Heading out Term break!

Well there has been a slight change of plans...I'm heading out today with the other american student teachers toward Hawkes bay then down to Gisborne to see the sunrise before anyone in the world has seen it!  Here are a few pics of the rotorua area!  I don't know when I will be back or if my plans will change but until next time...Cheers and have a great weekend.

the pub, an old police station!

Casey  in her basket in front of the fire

Casey in her basket

rainbow on the walk home from school

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Term Break is Coming!

This week I finally took over my first two classes at school on my own not just team teaching!  Both of them went well, but then both are senior level chemistry classes.  The subject we are currently on is Organic chemistry, which is quiet fun to teach as for those who have never had the pleasure of taking it, it is like a puzzle.  The only problem I had was I missed several points I needed to teach for all the teaching here is prep for the end of the year exams which does take a lot of the fun out of the teaching (I'm just happy to be doing something that is mine not part of another teacher).
Term break is almost here!  To clarify as to what that is, the student here go to school all year round.  Each year is broken up into terms, with four to a year.  Between each term there is a two week break, and a three week break between term four and term one (Christmas/summer holiday).  So as of Friday I have two weeks of adventure to be had before I have to be back at school. 
The future plans of term break are the following possibilities:  The first of which is I got an offer to work a sheep farm for a good part of the break to make some money and learn how NZ sheep farms operate.  The second option so far is going road tripping with the other American student teachers down here for they teamed together and bought a car (all i have is a bicycle).  They were planning on doing some black water rafting and surfing with a possibility of hitting the hot water beaches.  Black water rafting is rafting through blacked out caves and hot water beaches are beaches that are over a thermal vent so when the tide goes out hot thermal water rises, so you did a small hole in the sand and make a hot tub and the thermal water rises into your hole making your very own sand hot tub!  Then I can't forget that fishing season opens on the first of October and there is a fish competition that I'm going to enter in as a foreign angler!  I feel like I have a good chance of winning some really nice gear in this comp as Allen (host father) used to be a fish guide for 20+ years where as most foreign people would have to rent a guide for all three of the days to compete in the comp I will get guiding on an every day basis!
Then when I return to school on the 11th of October.  That week I am supervising a four day camping trek for senior students.  The trek is considered to be one of NZ great walks.  NZ great walks are treks that are deemed to be the most scenic and beautiful of the treks in NZ.  I will post a link so you can check it out.  The pictures are coming soon, they aren't going to be as amazing as the last ones for I have been in the city teaching for the past three weeks, but they will be of my home life and of the town of Rotorua.  I made a good start on them yesterday as we had an uncanny sunny day, but today is down pouring like I have yet to see it here!  I hope all of you are having a great week and I will post you later :D  Cheers!
CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THE GREAT WALK!

Rainy Days...

Well it has rained almost straight for an entire week...so I really don't have any good exciting adventures to post.  School is going well I have almost finished my observation periods and am prepping to take over four classes a day.  The classes I will be taking over are two year 10 science classes (akin to freshman).  One class is the best and brightest of the year 10's and the other is the worst behavior kids of year 10.  The other two classes are senior chemistry classes.  One class I have free range of the curriculum (minus four students I will be tutoring) and the other class I will be teaching organic chemistry.
Rainy days...what do you do on a soggy mess of a rainy day in Rotorua on a saturday?  You go to the pub and watch  rugby and have a few pints.  Then watch a movie in the cinema that came out in the states three months ago!
The only good story I have from NZ is I went to a dinner at one of the guys house whom I play badminton with.  It was a potluck feed so random assortments of pizza, fish and chips, Chinese food, roasted trout and all sorts of other good things too eat.  I had four massive helpings of main course and two massive helpings of desert (plus several beers).  I was so full I didn't want to move off the couch and kept commenting on how "stuffed" I was.  It wasn't until I was laying in bed did I realize why people were acting a bit funny around me during the end of the evening.  Stuffed in NZ is the same as the F word, so me saying I'm stuffed is the same as me saying I'm FU#$#%   !!!!!  Hope you all have a great week to come!  Cheers

My day off

Today I had the day off because the teachers were on strike...what a great day!  The day started off right by me sleeping in.  I had originally planned on doing a bit of riding for a lady with a large ranch (its calving season here right now), but I could not get ahold of her.  For the morning I cooked up a large helping of bacon and eggs and made delicious bacon and egg toast sandwiches then I caught a ride to the race track.  For some reason the race committee decided to hold their races on Wednesday so I spent the morning and into the afternoon drinking coffee (which soon turned to beer once the sun came out) and watching horse race after horse race (3000 meter steeple chase).  I even got the chance to talk to some of the trainers and owners.  Dang one horse owner I was talking to had three horses racing that day (each of them about $75,000 a piece, $10,000 stud fee!).   The rest of the afternoon I spent at the gun club shoot several rounds of trap and skeet.  For the finale of the day I made home made pizza for every body in the house!   Mmmm going to bed with a day full of relaxed adventure and a full tummy....life is good in the land of the kiwi's   Take care :D  

NZ School System

I have been meaning to post the contrast between USA education system and the New  Zealand education system, but I wanted to get a good picture of how things worked before I wrote anything.  Here we go...

One of the best innovations in the NZ (New Zealand) school system is what is called interval.  Interval is like recess for high schoolers!  During the middle of the morning there is a half hour break for the students and the teachers.  The students eat junk food and horse around while the teachers get coffee and tea (well I am stuffing my face as well with my running my metabolism is crazy).
The rest of the system is pretty bazaar in my thoughts, with the idea of learning and students in mind.  There is no percentage grading.  The grading goes by three standards Achieved, Merit, Excellent.   These are achieved by getting a certain amount of problems right for each category. What is strange is that there is no differentiation between some one who barley makes the category and some one who aces the test.  For exampled a quiz with 10 problems on it, to get an Excellent a student must get 7/10 correct, a student who scores a 7/10 gets the same mark a student who gets 10/10.
The next strange thing in the education system is that there is no such thing as failing a grade.  If a student doesn't pass a year they....move on to the next year...  I don't understand the rational behind this, supposedly it is more detrimental to the student to hold them back and have a discontented social experience than actually learning the level they are at.  Can you imagine how difficult this makes teaching students here?  If a student doesn't pass a year how are they supposed to pass the next year...!!  When did this country decide the social aspect was more important than learning I do not know.  Mind you all I am not saying this to put the country down or run down the education system, it is just as an educator myself it is hard to see this.  
The last major thing that I have noticed was that all the students are grouped into their years by their abilities.  Well of course me being the new American I am going to be given the class tagged 10B1.  This means that of all the students of year 10, which is akin to our freshman every problem student is stuffed into one class.  This segregation goes all the way up to "extension" classes.  These are the brightest and best the year has to offer.  How crazy is this every student in each separate section believes they are where they are.  The bottom only achieves what is expected of the bottom because that is where the school and society has put them.  This is so frustrating, where is the achievement and pride of work?!  Anyways these are the most major things that I have noticed so far, but I still have three and a half more months so I will keep an eye out for other things so you all can get a good picture of NZ.  Tomorrow I have the day off as the teachers are going on strike...what to do..  There is an Alaskan woman that teaches at the school whom offered me some time at their ranch to ride some of their horses.  Then in the afternoon my host family is going to take me to shoot some skeet.  We shall see how well I do at this for I haven't a lot of experience in shooting skeet.  I did how ever kick major butt when we went shooting rabbits!  I didn't miss a shot and all were in the head.  Well I will keep you all posted if I keep talking about what I'm going to do I won't have anything to post later.  Take care and have a good week!  Cheers

First week at Rotorua in rewind

I arrived in Rotorua a week ago...yesterday here is whats happened so far.  The day I arrived I headed out from Auckland at 8 in the morning with my good friend I made Joe.  We would have made it to Rotorua on Friday but the bus system can be a bit wonky at times so in order to save almost 50 dollars we bused from Paihia to Auckland and stayed at the base Auckland for the night.  That was a most interesting night we walked around Auckland and found a Chinese restaurant to eat.  Well lets say I didn't know I was still in Auckland we were the definite minority in the restaurant, I didn't even know what I had ordered but they came out looking like chicken nuggets so I was really excited...only to find out they still had bones in them.  Has anyone tried to eat fried chicken bits with bones in them with chopsticks?   I think I would hold the world record for flying chicken bits!  the whole staff was taking turns watching me try to eat these things, finally I just ate them  like extremely tiny chicken wing.  In the end I gave up the amount of food wasn't worth the work around the bones and headed to get a milk shake from Wendy's down the road.
Anyways back to Saturday.  I arrive at Rotorua at noon and said good bye to my friend Joe and was picked up by my host families son Harley.  Harley dropped me off at the house and said good luck mate we'll be back and the parents will be back.  So there I was alone in a house that I didn't even know...crazy for them to trust me so explicitly that they just drop me off.  Harley had just returned from Australia working on an open pit gold mine.  He and his wife didn't have a place to live as she (Shonna) went into labor 5 weeks early, lucky that Harley flew in from Australia early!  Everybody came home at the same time and I met Allan and Marry who own the house, their son and his wife (Harley and Shonna) and the newest member of the family Georgia. 
Sunday September 5 happens to be New Zealand's fathers day so every one was off out and about while I was left to my own devices.  I happened to get ahold of my cooperating teacher so I got a crash course of the layout of the school and what I needed to wear and where to go.   Monday...I was instructed to be at school at a quarter to eight for a teachers meeting.  Well the meeting didn't start tell half past eight so I felt kinda strange sitting in the lounge by myself for near an hour.  Beside that thought the week went off with out a hitch and I am becoming very comfortable with the school the students and the teachers.  To go into everything that happened would take forever so I will highlight the important things. 
Tuesday: I went for a run in the Redwoods with my cooperating teaching, a slow pace but the forest is beautiful and it was a relaxing 10k. 
Thursday:  I went for a run with my cooperating teachers son who is in impeccable shape.  I hadn't ran very much in the last few weeks and it was all I could do to not loose my pre-run banana.
Friday: I made it through all my classes and went and played badminton with my cooperating teacher for 2.5 hours (plus all the club members).  One of the club members is an old wily Canadian who would trash me at the game with out breaking a sweat!  After getting beat horribly by every one in the club we headed to a local pub called the Pig and Whistle, named and established in an old cop shop.  Mmmmm good New Zealand fish and chips with several pints of beer, a great way to end the week.
The week wasn't as exciting as I had hoped, mainly because it has been raining nearly non-stop so most activities outdoors were limited by the massive amounts of water pouring from the sky.  Saturday I grabbed the bus and explored the city trying to get my bearings of the area but that got cut very short by the rain.  Sunday, well today...tomorrow for all of you.   Today I went to church in the morning, read a bit then explored the hot springs.  There are an amazing amount of geothermal activity in this area and my host family took me out to check them out and to one of the hot springs you can go swim in (however Yellowstone makes this place seem small) the rest of the day was spent soaking in a hot spring and eating good food!  That is pretty much the week in a nutshell, I am going to get some more photos out soon.  Take Care, Cheers!

More Photos

Beautiful Yellow Flower

 

Swinging on a vine!

Ahhh reflecting...

candle light dinner

sunrise in paihia

perspective of house and light house

Long shot of hole in the rock and tip of the light house

Bay Adventure Hostel in Paihia

Sky tower in Auckland (too bad it is so expensive to go up in it)

Base Auckland Hostel

Gull in sunrise

Mmm supper cooked by a French/Tahiti gal

Joe and I two hours to finish!

So here are a few more pictures thanks for being patient while you all wanted to see some of New Zealand!  Cheers

The people you met.....so far.

So far my journey has been more or less been summarized by my blogs posts.  However the people I have met on my journey have played a key role in my experience so far here so I decided to dedicate this post to every person I have met that have made a contribution that is worth noting on the entire journey.  I apologize every one but I have a hard time remembering names so some of the names might get well lost in translation.

A notable mention before I start mentioning the living people was the pilot I saw coming out of the plane in a casket with a full honor guard in Billings MT.  He was a helicopter pilot that was shot down the first week he was in Vietnam.  His family had been trying to recover his body since, and finely a fallen brother has come home to rest.

The first interesting person I met on the plane is one of the nameless but I remember him well.  He was an aeronautical engineer and was doing airplane tests up on the high line.  The reason he is well remember is because it was great to sit next to a guy that designed and tested every aspect of commercial airplanes, I was able to ask him every question I could think of about commercial airplanes while we were flying (its a nerd thing).  This was on the flight from Billings to Denver

The next interesting person was a Maori decedent (native New Zealander) whom was on the way back from Salt Lake city where he and his American wife and just gotten married in the Mormon temple. He was a really nice man and we talked religion for several hours and in the end he invited me to go and stay with him and his wife in the city of Hamilton. At the end of the flight he had a bunch of fruit from America that had to be disposed of because of customs so he gave me a lot of fruit which I chowed!  This was on the flight from San Fransisco to Auckland.

I finally made it to New Zealand and the first two people I really met were.....drum roll a guy from France and and guy from India.  The guy from France really has nothing notable to add to the pot of interesting people but the guy from India gave me quiet a laugh.  I am in the bar at the base of the hostel drinking a beer and this guy from India comes up and challenges me to a game of pool.  Now I am not very good at pool but hey what the heck.  This guy was talking non stop about how good he was at cricket, and pool.  Well lets just say he won the first game, but after I started to get a few beers in my my game drastically improved, its just a pity I wasn't playing for money cause at the end there was one tipsy American and one very pissed guy from India as I ended up cleaning up the floor with him at pool. (this was in Auckland at the Globe bar)

One guy I met in Paihia made it to the honorable mention list.  He was at the Mako bar outside having a beer.  Well needless to say I ended up stopping and having a few beers with this guy that looks he should have been playing Moby Dick in a movie.  I think I only understood half of what he said because his accent was so think as he was from the UK originally and moved to New Zealand.  He would laugh and say something and I would pound my beer and laugh at the appropriate spots and I apparently made an impression even though I didn't know half of what he was saying.

The next notiable person I met was Joe.  Well his original name wasn't Joe, but that is what I called him as he was German and I couldn't remember his real name.  Joe was a mechanical engineer from Germany that landed a really great job and wanted to live a bit before he became a slave to the machine.  I had been in Paihia for two days and had my room all to my self so I was a bit unhappy that I had a room mate.  He was typical german tall, big , blond hair and accent.  Within the first few moment Joe and I got along.  Some how among all the hundreds of Germans traveling around New Zealand I met one that was a perfect compatible personality to mine own.  He mentioned this hike he wanted to do but had no one to do it with.  Here I was thinking, what the heck am I going to do with this time I have tell I start teaching??   So I volunteered to hike with him but we had no way to get to the trail head.  We finally worked every thing out over some BBQ hamburgers and from then until I got to Paihia we were attached at the hip (not literary hahaha).  We had some amazing conversations, because what else are you going to do when you are hiking for 12 hours.  It seems that we both had a very similar view on life, his just in German and mine in American.  Joe was one of the great friends I have made here and hope to meet some other people like him because he was a great friend.


John.  Well john is one of the most interesting characters I have met so far bar none, not as good as friend as Joe, but very interesting.  He was born in Zimbabwe and from there he traveled the world from the UK to Egypt to India...and on and on.  Some of the stories this guy had were so unique I would be hard pressed to reproduce them.  In the end he was working for this hostel part time with his van set up to sleep in and move on when he felt the need to roam.  Very few people at the hostel got close to him however with a little Montana hospitality we became fast friends. John was our transportation to and from the trail head.

Marry.  Marry was one of the last people to add to the list in that she showed up at the hostel right before we treked out to the cape and then left the same day we did.  She was originally from France, but had moved around the world and was currently residing in Tahiti teaching french and scuba diving.  She had some amazingly great stories and was so engaging when you talked to her that you couldn't help being drawn into conversation.  The interesting thing was John very interested in Marry, but Marry was just interested in living.  However Marry went along with us to the trail head and also was along for the pick up.  John was taking her fishing and she promised us that she would have fresh fish for us when we were done.  True too her word she caught a fish and cooked joe and I some great food after our trek, the highlight being us watch her eat the fish eyes in true Tahiti fashion. 

The final evening before we all left we went out to the local pub and drank beer and had a great time with stories and laughter.  Here is to all my friends I have made so far and the people I have met so far.  Cheers

PICTURES

me looking sexy with great scenery!

Wine in a coke bottle after the trek

DONE!

light house at cape brett

Rainbow on the coast

Coffee break on the way back

Cape Brett trek (cape brett is at the very end of this near the start of the surf caused by the boat)

The crew john (Zimbabwe) joe (Germany) marry (France/Tahiti)

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Cape Brett

Okay so I finally have a chance to sit down and type another entry!   Cape Brett.   Wow this was a very amazing trek and highly recommended to any who come to New Zealand.  The more famous recognition of cape Brett is the hole in the rock scene which you can take a boat through if you want to pay 100 dollars for the cruise.  The unknown part is that you can trek to the light house and stay at the lighthouse keepers old house.  We hired a guy to drop us off at the trail head, which ended up being an hour and a half (including a ferry ride) drive.  When we got to the trail head we didn't actually know it, all it said was scenic reserved with a fancy carved gate.  We then hiked by trail markers an hour and a half before we even found a trail sign.  The hike takes you along the ridge of multiple steep hills (about 300 meter climbs) then once on top you immediately drop and then climb again.  The hike turned to be quiet strenuous because of the constant ascending and descending.  The view however was epic, I have never seen anything like it.  Hiking along a sheer cliff with 400+ meter drop meeting the water then on the other side of the ridge blue green water with hundreds of small islands.  It looked as if we were in the movie the lost world with strange plants, bird calls and fantastic views.  After 6.5 hours of hiking we made our final ascension and started down to the light house, then descended another 500 meters to the light keepers house.  The house renovated by DOC (department of conservation)  was simply beautiful.  Pure white on the outside with beautiful hardwood floors inside.  We ate a snack of tuna fish and crackers with wine (hahaha I packed 2 liters of Merlot 20k) then took pictures of the beautiful sunset.  There is no electricity but there was water (collected by a rainwater cistern) and propane gas.  We ate baked beans and spaghetti and relaxed by the light of candles as the sun set at 6:30.  We got up the next morning and ate some fruit and snack bars with a cup of coffee and saw black clouds rolling in. We didn't know if it was going to rain so we decided to pack up and hoof it out.  It didn't end up raining until we made it to the trail head, but if it would have started raining we would not have been able to hike back for the trail would turn from difficult to deadly in a matter of minutes.  The hike back took about 5 hours as we were afraid for rain.  Halfway back we decided that we had crossed the most treacherous part of the hike and took an hour break to cook some rice on a camp stove and drink some hot coffee.  The view we stopped at was as usual very spectacular.  We stopped at a grassy patch on top of one of the hills over looking several beautiful green islands.  The rest of the hike went on with out a hitch and we made it back 2 hours before our transport was supposed to pick us up.  So...with extra wine we went to the beach and killed the rest of the wine and ate our avocado we had been saving.  The rain started at that point and our transport was an hour and a half late, but with just a bit of chill we made it back and hit the hot tub and ate some great food.  Yet again another computer that won't accept my pictures...have patience and I will find one that I can upload from.  Cheers!