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!

Ohmygoodness two posts in less than two weeks!!

What is happening, am I actually posting more often?!

That's crazy!

So anyways, enough with the exclamation marks for now.

It's actually been a pretty important two weeks! Well no, it's really been more of an important yesterday and last Sunday.

...there goes my restraint on using exclamation marks.

So, another update:

1. I have a job! I found out yesterday that I got a position at a cafe that's kind of nearby. Well, it's 6.6km away (~4 miles), so I'll have to bike that before going to work, but that's ok! Income! Yay! I'm not sure when I'm starting yet, as they haven't done the roster yet for the upcoming weeks, but I'll find out on Monday. Yay!

2. Productions are starting next week for my group. We'll be in the school restaurant's kitchen cooking for folks, and it'll probably get rather busy seeing how yesterday the group in there this week had 60some people and that was only the second day of it being open. Hoo boy. On the first week I get to be the bread man, which is awesome. Yay bread!

3. Volunteering at the emergency department is actually pretty awesome, and I'll be flying solo this upcoming Sunday (my second shift!). There will be so much tea and coffee and milo and sandwiches and soup everywhere.

Ok, so I guess there aren't as many things to report as I thought there were.

I thought I would end with pictures, but this connection apparently can't handle uploading them.

Boo.

Next time I'm at the library I'll have some completely uninteresting photos of Hastings!

Yay?

The secod semester begins!

Hello everyone!

How are things?

Sorry about the delay, there was a gross situation involving paperwork and fees and loss of library use and it was very bothersome and took way longer than it should have and not all of that was my fault.

Or at least I'd like to think of it that way.

Anyways!

Brief update about how things are going:

1. Classes are back in session, thankfully! Break was a bit bothersome with no job and a busted foot. It was nice to have some time off, but it seemed a bit excessive. Without it, though, number 2 probably wouldn't have happened!

2. Volunteering is happening! Finally! Well, for the most part. My first day at the hospital as a “Friend of the Emergency Depatment” is in a week, from 10-2. Woo! I feel slightly out of place because most everyone else doing it is almost or over twice my age, but it's still nice to help and I'm glad I'm doing it. Another volunteer thing that's starting up is with the Coast Guard (I know, right?), where I'm learning to be a radio operator. I figure it's absurd enough that I went from bio major in MA to cooking school in NZ, so why not continue the trend? It's also pretty neat even though I don't really understand a lot of it yet. Another plus of these volunteering things is free training, so yay. I'll be getting a radio operator's license through the Coast Guard, and I'll be able to go to first aid courses and things like that through the folks who do the emergency department thing.

3. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten much word about the third volunteering thing, Big Brothers Big Sisters. I'll be calling in a week or so after having sent a couple of e-mails over the past couple of weeks to see what's up with that.

4. Also unfortunately, no job yet. A lot of people have my CV, though – I feel like my CV in all of its various incarnations is responsible for at least a fully-grown tree, if not more than one.

5. Back to the plus side of things, my foot is ok! As a result, field hockey is back on! Now I just need to get better at the whole sprinting thing.

I think that's about it. Even though it's only the first week/almost second week of classes it already seems a lot more promising in that we've already done things that were way more interesting than first semester. Examples: Prawn Laksa (a Malaysian curry) and sweet chili sauce (so good!) on our first day, and we made spaetzle on our second day (along with some fish and some soup). Spaetzle is essentially the German version of pasta, to be honest, except instead of little oganized shapes it's little clumpy/stringy things because you don't roll it out, you just pipe the batter into boiling water. Also yesterday we made pork dumplings/potstickers/wontons!

Ok, that's it for now! Have a good until next time!

And so break begins

Hello everyone!

So, let's see, what's the news from pseudo-down under?

(Psuedo because people usually think of "down under" as Australia, I think?)

Well!

The first semester is over as of the first of July, and we are now on a three-week break (NZ's winter break, essentially), which is both good and bad. Leading up to the end of the semester we had our productions, where everyone spent one week as a front of house person at lunch, one week as a cook at lunch, and one week as a cook at dinner for people who were actually paying to come to the restaurant on campus (sorry, people who came!). It was still only three days per week, though, so it wasn't *too* intense...during service it did get a bit hairy at times, though. For lunch I was on spanakopita duty one day, then pasta carbonara the other two days. For dinner, it was steak with hand-cut fries and mushroom sauce all three nights (kind of...I wasn't there for one service because I had done a double shift - lunch and dinner - one of the days the week before so I could still make it to field hockey practice).

It was a bit silly because we were all supposed to rotate between appetizers, mains and desserts for each meal to give us all experience doing each station for that mealtime, but that really didn't happen. So the dessert people the first day pretty much desserts for all three, mains did mains all the time and appetizers did appetizers the whole time. It was nice to be able to get a bit more comfortable with the meals you were preparing, so it wasn't just one day of something, but I really didn't get to do anything with desserts or bread like I was hoping to. Oh well! We'll be doing many more productions next semester, so I'll be able to do it then.

Speaking of next semester, it looks to be even...stranger than this past one as far as class goes. It was a bit of a stretch in my opinion to call three half-days a week "full-time", and next semester....well, here's what we'll be doing. We'll be split into two groups again, and Mondays/Tuesdays we'll be doing the usual: Mondays one group will be in the kitchen in the mornings, one in the afternoons/evenings, and Tuesdays will be "theory" or computers. The next part is where it gets weird. We'll be doing productions every other week for two days. Example: Week 1, group A does Monday morning in the kitchen, theory on Tuesdays, and dinner productions Wednesday and Thursday while group B does Monday evening in the kitchen, theory on Tuesdays, and nothing for the rest of the week. In week 2, Monday and Tuesday will be the same, but group B will be doing productions Wed/Thurs while group A has the rest of the week off.

So, some weeks I'll have two days of class while other weeks I'll have four. It's kind of awkward, I'm not going to lie. We'll see how it goes, though! They want to give us two days of productions in a row so that there's a bit of continuity and it's not just a string of one night services, which makes sense. I'm just not sure how I like the idea of having two days of class per week half of the time. The alternating schedule will also make it kind of awkward to fit other things in on those days, not to mention that dinner services on Thursday will clash with field hockey practice (oh no!).

But again, we'll see! It'll be nice to get more experience in the kitchen during productions, even if it is a rather awkward schedule. And maybe having fewer days of class one week will mean I can make a trip or two every now and then. It could be a good thing!

Let's see, what else? I haven't been doing as much field hockey the past week or two, because I managed to hurt myself in a rather silly fashion in the game two weeks ago. We were getting clobbered by a the A team of a club whose B team beat our A team, and I was getting frustrated, and I managed to temporarily blank on a rather strict but easy-to-follow rule and managed to twist/roll my ankle and bruise my foot at the same time. I'm pretty sure it looked utterly ridiculous to everyone else on the field. It's a rather strange injury because my ankle is pretty much ok (thankfully), but the part of my foot under my pinky/fourth toe is really sore/bruised. Better than a sprained ankle, though, that's for sure!

So I've been staying away because I can't really run very much, which would be a problem in many sports, field hockey included. I'm hoping that by next week it will be back to normal - it's pretty close now, but not quite there yet and it would be silly to go back to early and just mess it up even more. They've finally split up the pool of teams as well, so there shouldn't be too many more ridiculously lopsided games (I think the one I hurt myself in ended up being around 16-1? And field hockey is supposed to be a low-scoring game...), which is nice. The only bothersome thing is that there's only one game during the cooking course's three-week break and that's this upcoming weekend, so I probably won't be able to play in it. Bah!

In other news, I've joined Big Brothers/Big Sisters! I'll be matched with a little chap in a local school and will be meeting with him there starting next semester, which should be neat. It's the first time they've done mentoring in schools in this part of NZ, so it's kind of exciting to be one of the first people to do it. I may start to look for another place to volunteer at on top of that, because I need to start filling up the ridiculous amount of free time that I have.

I think that's about it! I'll be going around applying to jobs/giving people my CV even if they don't want it tomorrow so look out, cafes and restaurants in Napier! I'll probably have enough time in the near future to throw up another post with more interesting things about life in New Zealand in general, not just my life, and maybe some pictures (no promises on the pictures though). So stay tuned!

Or don't, that's cool too.

FINALLY

Well, that took longer than expected.

Apologies for the complete lack of posts in May! On the bright side, May wasn't a fantastically exciting month.

Recap:

Field hockey is going well - the coach is pleased with how well I'm doing considering I've never played any kind of stick sport before, and the team is...well, the team is still the team. I only managed to go to a couple of games in May, because we had a bye one weekend and the other I had work. We didn't have a game this past weekend either, because it's a holiday weekend - Monday is the Queen's birthday, apparently, and so everything shuts down.

Speaking of work, I am now unemployed. Hooray! I gave my two weeks notice early May, after giving it a lot of thought and deciding that would probably be for the best. So far, so good! I'm not too keen on the idea of being unemployed for a long time, though, so I'm starting to look around a bit. In the next week I'll probably hit up every bakery in the nearby area (thanks, phone book!) and see if they have any positions open. Volunteering hasn't panned out so well either, but I'm still working on that.

As far as school goes, I got to re-sit an in-kitchen assessment I missed due to a mild case of food poisoning (Fun? No!) and that went smoothly. We had our third assessment as well, in which I managed to mess up a few things, but it's not too worrisome because they're rather minor and I have plenty of time to re-do them. Note to self: let meat rest before putting a sauce on it (I was worried about time restrictions and forgot about that...). We had our last in-kitchen class last Wednesday, and for the next three weeks we'll be doing productions in the actual restaurant, so people will be paying for the food we make, unfortunately for them. In the first week I'll be doing front of house stuff during lunch, the second week I'll be in the kitchen for lunch, and the third week I'll be in the kitchen for dinner - they have us split into three groups, and we rotate so other people are doing those things in a different order.

And now for the part that involves pictures!

Yesterday they had the "Midlands Hawke's Bay Charity Wine Auction" at a local (well, "local" - 20km away from us) winery called Elephant Hill, where I had never been before. Since dinner was accompanying the auction, the chefs at Elephant Hill had asked our program for help with it, and I signed up for the day of the event (they had others coming in on Thursday and Friday, but due to a problem with finding a ride, that didn't work out for me). Along comes Saturday, and my ride is nowhere to be found which is unfortunate because he was supposed to go as well. So I get a bit irritated and go about my business, when I get news from one of the heads of the course at EIT that someone else is driving over a bit late and I can get a ride with her, which I do!

(thanks, Mignon!)

It turned out to be a lot of fun - I was expecting it to be kind of blah, since catering isn't too thrilling on the actual day because no real cooking is actually done, mainly just finishing things and reheating them. The chefs there were really awesome, though, and the whole atmosphere was great. It turns out that there were only eight of us from EIT there, when at least 14 or 15 signed up, so I may get some brownie points for showing up (even if it was late...not my fault!). I'll be calling them in the next week or so to see if I could drop by once or twice a week to learn/help out - kind of like what I was thinking of doing with the Old Church once I left (oh, yeah, I was thinking of seeing if I could go back to the Old Church a couple of times a week to learn and help out - unpaid, that is), except that the chefs at Elephant Hill seem more experienced and the menu is a bit more interesting.

No offense, Old Church! They have their quota of fledgling chefs filled, though, I think. The food is still good and they're still nice people, I promise.

So anyways, pictures!

First, the menu:


(click to get it bigger so you can actually read it)

Second, the entrees:

(that's only half of them! There were around 300 people there - not sure how it tasted though, I didn't give it a try)

Closer shot of the food - sorry about it being sideways:

(this is before the pea and wasabi foam was added - just imagine light green foam on top of the herbs down the middle of the salmon)

Then, the main course:

(I don't really like lamb, but these were fantastic)

And finally, the dessert:

(also fantastic)

Oh, we also got to eat a lot of things because there were a few leftovers.

Yay!

So, I think that's pretty much it as far as big news goes. I've been making bread again and will actually have some loaves done in a few hours - we'll see how that goes. I'm having a bit of trouble actually getting big-ish holes in the bread (it's supposed to be rustic bread) - I'm thinking it's because the dough has been too dry, which I probably did unintentionally because I don't have a mixer to mix the dough. Having a mixer would make working with wet doughs a lot easier, but mixers cost money, which is what I'm trying to save at the moment.

Yay unemployment?

If it turns out well, I'll give you a peek!

If not, I'll just say it was mediocre.

Adieu!

Hello!

Hello again!

It has been a while, and I apologize for that! I guess I took the break as a break from pretty much everything, for better or for worse.

So, my ridiculous break is technically finally over, but due to a stomach bug, I guess I get another week.

Details: You're not supposed to be in the kitchen if you have had diarrhoea and/or vomiting in the last 48 hours, and for the past few days I've had a fever and this morning there was a bit of those things. So, no kitchen, and thus no class today. And since we only have class until Wednesday, and today is Tuesday, that rules out this week of class. Hooray?

Let's talk about something else!

This past weekend was the competition, but due to poor planning on my part I wasn't able to enter it. My recipes were nowhere near as tweaked as they needed to be, although in hindsight, I kind of wish I had entered because the competition was much smaller in scale than I thought it would be. I forgot I was in New Zealand! Some of the categories only had one or two entrants - there' nothing like winning by default. It was kind of neat to look at what others had made (I'm pretty sure all of the cheesecakes that were entered weren't baked, which is gross), and some of the cakes were rather pretty.

And now, I'll talk about the break!

Guys, it wasn't very interesting except for the field hockey. I didn't really go anywhere other than into town because work is so incredibly unpredictable (the highlights being asked/told to come in on Wednesday evening on Wednesday morning/noon and being asked/told to do a split shift on Easter Sunday with no warning ahead of time).

I had work 3-4 days a week, and it was kind of ok because my role was starting to expand a tiny bit (I got to make some desserts! Well, prepare, since the pieces and such were already prepared). Still mainly washing dishes, though.

So, on to field hockey!

I got to play field hockey!

I didn't end up playing in that first game, because they didn't have a uniform for me and I wasn't on the game card, but I did get to watch. We lost, something like 5 or 6 to 1, but it was still neat to watch. I went out and bought the gear the next day, and I got to practice that Thursday (Easter week).

I did pretty miserably. But I did get an assist on a goal in practice! We can just ignore the passes I missed and the passes that I botched.

There was no game on Easter weekend, it being Easter and all, but we had another practice where I did slightly better but still not that great.

Then, we had a game!

We (Te Awa Scinde B Team) played them (Bay something or whatever). We were last in the B teams last year, and they were first in the A teams. It would've been painful if I weren't having so much fun, because we lost something like 16-0. Still fun, though!

What else?

To be honest, that's about it. Work, field hockey, messing around with cheesecake recipes. Still no word on the volunteering, I need to get back to them on that but it may also be nice to have a little bit of free time. We shall see!

Next time: pictures!

Bonjour!

Hello cowboys and cowgirls! Or something like that. So, a brief update: We're now on our mid-semester/Easter break (halfway through the year? Whoa.), which goes from now until the beginning of May (also whoa)! Class has been going fine, we had our first two pastry classes and a couple of fish classes too. We have a competition coming up in the first two days of May, and I'm *probably* going to be participating in the cheesecake and fruit flan classes. Although the fruit flan one is still up in the air...I'm at least going to be doing the cheesecake one. So I have lots of time to practice! What else have I been up to, you ask? WELL. Uh. Not much? So the volunteering thing isn't going as quickly as planned, but that's ok - one place is full up, and the other's volunteer organizer guy is on leave at the moment so I have to hold my horses until he gets back. The most irrelevant and kind of exciting and scary news is that tomorrow I may be playing in a field hockey game. What? I don't even know the rules of field hockey. It'll be great! Some background: I had been talking with a couple of local field hockey clubs because I figured it would be kind of neat to join a team and just play a bit...I was hoping to be able to learn the game before playing in one, though. It'll be great! I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow! Also, I ate one of these by myself last night, which is probably the most exciting thing to happen to me in a while: http://onlyabox.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/DSC_0274.jpg It's called a "Hoggies Rocky Road Sundae", and the description from their website goes a bit like this: "4 scoops of creamy vanilla ice cream and 4 scoops of strawberry ice cream, on a pile of warm chocolate mud cake drenched in chocolate fudge sauce, plus marshmallows, strawberry topping, whipped cream and toasted coconut. A spectacular dessert to share, or go solo if you dare!" The Hog's Breath Cafe is basically a NZ version of the Outback Steakhouse, minus the Australian stereotypes because Australia is a lot closer to NZ than the US. Ok, I'm going to go read up on field hockey so I don't show up totally clueless to the game tomorrow. More updates this weekend!

Another picture!

Here are more pictures of the long lunch!

All of us! We're the ones in the white uniforms (well, most of them, some of them were from the catering company), I'm a row above the wine bottles.

A wide shot of the entrees (appetizers in the US), it's a lovely tent isn't it?

A close-up shot of the entrees!

Unfortunately I don't have any other pictures - I'm lucky to even have these, because they weren't taken by me. I didn't have my camera that day, but one of the other chefs had one and she was nice enough to e-mail me the photos!

(Thanks, Ute!)

As far as current events go, they're not too unusual! I've been working more, and been doing a little bit more than just washing dishes (I got to make some desserts yesterday! They were only banana splits and finishing creme brulees, but it's still a step forwards). A job change probably won't occur at this point, but I have applied for a volunteer position.

Where, you ask? Well, it's a surprise! It may not work out, because I don't know what's going on with the job at the Old Church - last week I worked Wednesday evening (after class in the morning), Friday and Saturday nights, and then Sunday from 11-4:30. That doesn't leave too much time for volunteering, but if they're ok with mainly just Thursdays, then I'll be doing some volunteering!

Time will tell.

Hmm, what else counts as news? I've been getting into bread baking lately, having made a couple of loaves last week and I made calzone dough from scratch and had a little calzone feast yesterday. I...I think that's about it as far as exciting things go, and those aren't even that exciting. Sorry! There's a competition coming up in May, though, so that may lead to some interesting updates.

The more I think about it, the scarier the competition sounds, though. I need to stop thinking about it.

Pictures!

So things are slowing down, as I thought they would! Well, "slowing down" in the sense that it's not much exciting. No trips to security areas, no buses leaving me stranded in stinky towns, so on so forth. The only newsworthy thing is that I had my first in-kitchen assessment on Monday, and I passed all of the dishes!

Granted, they weren't *that* involved, but we had time limits and such. Every item had to be served 15-30 minutes since the last one was, but you could start with the first dish whenever you wanted. We had 4.5 hours to do the whole thing (weigh up, cook, clean, etc.), and the dishes were the following in this order:
1. Rice Pilaf (not very involved)
2. Bookmaker Sandwich (fried steak and egg sandwich, kind of involved because you had to do everything as quickly as possible to keep the sandwich warm)
3. Pumpkin Soup (not too involved, set it to simmer and ignore it for a while!)
4. Macaroni and Cheese (the most time-consuming thing, because making the bechamel/cheese sauce from scratch takes a bit of time)

It was more stressful than difficult, really.

SO.

Other than that, not much exciting has been going on. Just day-to-day living, nothing new *yet*, may have one or two things on the horizon though. They're not exciting, it's not like I'm announcing I'm running from the police or anything, just may be volunteering and there's a slight chance of another job coming into the picture.

So anyways, these pictures are backwards from the order I was hoping to show them, because I uploaded them in the wrong order, but that's ok!

First, the restaurant on campus (Scholar's Restaurant) where we'll be doing lunch and dinner services later in the semester:


The production kitchen, which is where we'll make the food for the restaurant:


The training kitchen, where we do everything else:


The entrance to the building where I spend most of my time on campus!

The entrance to campus, with registration in that little building in front and the ESL building looming over it - also where the international office is:

The gym across the street from campus, where I spent a bit of time! The little shack in front is a bus stop, which is for the bus going to Hastings.

Hm, I was hoping you'd be able to see the EIT logo a bit better, but this is from the driveway to the student villas - right across from EIT (you can see the top of the ESL building). That driveway on the left is the driveway for the gym - everything is nice and close!

Our villa's common room! From left to right we have Benny (I think), Peter, Effie (in the pink blanket), and Mike. Effie and Mike are villamates, the other two live in other villas!

I was trying to find an angle where the tree wasn't in the way, when I realized that wasn't possible. Seeing the villa from the other side is also boring, so I'm sorry about the tree in the middle of the picture! Basically, it's just a U shape when looking at it from above - my room is on the left wing (in the picture), but it's not either of the blue doors you can see in this picture, it's on the outside of the U.

So there are some pictures!

Hopefully there will be more exciting happenings soon, and I'll start posting some food pictures as well! Pictures are almost always more exciting than text.

The Long Lunch!

Hello again, cats and kittens!

And chaps and chapesses, who can probably understand more of this than the felines.

Hopefully.

So, I got an adaptor for my camera and was all glad I could finally post pictures! And then I turned my camera on and saw that there were no exciting pictures to post. I have one picture of the villa but it is obscured by a tree and all of the other new pictures are of scenery.

So, let's talk about that long lunch, featured on that previous post where the picture was cut in half. Thanks, blogspot.

We got there around 10:45/11 and were split into our groups (I'm in group B!). We were essentially around to help with the plating of the food - much like my work at the Old Church, most of the food was mostly prepared beforehand and just finished off right before service since it was on such a large scale.

So we got to put out meals for 400ish people! Or I'm assuming it was that many, splitting the number of attendees in half because there were two kitchens (group A was in the other one). Our kitchen was actually in a tent outside, where there was some drizzling going on. Not in the tent, of course, that's why the tent was there! It was a bit rainy though, hence the moving of the venue from near the water to a stadium in town.

I did a lot of bread slicing at first, then putting the bread on the appropriate plates, and from that point on I was really the garnish guy. In the bad picture in the last post, he caught me trying to put a piece of mint between a spiced plum and a tiny tower of sorbet.

Mint leaves are hard to place!

I also got to put rosemary sprigs on the main course.

The job sounds very simple, and, well, it is, but when you have to do it 400 times in a matter of minutes it gets a bit more problematic!

Either way, after the service we got to go out into the lunch area. Apparently we did a good enough job, because everyone was clapping and thanking us! We had some more pictures taken, then we got to eat some of the extra food, we helped pack up, and we were done!

Speaking of done, it's 8:55 PM! The library is closing!

More tomorrow!

My ear!

Guys!

(And girls!)

I'm in the newspaper!

It only took three or four weeks, but I'm not sure if I can keep up this pace since I'm not sure I'll be able to be in another newspaper in another three or four weeks.

Also, apparently I haven't figured out how to scan things so that you can actually read them. Oops. They've also replaced the edition on their website, so you can't look at it there. Boo.

Here's what it says!

"A cook's tour: Mark van der Lee, 23, of Washington DC, wanted to atten a culinary school and visit New Zealand, so [he] has combined both by enrolling at EIT. On Sunday he was one of more than 20 EIT culinary students just three weeks into their training who were helping out at the long lunch."

And the actual article says:

"Bad weather makes the party, they say - and so it was for Sunday's C J Pask Great Long Lunch in Napier. For only the second time in 11 years, rain forced the event to relocate from the Marine Parade gardens, this time to the Rodney Green Centennial Events Centre at McLean Park. It didn't dampen the mood of the 808 guests who enjoyed three sumptuous courses by Arnault Vallee of Orton Catering. The event showcases Hawke's Bay produce and attracts diners from around the world. This year there were guests from Las Vegas and Sweden."

And the caption of the photo that doesn't have me in it (no, none of those are me):

"Queens: Long lunchers Ronda Edwards (floral dress) and Ally Gordon (silver dress) have their photo taken with the 'royal' guests - also known as Gary, Steve and Muzz."

Unfortunately, I didn't get to meet Gary, Steve or Muzz.

Just wanted to put an end to the cliffhanger regarding me in the newspaper! I still owe you all a lot of updates, and now that I have more of a routine going, there will be at least two in the next two days. Stay tuned, if you want!

If not, that's fine too!

Odds and Ends

Ok, so this was originally going to be more linear storytelling about how things were when I got here in Napier - I got to EIT about a week before things kicked off for the culinary program, because I wanted a bit of time to settle in. So, what happened in this first week, you ask?

Well, if you didn't ask, I just asked for you.

I went to a lot of grocery stores. Or, I made a lot of trips to the same three or four grocery stores.

Judging by my entries in this handy little book, though, I really didn't buy much of anything useful in all of those grocery store trips...there was a lot of muesli going on in the first two weeks. Haven't touched the stuff since.

Reading through this thing is pretty boring, actually, and so instead of that I've decided to just skip to the few more interesting topics/start talking about NZ in general.

So, I'm living in Villa 7! There are five other folks in the villa/apartment/house/whatever:
Nick (~30, also a culinary student, originally from Serbia but has been living in NZ for a while)
Mike (~19, studying something to do with computer hardware, a kiwi *I think*)
Effie (~20, second-year nursing student, from Gisborne which is NE of Napier)
Alysha (~19, second-year nursing student, from Auckland? Maybe Gisborne?)
Stephanie (~18, first-year nursing student, from Matamata, between Auckland and Napier)

So I'm not the oldest, which is nice!

The program I'm in is about 36 or so students - I don't know the exact number because they started with 38, but some people didn't show up and some people joined without originally being around, so I'm not sure where it's at now. High 30s, though. Our class has been split into two groups, named Group A and Group B. Not very exciting names, I know, but the reason is that the training kitchen only fits about 18 people and, well, not all of us would fit in one. We have three "chef tutors": Grant, Mark, and Rob, and they each take turns teaching the groups.

We have class three days a week, Monday through Wednesday. My first thought, upon hearing this, was something along the lines of "that's great!" Now, though, I kind of wish it were all week because I came here to learn, and with class only three days a week, it feels a bit like we're moving rather slowly.

Of course, a month or two from now when we get on to more complicated things I'll probably be wishing it were moving slower.

I'm in group B, which means that I'm in the kitchen on Monday afternoons/evenings (2 until we're done, which has been past 7 on some days - group A is in on Monday mornings, 8-12:30ish but can run as late as 1-1:30, which cuts in to theory time), and both groups have theory from 12:30 to 1:30ish. Theory can be either working on food safety-type things or how to plan out what order to cook things or demonstrations for upcoming kitchen classes.

Tuesdays are theory/computer days, with the computer things being focused on making sure everyone is computer literate (well, that's what it's been so far, not sure what we'll do after that). Tuesdays run from 10-3 or so.

On Wednesdays, we're in the kitchens in the morning, have theory, and are done for the week.

All in all, it totals to about, what, about 17 hours per week? Depending on how long we're in the kitchen, of course. Either way, even though it's only three days it's still more class time than I had at Clark with four classes - I think it was 2 hours 40 minutes of class per week per class, so four of those would be 12 hours.

So Mark, what do you do in your ample amounts of free time?

(I asked the question for you again)

Well, I'm still working on that. I have the job at the Old Church, as I mentioned, but that's only Friday and Saturday nights for the near future (through April at least), so that's only another 10-14 hours. I still have Thursdays and Sundays and all day Friday and Saturday free, and I'm still trying to figure out what to do with that time. I'll be calling up a couple of places about volunteering sometime in this upcoming week, and I've been toying with the idea of maybe looking for something that could provide more constant (and more) hours. Maybe.

I do like it at the Old Church, and I would rather not leave but I can't get another job to use up the last 6-10 hours per week that I'm allowed to work. This is mainly because I never know how long I'll be spending there every week anyways since my start time is fixed but my end time isn't.

We shall see!

So that's a bit of general information. There have been a few goings-on (I may be in a newspaper sometime soon! CLIFFHANGER), but I will save those for next time, when I will (hopefully) have pictures! My camera ran out of batteries and I never got an adaptor for the funky plugs here, so I need to get one of those this week as well.

Hopefully more tomorrow, although probably still no pictures.

I'm not very good at this!

So I broke my promise, I'm sorry! It's the middle of the week after the weekend in which I said I would get up-to-date. On the bright side, it's been less thrilling to read about for a little while (GUYS I DID LAUNDRY TODAY IT WAS PRETTY INTENSE. ALSO I WATCHED A BIT OF C4 2, NEW ZEALAND'S VERSION OF MTV THAT ACTUALLY PLAYS MUSIC MOST OF THE TIME. CRAAAZY!), but there have been some happenings that I feel like I should write about!

Unfortunately, it is getting late, so I'll just finally get through the arrival into Napier and then I swear I will work on it this weekend if not tomorrow.

So, where were we? By reading my last post before the string of filler, apparently I was at the bus stop in Rotorua, waiting for a bus to Napier. Well, there was a bus ride involved! It was probably the most gorgeous bus ride I've ever been on that wasn't meant to be a scenic tour - it was like the countryside couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It would be flat for a little bit, then suddenly there would be a gorge, then there would be a weird tiered hill (kind of like the Incan pyramid, but just a hill and not as distinctly tiered because the hills weren't man-made, I'm assuming), then just rolling hills for a bit, then another gorge, so on so forth. I took some pictures, but I left my camera at the villa (figures), so I'll put them in the next post!

So I arrived in Napier, and the bus driver was very nice and called me a taxi because it was Sunday and they don't really have buses going on on Sundays. It was a 15-or-so minute drive, during which the taxi driver was very nice and told me about what was where, and I arrived at the villas. I got all my stuff to my room and got to meet most of my new villa-mates (two hadn't moved in yet), Effie, Alysha, and Stephanie (yes, all girls - the two to come were guys, though, so it's much more balanced than it was in Australia, where I was the only guy with five other girls). I slowly got settled in and met a few more people, and after a ridiculous number of trips to the supermarket in one week (five or so), I had most of the basics.

At this point, because it seems like so long ago/there has been a lot of stuff going on since, I'm going to consult my handy-dandy little diary-type-book to make sure I don't miss anything!

I left it in my room as well, because updating this was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.

Hey, it's better than nothing though, right? At least in the blog I'm now where I am currently, blog me is no longer stuck in Rotorua after having been there for weeks!

More soon, with pictures!

Slightly more filler (boo, I know)

Ok so just another quick post!

First off, things are fine here in Napier in the sense that we didn't feel anything from the earthquake in Christchurch - thank you to everyone for your concern and questions and such, but don't worry, we're fine for now! Christchurch has been...well, from some of the clips from the news, it looks like some of it has been bombed. Or, it looks as I imagine it would look if it had been bombed. It's a horrible situation, and one that there can't be much done about - I'm going to look into volunteer opportunities there, but from what I've heard they're only letting a limited number of people down to do that and if there's another earthquake on the horizon, a rumor that's being thrown around, I may wait until that one's done with...

Anyways, slightly happier news, classes are still going fine (still no cuts yet!), and I may actually have a job (!!).

But, I'm going to leave it at that because I need to be at said possible job in just over three hours and I need to do a bit of research and the likes. Aren't cliffhangers great?!

(sarcasm)

I'll do a bunch of catching up over the weekend, I promise!

Filler!

Hi!

I'm feeling a bit burned out at the moment, between classes and responsibilities and a to-do list that never seems to get smaller, so until the weekend there probably won't be any more updates.

Sorry!

There isn't *too* much left to talk about, though, because that week before classes started (they started this past Monday) was pretty tame, with me just wandering around clueless in Napier without anything exciting happening. Unless getting a cellphone and going grocery shopping five or so times because I never knew where to start buying things counts as exciting, in which case, phew, that week involved a constant stream of adrenaline.

So don't worry, there isn't much being missed!

The Auckland Sky Tower at Night, and Why Rotorua is Gross

First off, I would like to apologize whole-heartedly for forgetting to include the following in the post about Waiheke Island - this picture is probably one of my favorites of the trip so far:

Oh noooo

Ok, back to Auckland!

After returning from Waiheke, where I (fortunately) did not witness anyone jumping for the ferry, I had dinner and made my way to the Sky Tower, which looks like the Space Needle in Seattle except pointier. Even though visibility wasn't that great, and taking pictures in the dark was rather difficult, I managed to get one or two that weren't totally awful:

The Sky Tower has a nifty little thing (not sure if other tall pointy buildings like the Tower and the Needle have this kind of thing, since I've only ever been in this particular tall pointy building) where they have your usual floor and seats around the rim and windows. And then they also have glass floors which they advertise as a whopping 35mm (1.4ish inches) thick.

Now, I know, glass that thick is as strong as the concrete the rest of the floor was made out of (or so their signs said), but for someone who's not especially keen on heights, man that was a bit gut-wrenching. Even if the glass were a foot thick, if I could see through it, I would still not want to be standing on it. If the concrete was paper-thin, and the glass was the thickest part of the floor, I'd still want to stand on the concrete.

Ok, not quite true, but I would stand on the glass and look at the concrete and pretend that's the material I was standing on.

Either way, I did my duty and walked across a pair of glass floor panels once (while holding on to the railing, but at least I looked down while doing it), then went back to sitting on the benches and trying to get a decent picture.

"Well this is all nice and touristy, I'm glad he had a good time", you must be thinking (assuming that you do not hate me), "the next part is probably about him getting on the bus to Rotorua, wherever that is."

(It's 145 miles/233 km southeast of Auckland)

See, I would like to do that, except that A) that would be too easy and B) that would be skipping probably the most interesting part of the evening.

While many people can probably say "HEY I WENT TO THE SKY TOWER AND SAW THAT STUFF AND TOOK PICTURES AND I JUMPED ON THE GLASS PANELS WHICH HE DIDN'T BECAUSE HE'S A WUSS", probably not as many people can say "HEY I WENT TO SKY TOWER SECURITY AND HAD TO SHOW THEM MY PASSPORT AND GOT TO WAIT AROUND BEHIND THE SCENES WHILE THE SECURITY GUARD MANAGER GUY CAME DOWN FROM THE CASINO."

And I will leave a few spaces here for the imaginative juices to get going, since it's kind of fun to be melodramatic.

And now for the far less interesting truth as to why I wound up in security, giving them my passport and waiting for the lead security chap to come down from the casino:

At some point in my picture taking and multiple seat changes, the case containing my spare glasses fell out of my pocket. I had switched to my good glasses (gasp!) because it was dark and things were a bit far away, neither of which make good conditions for wearing glasses that you stopped using as mains about five years ago.

Now, this wouldn't have been a big deal, except I did not feel them fall out, and by the time I realized I no longer had them (I took the elevator back down and was about to leave, noticed they were gone, and hopped back on the elevator to go back up - not sure if you're supposed to do that without an attendant, since on the way up they got to push the buttons), they were gone. I searched frantically for five or so minutes, making a couple of loops of the tower, when I asked one of the attendants at the top if someone had turned them in.

Someone had! They were sitting in the lost and found, waiting for me to take them home/put them in my pocket. I went down again and was shown to the security area, where I was questioned as to what the glasses looked like and what the case was like.

I guess I passed (which was good, because I had kind of forgotten what the glasses looked like even though I wear them daily), because after taking my passport and contact information, the security guard said I could get them back - when the security manager guy on duty, who had the key to the lost and found, got done dealing with some unruly folks in the casino.

After waiting five minutes, the absurdity of the situation hit me - I was under Sky Tower, I had lost my glasses case containing glasses six years old about 15 or 20 minutes ago, and they needed my passport, a brief questionnaire concerning the lost spectacles, and now I had to wait for the lead security guard to come and open the box. All in all, it took about 20-25 minutes to reclaim my spare spare spare glasses. They may have also taken my picture, I'm not totally sure.

The funniest part about waiting was at some point, a guest who was noticeably...impaired...stumbled into the room (it was just behind a door off of the main little plaza with the elevators, and the door was open), looked around for a minute or so, then wandered off back to the plaza.

Glasses and case in pocket, I went back to the hotel, looking forward to my visit to Rotorua.

I have no pictures of Rotorua or the bus trip to it, because I do not want to remember it. Or I just forgot to take any.

So, Rotorua!

It smells.

It's got a whole bunch of hot springs and bubbly mud pools, which would be really great to visit if it didn't cost around $100 (NZD) to do anything. You can even Zorb (go zorbing?), which looks amazing and I promised someone I would do it for them. Also, it literally smells - because of the mud pools and geothermal whatnots, every now and then (five minutes) you get a lovely whiff of sulfur. It's not a constant thing, so you don't really get used to it, it just...comes and goes.

The problem with all these activities is, along with the price tag associated with *all* of them (Rotorua is a tourist hotspot), none of them are within walking distance - everything is actually *around* Rotorua, not *in* it.

And so, I decided to cut my time in Rotorua (and Taupo) short, since I had no idea how expensive things would be once I got to Napier and actually had to spend money on important things (like food).

I called up the travel agent (on the hotel's phone, the manager of the hotel was amazing and very patient with this whole ordeal) and told her of my plight - after some phone tag and fax tag (or faxes not being sent/sent to the wrong place), I had cancelled my hotel reservations and gotten a pair of bus tickets straight to Napier.

Hooray!

I had been told the bus would pick me up the next morning outside the hotel, so I wouldn't have to lug my bags into town (since I was a good six or so blocks away from the bus stop).

Hooray!

So I spent the evening watching movies on TV (Munich was *long*, but good), because I figured that was pretty much the only way I would not spend any more money.

Relaxing and cheap!

The next morning, the bus didn't come to the hotel.

Boo.

After waiting for an hour outside the hotel (the agent told me one time, the ticket said another, I waited there for both of those times), I decided to just walk into town, get my own bus ticket, and end this mess by just settling in Napier.

Which I did!

That is a story for another post, though! This one is long enough as it is.