love me some coromandel ♥

This weekend I spent three days in the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my whole entire life. We camped with the Joseph family in Coromandel, which is on the east coast of New Zealand. I know people exaggerate all the time, but if there is one time I'm not exaggerating, this would be it. The whole time I was there I felt like I walked into a postcard or a desktop background.

We took off right after school Friday and piled all 20 girls into two vans to drive for 4 hours. We got there right as the sun was setting and we went a little camera happy.

Friday morning, bright and early, a small group of us got up before sunrise to go fishing. We didn't really know what we were getting into - they just told us to bring our swimsuits. I thought we were going to be fishing on a boat, but we were actually setting up nets and diving for sea urchins and paua shells! The water was freezing . . . I have never been so cold in my whole life (they ran out of wetsuits and I got shafted). We gathered a whole bag of sea urchins and shells and watched the sun come up. I was in shock, both from the cold and the view! I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life.

body glove's next hottest model

completely numb and frozen

so happy to be back in sweats

Then we spent the whole entire day at the beach. heaven. on. earth. I took a nap on the beach and ate lots of junk food. Then went ocean kayaking and surfing for the first time. Can't say I'm a pro, but I did get up a couple times!

That night we cut up the urchins and paua shells. Brother Joseph scraped out the "good part" of the urchin and had me eat it. nasty texture. Turns out it was the tongue!

Feeling brave after eating urchin tongue, I tried a bit of paua shell. We helped scrape out the insides, remove the guts, and cut out the teeth. shells have teeth! Then the meat was put into a grinder and then heated up into a type of stew. It tasted like ocean hamburger helper.

The Josephs were so kind to let us come along on their camping trip - they are the best family. The next coming adventure starts tomorrow morning at 5am! There is a taxi picking us up at our house to take us to the airport to travel to the South Island. We will be there for 10 days visiting Queenstown and Christchurch. I won't have any internet, so no pictures for a bit! I have heaps of pictures I need to post though, so I'll go a little facebook/blog crazy when I get back. cheers!

eggsperiment

TOMORROW IS THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!!

of course because it's nearing the end, everything starts getting crazy and begins to blow up. Literally blow up!

Today in science we each taught a mini lesson and mine was on Newton's first law. I was going to use eggs in my activity and had two hard boiled eggs and one raw egg. As we were walking to the bus stop I realized I forgot my eggs!! I left my backpack with Stacey and Mallory and sprinted home (the bus stop is pretty far away). It was hard to carry three eggs without dropping them so I tucked one somewhere safe and carried the other two. It didn't really matter though because we ended up missing the bus.

In school, after all the experiments were finished, I heated up the boiled eggs to eat for lunch. I swear. . . I only put the eggs in for 20 seconds (that isn't even long). They were nice and warm and I bit into the first one, and good thing I was holding it way close to my face because then it blew up. I'm not scientifically saavy enough to explain how that happened, but hot egg innards went all over me and burnt my skin! I'm not kidding. I have little burn marks on my face. They will probably be gone by tomorrow but it was a pretty dramatic thing at the time.

Today I have to finish all of my assignments which are due tomorrow, and because I am the biggest procrastinator, I've left quite a bit for myself to do :) However there is great motivation to finish because tomorrow we leave to go camping until Sunday night. We are camping in Coromandel, which is equivalent to heaven.

THEN Monday we set off for the South Island and will be gone for ten days! Perfect end-of-school celebration :)

all in a days work

School here really is the best thing that's ever happened. This week we've moved into social studies and science. No offense to Professor Sitiene, but science is definitely the better end of the deal.

To investigate air pressure, we put balloons underneath an upside down table and saw how many people we could get standing on top of it before the balloons popped. Extremely entertaining? yes. Extremely productive? maybe not.

We were even able to fit the whole class on one table without the balloons popping. It's science!

We also looked at solubility and experimented with different scientific substances such as M&Ms, gingerbread babies, and ginger nuts :)

Outside of school, everything has been brilliant. It's sunny, I've mastered the bus system, and my roommates and I have decided to run a half marathon at the end of February! I've been running every day and one morning decided to run to school instead of taking the bus. It was a great idea! Minus the smelling/looking bad for the rest of the day part. And once I got there I realized I didn't have any school supplies. Wasn't the most thought out plan I've ever had. Stacey pointed out that I could run with my fanny pack to school! That was also a bad idea.

Fanny pack. Literally.

saddle sore but so happy

This is my second post for the day because it's Sunday here and my internet is working! (which isn't always the case). Plus there was so much happening in one week, I didn't want to make a post the size of Texas (shout out to JR, KM, & JS). After a wonderful week of school, we spent the weekend relaxing at the house, doing chores, and horseback riding.

!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! I love everything about my life !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not sure how to explain how I felt, so this will have to do the trick.

The sun was out, the hillsides were breath taking, I was riding on a horse, and in New Zealand. Life couldn't get any better. I even got a bit of color! More of a burn actually. I used sunscreen but missed the back of my neck, which is now a gorgeous brick red color. When I came home Victoria (my host mother) came into my room with a plant. I wasn't sure what she wanted me to do with it, but she ripped off a section, opened it up and started rubbing it on my neck. It was an aloe plant! Maybe I'm the only one who hadn't put those pieces together, but aloe vera isn't just a made up name. It's named after a spiky, sticky plant in New Zealand!

The horses we rode apparently starred in The Chronicles of Narnia - cool huh? One was Prince Peter's horse and I guess my horse played dead in a war scene. Can't get any closer to Hollywood than that!

And they had little hobbit horses!!

I was just a little excited

I'm a little embarrassed I posted so many horse pictures, but I just couldn't help myself. And these are just the selected few of many. It was a dream day! Afterwards we came home and had the house to ourselves so Stacey, Mallory and I cooked dinner, cleaned, and then watched Signs. Victoria came home to see us all piled on one couch yelling about aliens. We even stayed up until midnight. wooohoo late night!!

but seriously.

ABC easy as 1, 2, 3

3 classes and only two more to go! Classes can seem long since each session is 6 hours, but considering what we do in school, time goes by pretty fast. This week we've been working on "maths", as the New Zealanders call it. At first I thought our teacher had a lisp, but then realized that's what they really call it. They call it "maths" because it's referring to mathematicS not mathematic. Hahaha apparently Americans are the stupid ones.

Here is a little review of our week:

Became familiar with the metric system by

measuring how far we can blow objects across the carpet

used the golden ratio (and other essential materials) to figure out the dimensions

and size of goliath's body: 12 feet tall!

practiced writing upside down - a commonly used teacher skill. yeah. . . it's safe to say that there's definitely some room for improvement. I particularly struggle with the numbers.

learned about place value in exchanging "United Octopus Bank" money

activity for reflection, translation, and rotation = an excuse to do art for a whole day

1. First we created a pattern, which was hard for me because my creative juices are permanently dried up. That's why everyone has flowers and turtles and I just drew lines.

2. Then wrinkle up the paper and iron it out. This gave me a chance to really show off my domestic skills.

3. Dye your tapa with brown dye

4. Bleach the parts you want to be white

5. Be proud of your ability to make elementary art!

In other exciting news - my roommate Stacey got her mission call!!! :):) She skyped with her family and she will be serving in Carlsbad, CA speaking Spanish. She is going to be a wonderful missionary. I'm so excited for her!

Next week is my last week of school! Once we finish up social studies and science, I will be all done :) and the most wonderful part about it, is that finals don't exist here. Can't say I'm too bummed about that.