Couch Surfingish?

Today I think I ate my body’s weight in carbs. Because we are couchsurfing sort of (I’ll explain in a bit), you buy your own food. Since it was the first morning and the people we are staying with just got home, there wasn’t anything to eat, but you don’t complain and after a while it kind of fades away. When we got to “The Warehouse” which is kind of like the New Zealand version of Costco or Wal-Mart, I bought a sleeve of cookies, graham cracker circles with chocolate (because it was the closest thing to the checkout stand) and proceeded to eat that for sustenance until around 3 when we bought some traditional pies. I got sweet lamb curry. It was delicious! I was wondering what New Zealand cuisine was known for. Back to “The Warehouse.” We were there to pick up a cheap phone. Chloe bought one, which ended up being a more expensive one so we had to go back and return it later. It is very uncommon to be able to return products here because there are less consumers than in the states. Then we went to a phone store because I wanted to see if my phone could be “unlocked.” To “unlock” or “jailbreak” a phone is to enable it to use another network, different from the one it was originally made for. Unfortunately, with the iPhone, it would have disabled an other features and may have caused problems when switching back, so I just bought a $50 phone with $20 worth of minutes. Guess I won’t be texting here… Thank God! I hate texting. How much more impersonal can you get? And there is always room for misinterpreting. When girls text all together, asking each other what they should write, taking 10 minutes to respond is just hilarious.

 I was so grateful Carol was our host and guide, helping us figure this all out. Very hospitable. I found Carol and Kent not on couchsurfing.com but through craigslist because I had inquired about an old campervan they were selling. They had sold it but offered us to stay with them in Rotorua and 1 night has become 3. When you’re traveling, not everything works out perfectly. I would say to stay with fewer people for longer periods of time and figure out if they can pick you up when WWOOFing or if they are close enough to the train or bus station. The public transport here is not the best as there are not tons of people to use it. 3 million people inhabit the North Island (1 million in Auckland) and 1 million on the South Island. We were going to go to Tongariro Crossing, but couldn’t find a bus that would take us to the National Park. Carol says people will just hitchhike, but I think you need time to do that because you never know when someone will pick you up. And no Mom, its not dangerous here, but don’t worry I booked a bus:) We Google mapped the house where we are going and the bus station in Wanganui to see how far away it is (only 10 minutes walk) to the yoga studio where we will stay with Sam and Mass on the 27^th. Tomorrow we are going to Hobbiton! Yes, where Lord of The Rings was filmed!