They drive on the opposite side of the road, for starters. I am constantly looking the wrong way when I want to cross the road. I’ve only been honked at twice and haven’t had a near miss just yet. They supposedly speak English ~ but they use all sorts of weird words and its more similar to British or Aussie English than it is American. Over here, when they are speaking of thongs, they are talking about flip flops. A jumper is a sweater. The currency is different -- $1 and $2 amounts are coins not bills (I’m pretty sure that is typical of most countries outside of the US). Everything is in metric and I’m still working on adjusting to those conversions. Everything from buying food to figuring out the temp takes me a lot more time. I look pretty stupid at times trying to figure things out. At major 4-way intersections downtown, when the pedestrian guy goes to green traffic is stopped and you can go straight or diagonal which is kind of fun.
Right now, I’m staying in a nice and quiet suburb of Auckland called Mount Eden. It’s called Pentlands – www.pentlands.co.nz. I am doing a work exchange for 2 weeks. So, in turn for cleaning for about 3 hours a day, 5 days out of 7, I don’t have to pay for my accommodations. I’m not cleaning the Pentlands though, I am cleaning Bamber House, which is slightly annoying. The Bamber House appears to be a little bigger and nicer. Of course, it would be nice if I was staying at the same place I was working, but luckily it is only about a 5 minute walk. Today I was assigned bathrooms. I didn’t finish all the bathrooms by 12:30 and when I got back to Pentlands one of the other girls I am working with, told me that I was trying too hard! She told me that you just do enough to get by so you’re out of there before 12 pm. I believe I have a habit of being an over achiever, but I don’t know that I’ve ever been told not to try so hard. It’s also sort of on the embarrassing side when your mate tells you to try less. I suppose I should have figured it out on my own. Yikes….
So that’s life down here in New Zealand for now. I don’t have to work tomorrow (Friday) and I’m very much looking forward to sleeping in and deciding what I’m going to do for the day.
Ps. There are not yet any pictures up because my laptop can’t connect to the internet at the hostel and I uploaded all the pics to my laptop and deleted them from the SD card before I realized I couldn’t get wireless. Hopefully the pics will be up soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment