Its hard to imagine we have been gone for almost a week now! Imaginably, that’s probably partially due to the fact we lost an a day when crossing the International Date Line. Besides that, I am finally getting settled into a routine with classes and such. My classes are still proving to not be bad at all, which is so nice because it gives me the ability to focus on other things. Also, I found out pretty much at the last minute last night that a few guys from my trip are leading a weekly Bible study. I went, along with fifteen other students from my trip which just seems incredible. I am really excited to see where that goes and get to know these people on a totally new level.
On another note: for those of you that don’t know how this trip is set up: I will spend 6 weeks living in Wellington, NZ while taking classes Monday-Thursday. Excluding finals, we have five three-day weekends before we move to Australia. One weekend is a program-led trip to Lake Taupo and one is spent staying in town for the Wellington Sevens (an annual rugby tournament turned city-wide, weekend long festival), leaving three working weekends to travel wherever we desire. Given that the first travel weekend is, ya know, tomorrow, we were faced with a pretty quick turnaround to find a group, decide on a destination/activity, find and book hostels, and so forth. I was pretty fortunate to kinda tag onto a group that pretty much had all their ish together already and amazingly had one open seat in their rental car. How convenient. We (mostly they) chose to traverse the North Island this weekend and try to hit up some of the main attractions- starting with hiking in Rotorua, visiting the Hobbiton movie set, and finally ending with black water caving in the Waitomo Glowworm caves.
We are viciously trying to book next weekend’s trip, as ferries to the South Island tend to fill up pretty fast. So far the plan to my understanding is taking a ferry to the tip of the South Island, renting a car and driving over to Abel Tasman National Park. While there, we will spend three days sea kayaking, snorkeling and camping on the beach. I don’t know about you, but it sounds to me like it doesn’t get much better than that. We have a few extra weeks to plan the last trip so we’re throwing around ideas about Christchurch and Queenstown.
To end, here are some pictures from the group’s first venture out to the bars in Wellington. As crazy as it sounds, I met some Alpha Xi’s from Delaware when we were out. One of them even went to high school with a girl from my chapter of Alpha Xi. So crazy.
Pacific Program 