Totally Skipped Valentines Day

Yesterday was quite possibly the longest day of my life. Actually, I don’t even think it counts as yesterday. My day started at 6:00 am, Eastern Time. I got up, had a shower and mom and I left around 7:30 am, since there was a major snowstorm rolling in. We stopped and had breakfast, then continued on to the airport. We went through customs and all that stuff and the airline lady gave mom a boarding pass so she could wait with me for my flight. We just kinda hung out and looked at pictures on my computer. When my gate finally got called at 11:35, we both kinda lost it. But then I regained composure to get on the plane.

The flight to Dallas/Fortworth was long and boring. I was sitting next to a man from Wichita, Kansas. Exciting. I arrived @ DFT at about 1:30 Central Time, so that’s one hour gained. Total hours awake so far: 8.5. Then I had an hour and a half layover. I love that airport, it was so big, they said it was the size of Manhattan. It’s so pretty. My flight to Los Angeles left at 3:15pm Central Time. I got to LAX at 4:00pm Pacific Time. Total hours awake thus far: 13. Then I had a five-hour layover. Running total? 18 hours. During the layover, I met a whole bunch of people going the same place that I was. I met one girl, who looked like upper class white trash… figure that out. Anyways, she looks uncannily like Matt Lucas. Which is quite unfortunate for her… and funny for me.

Anyways, I boarded the plane with the rest of the group and I couldn’t believe how amazing it was. The plane was an Air New Zealand 747-400. Effing huge. And each of the seats had it’s own television. And a whole bunch of movies, tv shows, documentaries and music, on demand. We had dinner, which was kinda shady, but only because of the chicken. I still ate it like a ravenous animal. I tried to watch three different films, The Queen, Babel and Mary Antoinette, but I kept passing out for small parts of the movies. We arrived in Auckland, NZ @ about 6:30am New Zealand Time, which is –12 Greenwich Standard and 18 hours behind home. Running time awake? 30.5 hours. We had to go through customs and all that; we finally got through and to the AustraLearn people at about 7:30am. I immediately bought a huge bottle of water and downed it, the plane made me super dehydrated. We left about an hour later, but we were all zonked. We rode on a bus for the next three hours, with a few stops for food and the toilet. Here’s one place we went to, to use the toilets: Yes, I peed in a giant dog. I know, it’s kind of exciting.

We arrived in Rotorua around 1:30 pm and got settled into the KiwiPaca hostel. Sweet as. ß We learned some new words. That’s pretty much saying ‘awesome’ or ‘it’s all good’, they say it all the time. Ready for a lesson in Kiwi English? Dairy = small grocery store, chuddy = gum, dodgy = shady, fanny = vagina… That one is kinda weird, since we were playing a version of bingo to match the Kiwi word to the American word. All the sudden, Tommo, the guy on our bus, is saying ‘The Kiwi version of chewing gum is…? The Kiwi word for female genitalia?’ It was slightly awkward. But whatev.

Total time awake thus far? 37.5 hours. A little while later, they provided a buffet style sandwich bar, which was amazing, as we were seriously famished. A while later, we went to the school across the street to get some super important (read: boring) information about NZ. I tried really hard to stay awake, but it was rough. At about 4:30, we went on a little tour of Rotorua, I wish I had brought my camera, as we went to Lake Roturua, and it was absolutely gorgeous. We drove through town a little bit more, then came back to the hostel. Dinner was pretty delicious and it was all homemade food. After dinner, I went for a walk with a few people to the park behind the hostel, which is a geothermal area. It was really cool, as we saw a whole bunch of little springs. I don’t really remember a whole lot else, as I was awake a grand total of 45.5 hours. I slept very well. Probably because we crossed the international date line and I had absolutely no Valentines Day what so ever.