– Did you know that the rest of the world calls the letter “Z” zed? I didn’t, but it’s true.
– I’m sorry to report that we are not any better at mastering the New Zealand accent. Although it is in the same general family as the British/Irish/South African/Australian ones, the Kiwi one is definitely unique. I met an Australian woman doing laundry the other day and we got to chatting about accents and language. I mentioned that we’re learning that some of the words we use are American English (like apparently the letter z!) She replied, Honey, American English ain’t English. I refrained from replying, Honey, ain’t ain’t a word in any language.
– Speaking of laundry, doing laundry (in a machine!) every four days (coinciding with the number of underwear and socks we own) is pure decadence.
– Speaking of accents, on the radio the other day, the Kiwi radio host was making fun of quote, ridiculous British accents, end quote.
– Speaking of Britain, talk of the Royal Wedding was EVERYWHERE in New Zealand on Friday. (Yes, I watched. Yes, I loved her dress!)
– You knew it was coming, but I am over this campervan. Being hemmed in by the rain doesn’t help and we find ourselves venturing out to eat more and more despite the crazy prices. I swear the campervan is getting smaller. As I write this, winds and rain howl at our campground outside our campervan shaking it from side to side. We didn’t have power at the campground when we arrived but it came back on a few hours ago. Driving here today, the winds whipped everything sideways. Luckily, not our campervan, although it seemed like a distinct possibility at times. The tall roof is like a sail. Everywhere we go, we hear how the weather just took a turn for the worse or that it’s going to be an early winter. Except for two glorious days in Rotorua, it’s been nothing but buckets of rain since we got to the North Island.
– It’s May 1: twelve days until home and less than two days until we re-enter the United States. Insane.
– Except, really, it’s twelve or two plus one. In the most exciting news around these parts, we discovered that we’ll be time travelling on Tuesday and experiencing May 3 twice. Yesterday, we finally took a closer look at the crazy flight we booked back in January. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to add a Hawaii stopover in for super cheap prices. What we forgot about was the many legs of flying required to get those cheap prices. Going by the local time at each stop, we fly from Auckland to Fiji at around 1:00 on May 3. We then have an 8 hour layover, and take off again at 11:59 on May 3. We then land for an hour at Christmas Island (which apparently is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and luckily is not the Christmas Island over in the Indian Ocean) around 6:30 a.m. on May 4. Then, in the really mind blowing part, we fly for a couple of hours more to Hawaii, and land around 10:30 a.m. Except, it won’t be May 4 like we thought. Because we cross the international date line, it will be 10:30 a.m. on May 3. So that means we have 8 nights in Hawaii, not 7. An extra day in Hawaii? Awesome. Too bad we booked our interisland flight from Oahu to Kauai and rental car on Hotwire starting on May 4. Oops.
I can confirm it is pronounced zed in Canada too.
We had two Christmases when we flew home from NZ, it was kind of neat because we got free champagne on all our flights.
The Canadians too? I had no idea!