"Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake" -H.D.T.

A new blog post is long overdue. I have so much to say. It's been three exciting weeks of hanging with the boys and two fun weekends since my last post! I will try to just write about the highlights to keep interest! But be warned sometimes I just can't help but think about other random cool things to write about that might only be random and cool to me!

This most recent weekend was quite eventful! I went on a weekend trip to Hahei on the Coromandel peninsula with Caitlin and our new friend from Japan, Mami (pronounced Mumi)! We wanted to go there to go to Hot Water Beach and see a famous beautiful beach, Cathedral Cove! Cathedral Cove is seen in the beginning of the Prince Caspian movie. And it is beautiful, yes, yet another beautiful beach, New Zealand is quite lucky with their beaches!  It was a nice forty-five minute walk to get there we saw some awesome views and took many pictures of the beauty! We saw random sheep on the walk we believe to be wild! I couldn't help but be jealous of those sheep--they have the best life living on the hills overlooking the beautiful bay! Thinking of which it's quite cool that most of the land near the beaches aren't covered in houses!

Beautiful Cathedral Cove, I love the color of the rocks with the light color of the water!

After Cathedral Cove, we ventured to Hot Water Beach! This is such a cool beach, I don't know of any other place like it in the World! Two hours on either side of the low tide you go to this beach, look for steam coming up from the sand and start digging there. All we had to do was dig a couple inches and viola, hot water! It was so cool! This natural spa is there because there is volcanic activity below the surface that creates the pools of hot water below the beach! At high tide, the ocean water covers the pools of warm water beneath the surface, so you have to go at low tide! The water is so hot, after digging a circular spa we couldn't get in, the water was burning us! Luckily, the ocean left behind pools of cooler water in the sand that we could dig to and connect to our steamy spa! We ended up with a bunny shaped spa or a hand peace sign-- depending on how you see the ink blot. I loved relaxing in the hot water watching the beautiful ocean! It's a whole new way of relaxing on the beach! It's too bad I live about three hours away from this awesome beach otherwise you'd see me digging holes at every chance I had! Forget the beach towels, I'm all about relaxing in natural warm water at the beach!

See the bunny/peace sand spa! Hot head-cool ears!

The view I had from my sand spa, gives a whole new meaning to relaxing on the beach, eh?

The weekend before I went out of town to the Coromandel peninsula, I explored the beaches around Waimauku. I went on awesome bush walks around Muriwai, saw the gannets and walked around Bethells Beach. I really enjoyed that weekend. I spent it by myself and enjoyed exploring alone on my second weekend in New Zealand although I am grateful to know girls my age here! That weekend, I enjoyed walking along the beach and exploring! As I was walking along I kept thinking to myself, "Am I seriously here? This is beyond beautiful!" It felt like a dream. Then it reminded me of a quote I have had on my facebook for years by Henry David Thoreou, "Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake" Seeing as it's been on my facebook profile I have tried to live by it and try to make life feel dream-like and surreal. Obviously, this doesn't happen all the time but I do appreciate when life feels like a dream--a good, pleasant dream, mind you--no nightmares please! I will add a picture of Bethells but the camera never fully captures the beauty.

One of my many pictures of Bethells Beach

It's funny the random things I am starting to miss about home! They usually revolve around food. Ok, yes, I miss the people but I can talk to you! I really miss Tapatio, the delicious hot sauce I put on everything! And authentic Mexican food! Also coffee, New Zealand coffees are all expresso, not filtered drip coffee. Where's my regular horribly made (by me) drip coffee with a little light milk? The coffee here is going to spoil me! Oh something else I miss, cheap gas! We complained when it was $5 a gallon. Well here it was $1.82 cheap right, NO, it's for a liter! And there are about 3.8 liters in a gallon so with my handy dandy math skills that comes out to $6.84 a gallon. But then in U.S. dollars thats only $5.14 per gallon. Ok, well it's as expensive as it was when gas was expensive to us Americans!

There are a lot of things I love about New Zealand. "Eh!" It's so fun to hear people with New Zealand accents say "eh", as in "That was pretty wicked, eh?".  I repeat Sam when he says "hey" (the kid version of eh) and he gets annoyed. I tell him it's because it's cute, but he is still annoyed, I guess even little boys don't like to be called cute. Little Cooper didn't like it either, maybe it's a man thing, I don't know! Anyway, I wish I could say "eh", Caitlin says I'm not allowed to say it because I will sound Canadian, nothing against them though. Plus, I wouldn't sound as cool because I don't have a Kiwi accent! I'm actually not sure if it's spelled aye or eh, I have seen Kiwis spell it both ways. Next topic, I love how they serve iced coffee! I'm used to Starbucks (which they do have here) just putting ice in drip coffee. The iced coffees here have ice cream and whip cream, sooo delicious! OO I have a picture. The picture also has a savory muffin in it! Savory muffins are the best. You can find them in all the coffee shops. I actually made some the other day because I saw the recipe on the back of a flour bag and Sam sounded interested in helping. Pretty easy and yummy, the ones I made had cheese, bell peppers (capsicum as they are called here) and celery!

Iced coffee, you can barely see the savory muffin but it's yummy!

I am excited for this weekend! I have made some more awesome friends via facebook groups for Au Paris in the area and we have plans to explore Auckland! We are going to eat dinner up in the Skytower! It's a tall touristy, needle-shaped thing, um hard to explain I'm in need of another picture--see it's good to be click happy, I have one! We currently have five au pairs going to eat in a rotating restaurant! I am super excited! 

Skytower-it's lit up pink for breast cancer awareness!

Well this concludes this blog post! I vow to be better at my blog, no more almost three week gaps! I have so much to say about living in the country, watching cool boys, the way the Kiwi's live! I also am sure to have more adventures to talk about! Adios amigos!