Click, click, click, smile!

New Zealand is so beautiful! I took over 200 pictures in twenty-four hours on a mini-journey with Caitlin this weekend! By then end of the time, Caitlin called me "click happy"-- I suppose I am but I can not help it! On Saturday, she picked me up from a birthday party in Auckland at a climbing gym and we went up Mt. Eden. Mt. Eden is the tallest natural point in all of Auckland city and you can see the whole city from up there! It's a volcano and it's beautiful--there and the views. Auckland has many volcanoes around it. As Tim put it, "One day they will erupt and we will all die, but it's nothing to worry about." I laughed because really San Luis Obispo, the very town I have lived in for the past five years, is on the San Andres Fault that is bound to move one of these days--ok well in the next fifty years, as my professor once predicted.

Me on Mt. Eden, see the Auckland skyline behind me!

The crater! 

After Mt. Eden, we got lost driving around Auckland but I didn't mind because I got to see it better. Then found some place to eat dinner, near the water. We decided it would be cool to stay in the city for the night instead of driving back to Waimauku, so we booked a room at a hostel. Neither us of had ever stayed in a hostel and were quite excited about the new experience, only to find our roommates were slobs and decided to smoke at 5:00 in the morning--in the room! Yuck! Still, the price was good and it wasn't so horrible. I'm not completely turned off by hostels.

Nomad Hostel, I love the name!

The next day, we explored Muriwai beach, the beach right by our families' homes. By the way Caitlin lives right up the road. Our families are friends and the boys are really good friends. Actually as I type this post one of the boys she watches, Jack, is sleeping in the other room. The beach was so pretty! I could not get enough of the views so I took many, many pictures. We were really impressed, among other things, with the soft, black, sparkly sand!

Cool black rock makes cool black sand. I couldn't resist climbing up the rock!

Crazy big cliff side, really cool looking!

Same cliffside, from afar!

It's spring holiday for all the school children here.  Oli has the next two weeks school free, we plan to go fun places! We went to the nearby beach today with their dog Coco. She's a sweet dog but still a puppy and needs some more training. Tomorrow is some sort of adventure and Friday we are going to see a play--Badjelly the Witch! Apparently it's a popular children's story but I have never heard of it.

It was just daylight savings here. Now instead of being nineteen hours ahead of California, we are twenty hours ahead. I am excited for when California has daylight savings and they "fall back" to make New Zealand twenty-one hours ahead. That's almost a whole day, which makes scheduling Skype dates much easier! At first, the whole daylight savings thing confused me. I forgot it was spring here. The cold weather was quite fooling me. Plus, it's September and that's always been fall. So I said it was "fall back". But a nice Scottish couple, that we met when out in Auckland, kindly corrected me to realize it's "spring forward".

I am so glad I decided to come to an English speaking country! I was thinking of Italy or Spain before I found this wonderful family and place! At times I have a very hard time understanding accents and lingo. The Scottish couple were especially hard to understand and Gendie can be as well. New Zealanders say my accent is easy to understand because it's what they hear on the "telly". Caitlin and I were often asked the question, "Where in America are you from?" For some reason they believed she was from California easier than they believed I am from there. Not really sure why, I've lived there my whole life, up until now at least!

Well time to end my blog, although I'm sure I could ramble on for many more paragraphs! Keep in touch America! It's been great having Skype and Facebook to keep in touch. What in the world did people do without all this technology!?