Hello Everyone!

Yesterday was a Halloween and you wouldn't have guessed it by looking
outside. Here is a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween. There
were the few Americans and Canadians that decided to throw a couple
parties and light a few fireworks, but that was just about it.
Everyone else carried on with life as normal… which I found odd.

I'm in Wellington these days, the capital of NZ. The city is built
right of the southern coast of the northern island. It's a beautiful
and clean city. The weather is perfect, one day cloudy, the next sunny
and the following a mix of cloudy cool weather with some wind and some
sun. Due to its location, Wellington is supposed to be the windiest
city in NZ, and no one doubts that so to say the least I think I have
yet to see the true meaning of windy…. Oh yeah and the city is built
on a fault line… so someday in the near future they expect the entire
city to collapse… I'm dead serious… till then I enjoy calling it home
:-)

I found a great apartment last week! It's actually a pretty big place
and pretty cheap to. It's located just behind the downtown area, so
it's a close walk to everything, and it has a remote feeling to it.
There is a small school right next to the apartments and plenty of
beautiful places to go for a morning jog. The roommates, or flatmates
as they call them over here, are a couple of girls. One is 19, and the
other is 18… I haven't met the 18yr old, but the 19yr old is a lot of
fun to hang out with. I know you are all thinking to yourselves, "what
the heck is going through his head?!", in all honesty, I went looking
for the younger roommates so I wouldn't be bored and sitting in a flat
all by myself. I came for a good time, and who better to show it to me
then these girls. Oh yeah, the drinking age is 18 over here, which I
will come back to later.

I'm still looking for a job, actually I'm waiting for Starbucks to
call me back, along with another café manager. Hopefully one of the
two will call me this week.

I think I broke the world record… one week after going to Starbucks
and I am now getting free coffee! Oh yeah!... And it didn't come from
the girl that I have been hanging out with. I guess I haven't
mentioned much about her. Well let's see, her name is Jessie and she
is from Canada. You don't see many Canadians or Americans traveling in
NZ, so when we do meet, we tend to have a lot to share and talk about.
Plus she works for Starbucks and also worked for Starbucks in Canada,
which means we could talk about customers and different business
practices for days on end. There are always good stories to talk about
like, those customers who come in looking for espresso brownies
everyday (Dad and Bob), or those who know exactly how their drinks
should taste because they visit Starbucks too often (again Dad and
Bob!), then again… those are the customers that can turn a bad day
into a really good one by just showing up. :-)

Jessie has pretty much turned into my Wellington tour guide. She took
me to the botanical gardens (pics on ringo) on Monday, and shows me a
lot of the great shopping and eating places. And she has become my NZ
linguist. Over here they have a lot of weird words, some of which I am
still picking up, but what's weirder is that they say the most common
words in a manner which I just don't understand. It turns out that
they just like to drop the "r"s out of all the words. So Starbucks
turns into "Stabucks", and Garden turns into "Gaden"… I'd love to know
who decided that would be a good accent to teach kids!

Coming back to the drinking age… over here is it 18 and of course they
are thinking about raising it to 21. mainly because a lot of the kids
are drinking and driving. Just as big of a problem seems to be the
speeding. With NZ being a pretty spaced out country, its easy to get
on a motorway (highway) and in five minutes you are pretty much in the
middle of nowhere. Where it doesn't make sense to have police
patrolling because it is too far from town, and it is too hard to
monitor. So when these kids do get into accidents, it can be awhile
till anyone finds them and normally the collision is so bad that
everyone dies. So what's one of the best ways to make people aware of
this issue? Advertising of course! And in NZ they hold nothing back.
Ads that would be seen as too emotional are played over and over here.
And a lot of the ads that are on TV will be 2parts. During the first
week they will air the first part of the ad, and the second week they
will air the first and second part of the ads.

One of the commercials starts off with a girl coming home with a
terrible hangover, the second commercial she will realize that she
blacked out, doesn't know who she had sex with, but is pretty sure she
didn't use any protection and then she mentally breaks down, while her
roommate asks her why she does this to herself every weekend. They are
pretty emotional and shocking commercials, and there are a lot of
them. Billboards on the highways say things like "Slow Down" and then
the next one will say "We are killing our kids." I was driving in the
southern part of the south island I saw my favorite one, which
actually freaked me out… the first one of course said "Slow Down" and
then next one wasn't a billboard, it was a sign where you would see
facts like "City Name, Population etc" and on the sign it clearly
stated "No Hospital, No Doctor, One Cemetery"… that alone made me want
to drop the speed down to about half of the limit. And I wasn't
speeding!

Well it's about 10am over here and finally the shops are opening up so
I think I am going to do some grocery shopping. I'd love to hear how
everyone is doing. And thank you so much to those who sent me snail
mail, it's really cool to get hand written letters over here… plus it
gives me something to brag about to those in the hostel :-)

The wanna be Kiwi,

Marcus