Week One Recap

Classes began. I have a lecture from 8 - 9:30 AM and from 9:45 - 11:15 AM. My second lecture was supposed to be from 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM, but we only hve ten students in our class. This allowed the location of the class to be moved to a conference room at the Weir House instead of in one of the classrooms. Now everyone gets finished with class at the same time. This also allowed lunch to be moved up from 1:00 PM to 12:30 PM. I'll comment more on class stuff in a later entry.

Nearly all 43 students are bar hopping every night of the week. The Big K, Bodega's, and Irish bars are popular. Jeff met a Kiwi named Claire. Apparently, they agreed to meet up the next day at noon right after classes at the school library. Shockingly, both of them showed up. She invited him to a house party Friday night, but we had already paid for our trip to Rotorua. Getting a trip planned for the weekend proved to be much more difficult than I anticipated. On Sunday, I was asking people what they wanted to do for our first weekend. The only response I received was we'll decide later. I don't think people realize the short period of time between Sunday and when we should be departing Thursday afternoon for our weekend excursions. On Monday, about a dozen people come up with a trip to Able Tasman, a national park, which doesn't really interest me. I keep trying to get people interested in seeing Aucklnd and the Bay of Islands.

On Tuesday, I go by STA Travel at the Union on campus with the intent of finding out details of how an Auckland trip might work. When I walk in, there's a huge group suddenly booking a trip to Rotorua. Amongst everyone, there is a desire to travel with a medium size group, more than ten people. The three other guys I am closest with on the trip (Jeff, Kaniel, and Evan), and I decide to follow along on this Rotorua trip. For one reason or another, it is not possible to get the 7 - 10 passenger vans, so everyone is renting cars and sticking about 5 people in them. Everything is quite chaotic and going extremely fast. The four of us book a trip that includes a rental car with 5 people (the 5th person being a girl on the trip named Alice), 3 nights in a hostel in Rotorua, a sledging/rafting trip, and a caving trip.

In booking the trip, I told the travel agent to book us on whatever the other group is doing. We rented a car from the same company and our accomodations are at the same place. The rafting company the other group went with did not offer sledging and about 4 of us wanted to go sledging. I asked the travel agent who we could book sledging with and she didn't know. So I gave her the website of a company I found about when I went to purchase my backpack at REI in Atlanta. I asked an employee there for a recommendation on a backpack and it turned out the employee was from New Zealand, had been there his entire life, and had only been in the states about 6 months. He was engaged to a Georgian. He told me about all of this stuff I had to do while in New Zealand, one of which just happened to be sledging with this company. The travel agent called and suddenly there were 4 of us sledging and 2 of us rafting at 3 PM on Friday. The company for the caving trip we booked was the same company the other group used. I returned on Wednesday to pick up the vouchers for everything and just hope it all works out. Thursday the trip begins.