HA! There is peanut butter in NZ

I went food shopping yesterday and discovered that peanut butter has already made it's glorious debut in NZ. So instead of buying every meal I can now live off of cereal, pita bread, and peanut butter (the backpacker diet). There is a kitchen in the hostel so if I ever do feel adventurous I can attempt to cook something.

Crossing the street is a little difficult since I am constantly looking the wrong way. It's very confusing so I just basically make sure I am not the first one to step into the street and I look both ways constantly while I am crossing. The streetlights in downtown Auckland are like UMass's. Traffic lights from all directions are red at once so it is possible to do the efficient diagonal crossing of the street.

The past couple of days I have just been hanging out around Auckland. I noticed that here even fast food is a lot slower than in the US. Also you have to buy your condiments like ketchup, they don't have it out for you to use. Another wierd thing is that the sliding doors close a lot quicker here. I was too busy looking at something and got slammed in the side by a sliding door. Needless to say it was at night and a lot of people got a very good laugh out of my slowness.

It's been really cool in the new hostel. The one bad thing is one of my roommates. There are six of us in a room, three guys and three girls. The one guy, Flo is German and drinks all the time. That's not a big deal. What kind of sucks is that he will come in at 4 in the morning and turn on all the lights and bring random people into the room while the rest of us are sleeping. It's just kind of uncomfortable. When of us said something to him he said "I don't understand. I'm a foreigner." That's his explanation for everything. Oh well he's leaving today anyway.

Apparently NZ is the place to be to learn english. A lot of the people I met at the bars and clubs are from a different country and are in Auckland to do a three month program to improve their English. It's cool though since it means that they all are very eager to talk to you for long amounts of time and most of them are guys and incredibly cute.

Today I did another free tour around Auckland and wound up hanging out in this volcano turned park called One Tree Hill. The park is huge and sits right in the middle of the city. Sheep and cows just roam around it and there are tons of footpaths. Some of the pictures I took are really cool. The sheep and the greenland are in the foreground and then the background is the city. It's surreal looking. As soon as I take enough pictures I will burn them onto a cd and then post them. But have no fear I am sure I will hold a giant slide show party of NZ when I get back. Since it just rained while we were in the park our tour guide took out his skis and decided that it would be cool if we skied down some of the grassy hills. It was pretty cool to watch. I didn't try my hand at it since to start downhill you first had to go over a jump and the grass was starting to dry so every now and then you would hit a dry patch and tumble down the rest of the hill. It just wasn't my time to try my hand at skiing.

I am meeting a lot of people that are finishing up their trip here and are giving me advice on what to do. It seems like the best thing is to just travel around and if you see stay in the place and apply for it. So the plan is to stay in Auckland until Thursday since by then my contacts will be here and my bank account will be in order. After that I am hopping onto the bus and travelling the North Island with hopes of finding a job while I travel around. No matter what, it's gonna be fun.