Auckland Days 2 and 3

Orientation at the International Exchange Program was interesting. It was like we were back in high school at a combined meeting of the Spanish club and German club. It even had that “I’m obsessed with another language” smell to it. The orientation went by slowly. It took almost 3 hours for them to go over some basic New Zealand culture and words / phrases, followed by a brief walkthrough of the entire country, and then 10 minutes of how to set up your bank account and how to apply for your Inland Revenue Department Number (SSN). They could have spent more time on the latter, but alas we were able to figure most of it out. We then picked up our new cell phones (yay!) and walked to the bank and the auto association (where you apply for your IRD#). Since we had all of that taken care of we had to decide on how and when to go to Wellington. Our hotel stay was over the next day unless we wanted to extend it, so we decided to book a few tickets to Wellington and leave the next day (Thursday).

I woke up Thursday morning to see that the hostel reservation I had made the night before was cancelled. Apparently nobody in Wellington has space. It took almost an hour to find another hotel that had any availability for 3 consecutive days. We checked out of our hotel around 1pm and had them hold our bags while we continued exploring the CBD area. We got bored after 2 hours and decided to just go to the airport super early and chilax there. Upon arrival at the airport we ran into the biggest freakin weight-nazi EVER. The guy checking our bags weighed each one and when one (big red) was over 25 kg he made me take some stuff out of it. I put the stuff in my backpack, and then he goes “now that one’s too heavy” and made me weigh my carryon! WTF bro?!? Sure enough, my carryon was over 7 kg, so then I had to take stuff out of it and mix it across all of our bags until everything was under 25 / 7 kg. It was a pain in the ass. We didn’t trash anything, or lose any weight overall, so I’m not 100% sure what his deal was. Whatever. We arrived in Wellington and got checked into our Hotel. The hotel is very interesting – it’s older and has a very colonial feel to it. It’s kinda like staying in a slightly more modern villa-louis. If you don’t know what that is you’re much better off.

Today we have no internet (that I know of). I’m hoping we can find some nearby at a cafe or something, but I’m sure we will. We’ve got at least one flat to look at tonight, so at some point we’ll have to find some internet access to get the address and phone number for that.

Hope all is well in the world,

Zach