This morning everyone piled in the vans and drove over to Thames, excited about the Maori festival we were going to see. When we got there, however, we went in the performance room and a guy talked for 25 minutes in maori (with 7 words of English). We bailed quickly, deciding to come back after checking out the weekend farmer's market. That only took 20 minutes, and we still had to kill 3 hours. Every time we go to Thames, it's a disappointment. We should just stop going.

The upside was that I got a Batman Begins poster and I and another girl got a huge, 40 dollar book for free because some maori dude made us sing the maori word for fish (ika) to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner. I-ka i-ka i-kaaaaaaaa, ika ika i-ka, ika ikkkkkkkkkk-a ika, ok you get the picture.

When we got home, we all had to work on essays, and we did a huge paper trade where we all read 3 papers. It took forever and hurt my brain, but my paper is much improved.

Tomorrow, South Island! We're staying for 4 nights on a marae, which should be awesome, and at the end of the trip we have 4 days off, during which time I'm going tramping with a couple other kids. Check back in a week or so for updates!

I went for a run today and I only made it 10 minutes out before having to turn around, panting and hurting.

Yesterday we went to the local shorebird center.


This picture pretty much summarizes how everyone felt about the birdwatching:


Today we went to the local marae, or maori tribal land, where the iwi, or tribe, welcomed us to the area. They sang a hymn to welcome us, and we responded with a Grateful Dead song.

The dessert situation here is out of control. Yesterday we had chocolate pudding (here it's like chocolate cake), chocolate muffins, and 2 kinds of chocolate cookies. I think they're fattening us up for our trip to the South Island, when we won't be getting any desserts. Speaking of food, tea time is very civilized.

Today we went to the local elementary school to play with the kids and help them plant trees and pick litter up on the beach. When we got there, we sat around in a circle with the kids. I sat in an empty section, thinking that I would space myself out from the other EcoQuesters, but none of the kids sat in the two chairs on either side of me, instead opting to sit on the floor.

Then we went to plant trees, and none of the kids helped me with my tree either. Instead, the teachers made me switch trees to the one some kids were working on planting.

Then we ate lunch, and I again sat in an empty spot and had no one sit by me. By this point I was really brooding over my dislike of children. Then one fell down and I had to go get her fixed up.

The kids got out a boom box. We figured, hey, kid's music, ok, but it turned out to be electronica remixes. They made everyone dance, and I felt stupid. Thankfully, looking stupid endeared me in the children's eyes, as did carrying an annoying child around on a half-hour piggy-back ride. (He said I was a truck, so when I put him down and tried to escape, he "shot" my tires out. Then I said I was a horse and tried to escape, but he shot me again. I told him that while it was OK to shoot your truck, you couldn't shoot a horse unless its leg was broken.) By the end of the day, I had some friends.

When our school week was finished, we got dropped off in the small town of Whangamata (say: Fanga matah). Whangamata photos. We hoofed our stuff over to the campground, which turned out to be a motor park, the kind that people live in. After setting up our tents, we wandered downtown to scrounge for food, found some fish and chips, and made it back to the sketchy "Game Room" at the motor park just as it started pouring. (Note: these people don't know what ketchup is--they use "tomato sauce," which, though produced by Heinz, is like oversweetened tomato juice just thick enough to pour on your fries.) Once the rain let up, we went to the beach to watch the sun set and the moon rise between some islands. It started raining again and we retreated to the Game Room for some hijinks. By 9, half the group had gone to bed. I went to bed at 11, happy to be sheltered from the pelting rain and gusting wind by a tent (though missing my thermarest), only to be awakened at 12:25 by the End-of-the-Fucking-World-Doomsday-You're-Going-to-Die siren howling through the gale. Wham, I was wide awake.

"What the fuck?"
"Think it's a flood warning?"
"Hurricane?"
"Tsunami?"

Continued below! Read on to part two...

Part Two!

I had by this point decided it was an evacuation alarm, and flung the sleeping bag off me, pulled on my fleece and raincoat, and crawled out of the tent. No one was in sight, and no one in any of the other tents showed any signs of alarm. I announced my intention to explore the motor park to find other, hopefully more informed, awake people to confirm my dire predictions. When I found no one, I dragged my two tent-mates from the two person tent to explore the town. Because it was freezing, they draped their sleeping bags over their shoulders like capes. We walked the two blocks to downtown and found only drunks staggering around the bars and who had apparently not heard the siren. How could they not have? It was the fucking Doomsday alarm.

We reached a consensus to return to the tent and try sleeping. I knew it was no use, and, as I predicted, I lay awake the rest of the night, checking my watch every half hour, thinking of hideous impending disasters and hearing each oncoming burst of wind as the surging tide coming to carry us away into the Pacific, where the closest piece of land worth anything is South America.

Finally, around 6 o'clock, feeling that the Doomsday Alarm must have either been wrong or given too much warning, I drifted into a doze for an hour. At seven, I threw my stuff into a pile that could be easily snatched if the tsunami did materialize, then went to sit by the crowd eating breakfast. Half the group had been too asleep to hear the siren, and the other half had simply ignored it, but I couldn't forget it, at least not without finding out what it was.

We asked a local, and she laughed at our worry. "Oh, that? It was from the fire department," she told us. "It's run by volunteers, so they turn on the siren to summon volunteers when there's a fire."

For the past week I have been at a marsh on the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula.

Opoutere photos

This week for school I:

• learned how to rescue someone who's fallen out of their kayak
  
• built islands out of sand based on topographical maps
  
• hiked to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise and sketch the outline of the estuary below
  
• wandered through the mud of the estuary at low tide in bare feet to examine animals and plants living there
  
• kayaking through mangroves while the light rain made a pretty noise falling on the water
  

The low points of the week were:

• waking up the first morning of the trip with a bugbite on my eyelid that had swollen my eye closed--I took some Benadryl, which helped the swelling go down, but made me exhausted
  
• getting shat on by a wood pigeon while listening to a presentation in the forest
  
• having my writing torn to shreds by our absolutely crazy but incredible ex-possum trapper teacher who seems to know everything
  
• being the slowest kayaker and getting totally worn out by it
  
• watching my teacher's finger get slammed in a door and hearing her scream the most horrible scream I've ever heard
  

Auckland photos.

Later today I'll put up Opoutere estuary pictures and relate the tale of the Doomsday Siren. Be excited!

Yesterday we spent half the day in a little town 45 minutes away called Thames. We went there to take a swim test, 8 lengths of the pool without touching the ground, then wandered around town. At one point we found a giant chessboard and played chess. (continued below, stupid blogger)



Today we took a hike over in the park where the sheep were before, this time looking at ecosystems and evidence of biodiversity in invertebrates. I liked this fern.



And you who know me well know how much I like taking artsy pictures of random stuff, so here is today's incarnation:



Tomorrow, Auckland!

Pictures from New Zealand! I think I'm going to make its own "New Zealand" homepage, but I certainly haven't gotten there yet.

The other day I went for a stroll (read: 11km hike) in the park nearby us with a bunch of other girls. We got a ride to it, and pulled up behind a group of 20 bikers, who immediately pulled to the side and called to us, "It's OK, we're due for a leak break anyway." Our walk took us through a couple sheep pastures, and since it's lambing season, we got to see and hear a bunch of bleating lambs. On the sad end, we saw one lamb that had hurt itself and couldn't move its back legs, so it's probably dead by now.

We eat all the time here. An hour after breakfast is morning tea, then a few hours later is lunch, then another couple hours later is afternoon tea, then dinner, then dessert, then evening snacks until our early evening bedtime. I feel like a hobbit.

I'm having some difficulties loading the %*&^*$@# driver on the computer ("You do not have administrative powers to install that program. Please contact the administrator or shoot yourself, which is probably much easier and less painful for everyone involved, including you.")

I'm in New Zealand!

I barely slept on the plane, which sucked, but now everyone's adopting similar schedules (bed around 9, 9:30, up around 6). We already went backpacking, up to Pinnacles park or something, and this morning woke up at 5 to hike to the peak to watch the sunrise over the Pacific. There are 22 students, and everyone seems nice so far. When we returned to "base" from backpacking this evening, we went to the pub to watch the rugby game--NZ vs Australia--and enjoy the drinking age of 18.

Kiwi terminology: togs = swimsuit