Catchup, Fries, and the Springs

It's only been a week in New Zealand but there's so much going on, that I'm already struggling to keep up with updating this blog as things happen. I must be about a day and a half behind. Though I guess if you adjust for the time change, it's only half a day (ha). Also, I thought it was worth mentioning that this blog after a week already has more views than my History As Fiction blog that  was up all semester, so yay for being more interesting than Libra!

Anyway, a few nights ago we had our first outreach prep class time, and we learned that there are three options. The first, involves going to Singapore for the majority of the time, then to the Phillipines for about 2-3 weeks, with possibly a stop in Indonesia for a bit. This one would for sure be ideal for my plan of trying to go to as many countries as possible while on my gap year. The second one goes to S. Korea for the majority of the time, with a stop in Japan for 2-3 weeks to primarily help in areas that were affected by the tsunami. The last option involves outreach in the Middle East. All of the options in my opinion have ups and downs to them. The Indonesia/Phillipines trip would be pretty cool, though one of the staff members was telling me he got Salmonella several times during his outreach there, which isn't very comforting. I think the Middle East would be cool to visit, and the food would be amazing. Apparently the plane trip would be around 30 hours, which is ridiculous, but as long as there are inflight movies and edible meals I'll be fine. I'm not very excited about the Korea/Japan option. Korea has never really been a country that has interested me, and while I love Japan and think it would be cool to help out in the tsunami relief areas, that would only be for 3 weeks max out of an 8 week trip, but if I got put on that trip, I guess it would be fine. We get to submit our preferences in about a week, but I'm not sure when we find out where we are going.

Saturdays and Sunday's are pretty much are our activity and free days. The adventure group will go off and do our awesome activities, and the other groups will do whatever they do and then we come back for classrooms and stuff on Monday. This Saturday, the plan was to go to a high ropes course with the whole group, but the rain just doesn't seem to stop here, so it got cancelled. I'm kind of bummed but not terribly since we'll probably just go on a free weekend or something, and if not, heights scare me anyways. Since we couldnt do the high ropes course, alot of us girls decided that we would just spend the day at The Strand (downtown area) and go to op shops and hang out, which would've been awesome, but it took so long to get everyone out there and apparently they all close early on Saturdays so we didn't get to do that. Instead we just went to The Warehouse which is like their Walmart and I got a Kinder Egg and some floss.

Later that night they decided to take us to the hot springs, which is basically several different swimming pools with varying degrees of hotness. It was a lot of fun. After a while of jumping in pool to pool and just hanging out, the guys started making human totem poles, and at one point had five people stacked up on each others shoulders. This eventually switched to four of the guys launching someone in the air to do flips. One of the girls in the group used to do gymnastics so she was really good at it; she got like 6 feet in the air. After about  1.5 hours, I was getting tired and my eyes and face were kind of burning from the salt water in the pools, so I jumped in the earlier van to head back.  I liked pretty much everyone in the van,  and we all just decided to stop off at Burger King and get fries and other shit, and pretty much everything but the ice cream cones were kind of expensive; the cheapest sandwich was $3. Then the rest of the way back we listened to two of the staff tell us how they got engaged because they were the ones who drove us (he proposed on The Mount). It wasn't the most exciting part of the but I really liked it because I got to know the people in my van a lot better, and I felt they got to know me better because it was a smaller group. Considering how much stuff fell through, it was a pretty fun day.