When I finally arrived at my dorm at around 6:00 Saturday, after a 4 hour layover in Sydney and a relatively quick 2hr 45 minute flight into a rainy Auckland the first thing on my list was to take a nice hot shower. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, because when I arrived, and until about an hour and a half ago, the hot water was not working. So I flew halfway around the world only to have to suffer a freezing cold dip in the shower to wash what I could without dying of hypothermia.
After warming back up a bit I followed a hint from the guy who gave me the quick tour of the dorm and went downstairs to check out the rugby game that was on, New Zealand versus South Africa. To my great surprise the first person I saw when I walked into the room was a friend of mine who ran track with me up at Bates sitting on the sofa. It was a very cool, “small world” moment for the both of us. We each knew the other had applied, but no idea we were in the same down, and I certainly would never have guessed he would be almost the first person I saw on campus!
I hung out and watched the last half of the Rugby game, met a bunch of different people from basically all over the world (Mexico, Canada, Seattle, Thailand, Finland to name a few), and tested out the ping pong and foosball tables for a while before giving into my exhaustion and heading to bed.
This morning I woke up at 6:00, so I had to wait a few hours for breakfast, but as of about 6:00 I have felt no effects of jetlag, which I’m very happy about, because it gave me a chance to walk around and check out the campus. I regret to say that I had some battery troubles with the camera so I was unable to get any pictures, because it was amazingly beautiful, just remembering that it’s the middle of winter here leaves me amazed as to what it’s going to look like in a few months. I have some pictures of my dorm room, but I’m having some trouble uploading which might well be due to the fact that I’m stealing some random wireless signal because I don’t have an ethernet cable to get access to the UoA network. Should be able to get that all working tomorrow.