The 10th Month

I have been in New Zealand now for 10 months. It feels like I was just saying 6 months yesterday. The time really has flown by. Winter has just about come and gone. In saying that, I have realized how much I really like winter. When you are in the mountains the light on them and the snow and the green grass is unbelievable. I exaggerated a bit when I said it was like Antarctica. It's not that cold. I have work a hat, scarf and gloves all of maybe 3 times. Once my body acclimated to the weather, I was good as gold. The hours of daylight definitely did a number on me since I felt like I should be in bed at 8pm. The shortest day of the year has passed and it's still light out when I get off work, so I can't complain. We did get some reallly cold times, but I think my winter in Germany was more harsh than the winter here, which I always thought would be opposite.

So with 2 months to go comes the million dollar question: What do I do when my visa expires September 24th? Thoughts of this have given me serious anxiety. My mom has gotten so many emails that I am surprised she hasn't disowned me. The problem is, in Catherine time, two months is a long time and I will change my mind 4 million times. In real world/normal people time, that's nothing. In order to apply for an extension of my visa, I need at minimum 1 month. So yeah that means I should be making a decision right this minute. Over several sleepless nights, frantic phone calls and emails to Carol, lots of coffee and sprinting on the treadmill till I feel like I might faint, I have come to a conclusion. I want to stay in New Zealand until January. I think the only thing that really made me hesitant was spending the money on the visa and filling out 45 pages of paperwork. I found out that I needed an entire medical exam, which is close to 500 big ones. They want blood tests and x-rays and this and that. This is required after being in NZ for longer than 1 year. If you ask me, it should be done before even entering the country. Any life threatening illness that may be in my blood or bones will have been something I would have caught in the last 12 months in this country. But I'm no doctor or immigration officer or anything of the sorts and nor do I want to be, so I will just comply and grit my teeth while attempting a polite smile at the doctor. Don't worry though, I will quiz the doctor on why all this is necessary. If there is anything extremely important I feel you should know, then I will report back. I can only imagine how painful it would be for a foreigner coming to the US so I should just zip it.

One thing I am really missing at the moment is Mexican food. It was quite funny because my uncle sent me this link ( http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/12-01/10-important-life-lessons-you-learn-from-living-abroad.html ) and I couldn't agree more with several of the parts. Especially the part about the mexican food. Once living here, you realize you are long way from Mexico and that incredible queso goodness that Los Rancheros serves up. Every time I think of mexican I think of when I was about 10 and on the swim team at Woodlands. We always went to LR after meets and one day I looked at the man and said I wanted 7 soft tacos. He stared and looked at my mom. She confirmed this was correct and that I could devour every bite. Let me just assure you, I didn't let that fella down. Nor would I today if I ordered 7 soft tacos. One thing that never slowed down when my athleticism did was my appetite. However, after taking a month off from the gym I am back in action. I haven't had french fries in a week! I'm pretty sure I have turned over a new leaf. If I don't make mention of the french fries again for a while, it means I have caved and just don't want to admit it. I can't help it, I love to eat. And I must admit, I have become quite the chef these days. I cook atleast 5/7 nights of the week and have rarely repeated recipes. I get some amazing blogs, but the one I use for most recipes is Meme Inge's 'Living Well Kitchen'. She is from Mobile and is now a nutritionist in New Orleans. Sometimes the meals lack a bit of seasoning for me, so I just add chili's or Habanero Tabasco to everything I make. (Sorry Meme if I ruin some recipes!) You should check out her blog though, I promise it won't disappoint you. You can sign up and it will send them straight to your inbox. I now have a whole folder dedicated just to recipes. So get to cooking! http://memeinge.com/blog/

I know this post is sporadic, story of my life. So the central part of the country just had some earthquakes. Everyone around here is insistent upon the fact the Wellington is going to "get the big one" soon. It was a 6.2 magnitude that did little damage, but injured a few, rattled some buildings and definitely frazzled the locals. Speaking of Wellington....

- It is called Windy Welly for a very good reason. It can be one of the scariest plane rides in because of how bumpy the landings are.
- The Te Papa Museum (one of the pictures below) is a free museum that will give you all of the history of NZ and just about the world. Anything you could ever want to know about NZ you can find here. We could have spent the entire day there, but instead just spent 4 hours. That's a long time for a museum. They also had a Warhol exhibit on while we were there, which was very cool and Warhol-y!
- The 'Bee Hive' is the Parliament building pictured at the bottom. You can literally walk up to the front door. I couldn't quite grasp my head around that. Can you imagine walking up to the front door of the White House? So cool!
- Wellington has some incredible restaurants!
- Wellington has a lot to offer, but has nothing on the mountains of Arrowtown!