The assistant director asked to see me after the classroom on Tuesday night, and I was automatically nervous and started racking my brain for reasons I would be in trouble, and started worrying that I would be sent home. Not that I had actually done anything, mind you. Just, you know, old habits. It all worked out fine, I had worried for naught. She just needed to give me my visa applicantion form so I could start filling it out. Let me tell you, that form was thick, and it came with an equally thick instruction packet on how to fill it out. Luckily, since I was applying for an extension that was less than 6 months and I have no children or anything, there were some parts I could skip over. Though I do need to take passport photos to paste in, pay like $160, and find a way to pay that $160 since they don't accept cash and bank drafts take too long. So that's been super annoying, especially since no one else had any trouble getting a visa.
Wednesdays we have a bunch of free time in the afternoon, so me and this other girl got a group together to go op shopping in Greerton (a suburb of Tauranga), but none of the staff could drive us, so they told us to take the bus. I though we should've just hitch hiked, since apparently New Zealand is safe enough that people still do that here, but since there were like 6 of us going and not everyone was on board with hitch hiking we headed down to the bus stop. As we were coming out of the house driveway, this kind of scary looking dude, all in black, with his music blaring walked past us and one of the girls was like "man I really hope he isn't going to the bus stop too cause that would be awkward." As you can probably guess, we indeed ended up at the bus stop with him. We got to talking to him, and he was suprisingly really nice. His name is Ethan and he's 18. He told us how he dropped out of high school when he was 15 and he cuts trees for a living. (He told us how his Aunt is a treehugger and hates his job, jand whenever she asks how many trees he cut down that day, he ups the number a bit). He told us he lives in Papamoa and was only in our section of Tauranga because he was visiting family. We tallked with Ethan for like 20 minutes while we were waiting for a bus to come, and it was a lot of fun. We asked him questions about New Zealand and he wanted to know where we were from and why we were here, and when one of the girls said we were missionaries (though we aren't technically) he was super suprised. Ethan helped us navigate the bus system and when we got to the Strand, which is the main bus stop area, to switch buses, we asked if he wanted to come with us to shop in Greerton, and he decided to come along.
Now, I know this all probably sounds pretty sketchy, and yes I was there for the lessons on stranger danger, but behind his long black trench coat, arm tattoos, and little blue dice lip stud, he was a teddy bear. When one of the girls asked him why he dressed so scary when he was a rerally nice guy he told us that he dresses like he does because he walks around in some sketchy areas, and if he looks scary, no one will mess with him. He actually told us about this one time where a Maori guy put a gun to his head and told him to give him his wallet, and just said "pull the trigger" and the guy walked off. I was just like damn! That is hardcore, though he assured us at he was shitting his pants on the inside. Crazy shit, my friends. We hung out with Ethan all afternoon, and even invited him to the community dinner Monday night, and he agreed to come, so I guess we'll see him again then. What's funny is on the bus back to our section on Tauranga, this one guy came and sat by us and wanted I know where we were from (I guess people were really intrigued by these loud, foreign white girls). He name was Dylan and he was also 18, though he was a lot less teddy bear like. He came to the back of the bus holding a hand rolled cigarette and told us that people called him the "crazy Dutch bastard". Luckily he didn't stay on the bus too long. The whole excursion took like 3 hours and we had to sprint from the bus stop to avoid being late for dinner. I missed dinner prep because it took a lot longer than we had anticipated, but Thomas and everyone were super cool about it, so it worked out fine. It was a crazy, but fun, day.
Also Mount Tongariro aka MOUNT DOOM erupted a few days ago about 2.5 hours away from where I am, shooting 8km of ash into the air. CRAZY.
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