Weird Day

This past week:
Travis went to work some more and finally got his IRD # (like his SIN number.... now he can get paid!). Yay.
Amy started working on Wednesday. Yay again! My commute happens to be longer than Travis's since I walk to work with him in the mornings, then walk home. Round trip: 30 minutes. He starts work at 7:30; I start work at 8am.

Went to Quiz night on Monday with Helen and the Quiz gang at the Dog's Bollix pub down the street. Our team won - again. We're at the top of the Quiz league.

Tuesday - nothing. made yummy supper

Wednesday - nothing. made yummy supper again.

Thursday - I went swimming with Helen; Travis did nothing. Made more yummy food.

Friday - Travis went out to the research station near the Ardmore Airport (happens to be the busiest airport in NZ). They do stuff out there. I don't know what. Test stuff, maybe? It's the second time he's been out there.

- We went on a field trip with a 3rd year marine physics class that Stuart Bradley - travis's boss - teaches. He has them testing ocean currents and stuff. We went with them to get out of the city - not because they needed our help or anything. Stuart and Chris (his wife) do this trip every year with 2nd and 3rd year students. We stopped in a town called Warkworth for supper, but the only places open were fish and chip shops, and our fish and chips were the greasiest I'd ever ingested. Eeesh. Then on to Leigh, the same place we went last week with Helen, etc. Leigh has a research lab because there's a marine reserve - no fishing in the reserve, so the fish and birds and everything are really tame. We stayed overnight there.

Saturday - We attempted snorkeling at the beach this morning, but the waves were WAY too big and it made for very murky water, so we just played in the waves and laid on the beach. After lunch we went out to the bridge where the class was performing their experiments and doing their tests. We basically just sat around, watched, took pictures, and walked back and forth across this VERY BUSY bridge, watching the tide and the current.

Travis and I were taking a break from standing around - we were eating cookies, actually - and I see Travis's face perk up and he starts waving to someone, and I hear yelling from the road. I thought, who could he possibly be waving to. We know 5 people in this country! I turned around and saw Louise waving out the window.

Now, here's the explanation.

Louise, and her boyfriend Nathan, lived in Montreal. Nathan's from NZ, and Louise is from Ireland. Travis and I saw them in the Vancouver airport. We boarded the same plane, boarded the same plane out of Honolulu, and, strangely enough, boarded the same plane out of Nadi, Fiji, to go to Malololailai Island, to take a boat to the Funky Fish resort in Fiji (we were the only 4 passengers on the plane out of Nadi - here's our pictures).

http://flickr.com/photos/amytempleman/

Nathan was en route to move home to NZ, and Louise was going to NZ with him on a Working Holiday visa (like me). They stayed in Fiji for 4 days and left a day earlier than us. We got to be quite good friends with them, since we had taken the same path from Vancouver and they were just very interesting people who were about the same age as us. There were also only 10 guests staying at Funky Fish, and we got along better with them than anyone else. We gave them our contact information and hoped that they'd contact us once they got settled in New Zealand so we could visit them sometime.

This takes us to today when Louise frantically was waving out the window to us.

They stopped their car, and I ran down the highway to meet up with them. We had a nice chat for about half an hour, then they went to the beach. I told them I was sad they hadn't contacted us yet, but they explained they've been busy family-hopping with Nathan's family scattered throughout the North Island. That's right. We hadn't gotten ahold of each other yet. I thought they had gone down to the South Island already, so imagine my surprise when I saw them in the middle of the same bridge we were on. It's not a spectacular bridge by any means. (the bridge is about 30m long)

http://maps.google.co.nz/?ie=UTF8&ll=-36.341955,174.770508&spn=0.069551,0.137157&z=13

What blows my mind, and the minds of everyone in this 3rd year Physics class, was that of all the people who met up with friends outside of Auckland, it had to be the Canadians who had lived here for 2 weeks.... meeting up with people who also were fresh off the boat.... in the strangest location you can imagine. It still blows my mind. I can't figure out what it all means.

Anywhoo, we got back to Auckland at about 6pm today - Stuart and Chris gave us a TON of leftover food from this class trip that we weren't even really a part of, and we were still in awe of our random meeting with random new friends.

Ah, we also found a great little restaurant/bar half a block away from here, as recommended by the Lonely Planet website, called Verona. Yummy food. Decently priced (not cheap, but not bank-breaking), and a live, awesome DJ. It wasn't too busy, but it seemed like a really cool place. We're definitely going back.

Plans for this week? Ummmm.... tomorrow = shopping for various household items. Nothing substantial planned for the rest of the week - I might go swimming again to train for the Triathlon I'm going to do with Helen in 3 weeks. I hear it's actually daylight savings tonight here or something, so soon we'll only be -4 hours + 1 day off of Saskatoon time. (or +20 hours).

(fyi - the triathlon is a baby one.... 300m swim, 10km bike, 3k run. I could do that in my sleep! maybe not. I think I'll have to train for the running part...)

UPDATE! We were again misinformed about daylight savings time. It is not until April 6. Apparently Telecom (the equivalent to SaskTel in Saskatchewan) had not changed its automated time announcement to the new Daylight Savings time changeover. They have since fixed their error.