend in the morning before work - that makes for long days. The emergency department is also a bit sidelined, but I managed to get a shift in a couple of days ago which was nice. A weekend or two ago I had a rather exciting time with volunteering at the hospital in that I went after work (work from 10 or 11 until 5:30, then volunteering from 6:30ish-10). Buses do not run that late, which meant I got to bike home from the hospital - about a 7 or 8km trip - at 10 PM and most of the route is along a 100km-speed-limit expressway that's poorly lit.

Excitement!

Action!

Incredible lack of safety!

(At least I had blinking lights?)

Needless to say, St. John's (the people I'm volunteering for) weren't too thrilled at the idea of having me do that on a regular basis, and I wasn't super thrilled about the idea either, so that's not happening anymore. It just means I need to play a bit of schedule tetris to try and figure out where to fit volunteering in.

Big Brothers/Big Sisters is still not quite happening - I need to call in the next day or two to figure out what the plan is. So that still needs figuring out!

That pretty much covers those bits...now for everything else!

Summer hockey: I've joined a summer hockey team, and that should be starting in a couple of weeks so that'll be good to help keep me in shape. They're mostly guys from the team I was on this past winter, so that's pretty neat!

The gym: I've actually been going on a regular basis! The only days I've missed I've missed due to either work (one Friday a couple of weeks ago I had work from 8-6:30, and quite literally had no way to get to the gym before it closed since I usually go after work) or minor injuries that I don't want to exacerbate (currently nursing a bit of a knee tweak, so I didn't do much for leg day today). In the past month and a half or two months I think there have only been three or so days where I haven't gone to the gym when I'm supposed to (three days a week). So that's pretty decent! I actually have a *tiny* bit of muscle mass now, which is weird.

Hot chocolate: I drink way too much of the stuff - usually at least a mug a day. But it's homemade peppermint hot chocolate so it's ok, right?

Oatmeal: I eat way too much of the stuff - it's good for your cholesterol levels, though, right?

Keyboards: I have one! My newest little thing to do, it's actually pretty nifty and I'm doing a bit better at it than I was expecting considering how I've never seriously sat down and tried to learn anything for more than an hour or two a week in the past..............decade?

Springtime: I actually get to have a spring! I realized the other day while going to the gym that it's been a year and a half since I've had a springtime, which is an odd thought. It's starting to warm up and some flowers are starting to grow, so hooray for that!

I think that's about it!

I'll snag some pictures of things like work and places I frequent over the next week, and I'll be sure to snag some photos of the event we'll be cooking for next week as well. Hopefully the weather (and my knee) will cooperate...

Stay tuned for pictures! I swear there will be some eventually...

It's not September anymore!

Ahoy, chaps and chapesses!

Or singular, that's probably more accurate.

Ahoy, chap and/or chapess!

(Is "chapess" even the proper thing?)

ANYWAYS.

It's not September anymore, and it hasn't been for a few days! Just a heads up.

I'm currently in the process of coming out from under that rock I always seem to hide under, and once a few more things have been done I will give you a full update on how things are going!

So hang tight for a few more days, and you shall be rewarded with random things about how I'm doing in New Zealand. Hooray!

So much for regular posts

Happy September everyone!

I guess?

This is actually just filler - I know filler is gross, and I'm sorry! I raised expectations with those back-to-back posts in early August (using "back-to-back" loosely there), and then promptly stopped posting.

Oops.

I've been in the middle of a little bit of stuff that will continue to occupy most of my free time, though, so there probably won't be any updates of any significant length for the next month. It should be over by the end of September, unless I don't finish in time (boo) or I give up (even more boo), so there will be plenty of almost-novel-length posts to bring things back up to date then! Hopefully with more pictures, provided there are interesting things to take pictures of.

Of course, if something major happens like I score a goal in field hockey or win a lifetime supply of Oreos I'll post about that, but those sorts of things seem rather unlikely at this point.

We shall see.

Have a good September!