Jen Hillam: Wellington, All Blacks, Tasman Sea and Otaki!

Chickens pecking my toes!

Bears together!

Cheesy Picture that people do at the beach

Polar bear?

Otaki Beach

The Stadium!

Testing our stride lengths

As they say here, "Sweet As"

There has been so much happening I can't behind on my blog or I will forget something. But from my last entry we had an indoor soccer game friday and we lost 2-5 but I scored with a nice little nutmeg on the keeper literally 5 seconds after I went in. It was great.

But then for Saturday...was epic. I woke up at 7 and went to the farmers market with Zaki, Giso, Zaki's friend with a car Chelsey, and our neighbor Rashmi. The market is awesome! I will never buy fruits or vegetables at the grocery store every again here. It is so much cheaper and more fresh, plus it is fun to go to. But I spent probably like $10 or $15 and got so much fruit and veges!

Oh those jumping photos

After the market I met up with more neighbors to go to Wellington. It was one of the girls birthdays so we had birthday cake for breakfast that had delicious frosting that tasted like fudge. We had 8 people just with us, mostly international students, a lot of which are the girls I hang out with here. Ema from Canada, Julianna from Germany, Franziska from Germany, Shobeck (Indian but from Auckland), Anja from Germany, Jess from Germany, and Benedict from France. On our way our cars got a bit separated so our car stopped in Otaki at the first place we could find, which happened to be a rose garden. There weren't any roses yet but we made friends with the lady there and some chickens. After the other car caught up we went to the town where they have a lot of good outlet shopping, so we stopped and some people did some shopping. I bought a few souvenirs type stuff because it was definitely the cheapest shop for that I have found. After some shopping we went to the beach on the Tasman Sea! It was pretty windy so we just hung out, took some pictures, and watched the waves for a bit. We had a lot of fun with the pictures though, I will put most of those on facebook. Then back to the road. We made it into Wellington and went to Te Papa which is the national museum. Its true what they say about Wellington...its windy, very windy. The museum was really cool, there was a lot about Maori history and English settlement, they had a special exhibit with a squid, I am not sure if it was an actual "giant squid" but it was giant! They had it floating lying long-ways in a class case of some sort of liquid dead. It was super scary looking, I would never want to find one those while I was scuba diving and their tentacles especially were super intense. They have those suction cups with jagged teeth around them and then also hooks around the cups. But they had a sorts of other exhibits on animals, plants, migration, extinction, war, and more.

Wellington Harbor

Seaweed and driftwood fort

Then it was off to the game! I was so excited!!!! So our seats were all pretty much pairs all over the stadium so Ema and I had our tickets and we were going to try and sit by our friends but we got kicked out so we went to find our other friends on the other side of the stadium. While we were walking around looking for them this big group of people totally decked out in all black stuff and they saw we were lost looking so they asked if they could help and we were just like we are looking for a couple of our friends, then they noticed our accents, canadian and american, and we started talking and they invited us to sit with them on the front and second rows! They gave us flags and got us doing all their cheers and stuff with them. They told everyone we were from Canada because they couldn't remember where I was from. They nick named us Jema (Ema and Jen together). They were like the loyalists of Real games and it was just a big party section. They were like just a couple big families who really loved rugby...and pretty drunk. But super nice drunks. Then a Franziska and Julianna joined us too and it was a blast! It was probably one of the most fun professional sporting events I have ever been too! And I didn't even understand most of the game. We watched all of it and I am catching on, the hardest is just understanding the fouls. But the All Blacks won 40-7. They played South Africa but it was just their B team. Still is was a good game, I wouldn't want to be around that many New Zealanders if they had lost. 10 minutes in to the second half we got kicked out of our seats pretty much because the band that played the halftime show was sitting there, so we moved back a row and then were sitting by the band and some more friendly people. Everyone here is just so fun and they loved talking to us because it was our first game and we were foreigners! We got invited to tons of after parties and made lots of friends! Afterwards the 4 of us girl together were headed to meet up with the people we drove with and looked up at the tv monitor to see them down on the stadium turf getting autographs so of course we went down there! On our way we found 3 more flags when ran onto the field and met 2 of the players! I got autographs from Ben Franks and Cory Jane. I fill like kind of a liar because I don't actually know who they are but I will eventually ha ha. They were huge and really quite nice! It was a great way to top off our experience. After the game we went to a ice cream shop with some of the best ice cream, it was like soft serve mixed with the hard stuff....so good! After all of this we were exhausted and made the 2 hour trek back to palmerston without any more stops and got home about 12:30. It was one incredible day...and very long. There are a bunch of pictures below too!