Beginning of the holidays!

Last Friday we had sports day at school. At school we are divided in 4 (?) groups and we all have our own colour. The groups are named after lakes and their colour. I was yellow, which means that I had to dress up all in yellow. So that morning I went in my uniform to school and got changed into my pineapple shorts and yellow ribbons/shirts etc. afterwards. I signed up to play ‘flags’ although I had no idea what it was or what I was doing but oh well. It was actually such a warm day and lots of people got sunburnt haha. Flags was so much fun! You basically have two teams who need to run to the other side without being tagged and bring a metal thing back. My house group won overall but in flags we lost everything ha ☺

Walking back home from school my feet hurt like hell and I was exhausted. Like a good New Zealander I took my shoes off and walked home bare foot. Home I only had 30 minutes to get ready because Maria, Victor and I were being picked up to go to Taupo for my first weekend with the other exchange students. They told me it was close (close is 15 minutes for me) but of course I forgot that NZ is such a big country and close isn’t 15 minutes. After an hour we were actually close. We were staying at a hostel with the inbounds (me) and the outbounds (NZ people leaving abroad). We played a few games and got introduced by the people who were leaving to our home country. So I was introduced in Dutch by a boy who’ll be leaving to Holland in January (somewhere near Utrecht).

Next day at 07.45 this loud as alarm went off, like a fire alarm, and woke us all up. Breakfast was ready apparently. So we had breakfast and made lunch for the day. We were supposed to go on a tramp but the weather was just horrible. Rain wind and cold. We left to go to a military museum ‘down the road’. Well nobody told me that we were going on the desert road which took around an hour!! It was so impressive to see the desert road. I felt like I was in an American cowboy movie! After the museum we were going to have lunch. We drove down to a place with picnic tables. Then everybody left to take pictures because apparently we were somewhere touristic. Little did I know there was a huge plastic carrot behind me. Maybe like 20 m high and I didn’t see….. oh god. We decided not to do the tramp so we went to a place where old cars are thrown away. All these cars out of the black and white movies were there being pretty and rusty haha. Then we went to see a waterfall but it was raining so hard bleh!! The highligh of the day was when we got to the hot pools and sat in the hot water relaxing whilst it was raining.

Back in the hostel we had dinner and after that they teached us how to do the Haka! We had free time after that and that’s when I got to know all the other exchange students. We put some music on and just started talking with everyone. People from: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, USA, Canada, Belgium, France, Austria and Switzerland.

Sunday I was exhausted because I went to sleep at 4am and had breakfast at 7! After a long drive home I had an hour to unpack and pack again because we were leaving to Ohope. We had a little beach house and luckily the weather was really nice! Maria and I went for a run along the beach next morning and met up with another exchange student who lives close. Today I got back from Ohope but I’m leaving again tomorrow to go to another beach for 5 days! I have no wifi there so i wanted to tell you guys what I’ve been up to until now. Oh I forgot to tell, I have a 2 week vacation!! Well actually a ‘study break’ but who cares I’m an exchange student!! ☺