Happy Turkey Day

Happy belated Thanksgiving to everyone back home. We've had a busy couple of days getting ready for the big day and teaching all the foreigners around here what Thanksgiving is all about (eating). Stephanie went all out as usual, with help from roomie Alison. You can't just go to the store and buy everything out of a can or pre-mixed here, you actually have to get raw ingredients and make stuff from scratch. Novel concept, I know. Much to my surprise, Steph was not at all daunted by the task, and boy did she pull it off. We had a big juicy turkey, cooked upside down but still turned out really good. For sweet potato casserole, Steph used orange kumara (same as sweet potato as far as we can tell), boiled it and mashed it up herself. They don't have mini marshmallows to put on top but it still turned out good as ever. We had green bean casserole, for which we were able to buy canned green beans and mushroom soup, but we had to fry up the little onion crisps ourselves. They don't have Jiffy mix so we had to find corn meal to make cornbread. Steph doesn't like the creamed corn they have here so she went ahead and made that too. Pumpkin pie was made using raw pumpkin, boiled and mashed up. They don't have whipped cream so the girls literally whipped some cream. You get the idea. It was a chore. Alison made stuffing Irish-style, some spiced rice stuff, plus a carrot cake. We did find a little jar of cranberry sauce, though Steph claims she would have made it herself if you could buy fresh cranberries. Steph made me some sweet tea as well as her grandma's apple cider. Simon and I oversaw the whole operation and put in just enough effort to say we did something. 

the feast

Believe or not, but you don't automatically get off work on Thanksgiving Day here (discrimination), so we had scheduling conflicts. This actually turned out great for me because we ended up having two feasts yesterday. The first was just the roomies since Alison had to work at 5.

Later some of the riversurfing crew came over. Stephen and his wife Rachel from the US were happy to get to celebrate Thanksgiving while abroad. Sean and Garth from Zimbabwe and South Africa weren't about to pass down an opportunity to eat until stuffed. Let's just say they are fans of Thanksgiving.

clockwise from left: steph, garth, sean, simon, adam, rachel, stephen

Also here are a couple pics from the new place. I couldn't get the panoramic function to work right on my camera or on the computer, but you get the idea.

Happy Holidays everybody. Hope everyone back home had a good Thankgiving and a good holiday season. We miss everybody. Wish you were here (not us there - this place is awesome!)

Long Time No See

Sorry we have been so absent lately. Things got a little busy around here, then we haven't had internet for a few days... so Steph has finally demanded that I do a blog post, so here I am at the internet cafe. Anyways, a lot has happened in the last month-ish, so lets get right to it.

We've moved! Yeah, so the dream apartment wasn't such a dream after all. Rent was killing us and the location turned out to be pretty crummy. It's a really long story that isn't all that interesting, so basically an we got a 2 bedroom place that we share with an Irish couple named Simon and Allison. Simon is a riverboarding trainee with me, and they were looking to move from their apartment, so we decided to find a place together. We ended up finding a great place really close to town, still near the water, with a great big deck looking over the mountains and lake. It's really awesome, plus it has a full-size fridge, TWO dishwashers, and a washing machine and dryer (all of which we didn't have in our old place). The best part about it is that we'll be paying about $100 less per week in rent. Actually the best part is that Alison works at a chocolate and ice cream shop called Patagonia and is always bringing home treats. Sweet as! (kiwi term)

Movember All the guys with Serious Fun Riversurfing (company I'll be working for), as well as seemingly most males in New Zealand, are growing moustaches for the whole month of November (get it? Movember?) to raise awareness for men's health issues like prostate cancer, depression, and what not. I'm actually not all that sure what it's for, I just know that I now have a sweet moustache that is driving all the ladies crazy. Not really of course, it is actually miserable-looking and kind of embarassing. I suppose we'll post some pics when we can.

Steph's wild night It wasn't that wild, but we had a pretty interesting night a couple days ago. As Steph was walking home from work (yes, we're close enough for her to walk now), she saw a dead person. It's pretty terrible actually. Two guys were either play fighting or actual fighting (heard different rumors) and one of them fell and busted their head open and died right there on the street. When Steph came by later she saw the guy's legs sticking out from under a sheet as the police investigated. Creepy. And really sad. Apparently the other guy is in jail. Then, at exactly 5:33 am that morning, Steph and I both awoke to find the whole room rumbling. Our first earthquake! It only lasted a few seconds, but it counts.

Miscellaneous Other than that, it's kind of more of the same. I think we are both enjoying it more and more as it gets warmer and warmer. Still not hot, 70 degrees would be a blazing day, but warm enough to sit out on our new balcony. The sunsets across the lake can be truly breathtaking. I've just finished my rescue training course, and have a first aid course over the next couple days. I have my 50 trips completed, so after that they will do an assessment on my riverboarding skills to see if I'm fit to be a guide. Once I pass that, I'm in! Can't wait. Steph has been working mainly nights and enjoying it more. She seems to like meeting the guests from all over the world, especially the Americans because they normally leave her a tip. I haven't reminder her about Black Friday coming up, but we are planning a big Thanksgiving dinner with our roomies and another American couple. We'll have to eat our on our deck in the warm sun New Zealand-style. Enjoy the cold back home! See ya!

Read any good books lately?

I am officially using this blog to plead for book suggestions. Steph and I joined the local library a while back and have been reading a decent amount. It all started when we only had two TV channels to chose from, then we went almost 2 weeks with no TV at all and the reading really picked up. Now we actually have like 10 channels, but we're already in reading mode so it ought to continue. Plus, it's a 40 minute drive each way for every riverboarding trip, so there's another good time to read for me. Anyways, there's simply a lot of books at the library and I have no idea how anybody chooses ones to read (I guess Steph somehow manages. She came back today with some "classic" called Jane Eyre as well as what appears to be a coffee table book called The Story of Archaeology in 50 Great Discoveries). Just so you know, I generally like fiction; the only non-fiction I'd generally read is adventure or travel-type stuff, but if you have any must-read's I'd be happy to hear them. Preferably no Bill Bryson (already read 2 of his). Leave a comment or shoot me an email or whatever. 'Preciate it.

Queenstown Hill

I guess you could consider this another installment of our virtual tour of Queenstown (which we'll hopefully finish someday), but another quasi-interesting thing to do in town is hike up Queenstown Hill. The hill is one of a few that hover over town, and this one has a nice, albeit quite steep, 3-hour return hike to the top. Nice day, nothing to do, so we finally decided to make the trek to the top. There's not really anything up there but a nice view, so we sat and enjoyed that for a while.

Lake Wakatipu looking towards Glenorchy. Fernhill is on the side of the hill on the right. Queenstown Gardens is in the lower left.

Lake Wakatipu looking towards Kingston. The cluster of houses you see is Kelvin Heights, on the other side of the Frankton Arm from us.

What else has been going on? Oh yes, Halloween. It is celebrated here, but didn't seem quite as big as in the US. Apparently the kids do trick-or-treat, but neither of us were here to see if anyone came by. They sure didn't sell hordes of candy at the grocery store like back home, which was of course disappointing to us. There are tons of backpackers in town, most of them younger than us, so dressing up and going out was certainly a popular thing to do. Steph had to work, and I went to a little barbeque by the lake with that guy Stephen from Buckhead (also, he went to Westminster, not Wesleyen). He had a couple high school buddies in town, one of them even went to Tech, so I got the chance to talk a little Yellow Jacket football which was nice. Also met a couple guys that live in town from LaGrange. That makes at least 6 people in town from the state of Georgia. Plus another one of the river boarding guys is from Aiken. I've yet to meet any Americans from outside a 200-mile radius of Atlanta.

Speaking of river boarding, it is going good. I'm up to just over 30 trips total now, so still a while to go. There are trips going pretty much every day now, sometimes two trips a day, so it should be pretty easy to complete my last 20 trips. I think I'm enjoying it more and more every time I go, so am really pumped for summer. Steph came out to watch a couple days ago and took some video of us going down the river. In the video below, we're going through the third named rapid on our run, called "Dead Cow" because there used to be a dead cow stuck on the rock. First I briefly "surf" on a small wave at the top, then go through a "squirt" called "Elevator to Hell". A squirt is caused by two currents of water crashing into each other, so a large flow of water is forced down to the bottom of the river. You put your board under and if you time it right, it will pull you underwater for up to 10 seconds or more. We do this for fun. The guy with the crazy accent yelling at me in the video is Sean, from Zimbabwe.