Life as of now.

Hello all,

First off, this is a picture of the front of the Te Papa museum, the national museum of NZ in Wellington. Up to this point in life, I'm having a blast! New Zealand continues to amaze me. There have been no more trips or pepper spraying so in that sense, things have calmed down. We all know the city a lot better and classes have started. And with the classes, I have found a new love in my life... architecture. I have enough interest in it that a master's in architecture could be a real possibility. I don't know if it is the type of work it is (or lack of work coming from engineering) or its the design/ artistic appeal but I'm having so much fun with it. The only problem is that its expensive from supplies to getting things printed to more supplies. So my two architecture classes are going well, I'm also taking an Economics class and a Maori culture class (the Maori people are the indigenous people of NZ). The econ class is tough because it's all New Zealand econ, so it takes a lot more effort to get to where the other students are. And the Maori class is like a foreign language but I'll get through it. Here are two pictures of my first architecture project; We had to pick a quote about architecture and advertise it and make it into a billboard. So this is a picture I took of one of the buildings here and I printed it on draft paper so light can go through. I then got foam board and carved out the word "Beauty" into it and taped the picture to the board. This is so when the sun shines on it, if it were a billboard, the word would come thru the picture. And when it was dark it would just be architecture. It may help that the quote i picked was "The sun never knew how great is was until it struck the side of a building" by Louis Kahn. The first picture is the picture I took printed on the paper and the second is the project in the sun showing the word. You can see how big the paper is because in the second photo thats my thumb on the bottom.

Nothing too much has been happening beside all these architecture projects. The weather has been all over the place. One day it starts raining the next its 23 degrees Celsius... around 73 or 74 Fahrenheit. They also call Wellington the windy city of New Zealand, we have gusts of up to around 85 mph so it shakes the windows a little. Also, I almost forgot to mention, I made the soccer team here for the university. The tryout went well and the coach liked the way I played so I went to two other tryouts and made the team. Its a competitive team so its not just social play but I'm just really excited to get to play again. The first game is in a couple weeks so I will be sure to tell everyone how it all goes. And as of now, I'm just waiting for our Easter holiday which starts at the end of March. I'm taking a trip to tour the south island for 8 days. The first day we take a bus ride to the Franz Josef glacier. We sleep the night there and wake up to get fitted to our hiking boots and our ice picks. We spend around 6 or 7 hours hiking the glacier exploring ice ravines and caves. AFter we get off the glacier we spend the night in Franz Josef until the next day when we depart for Queenstown and Lake Mathieson. Hopefully we are able to arrive early enough to see the lake in the morning but its all dependent on everyone else. We then see what they call New Zealand's most bizarre attraction, "Puzzling World." The next day we get to go jet boating in the Shotover River. Once we are done, we get off the boat and immediately head up to do our bungee jump. Its 440ft high and its in the home of bungee jumping where it was first started, here in NZ. Then after we jump in 7.5 seconds of freefall, we go to the mountain luge course and do that for a couple hours. The next day is a free day with options like sky diving, canyon swinging, white water rafting, or something else crazy so it will be an exciting two days to say the least. Then we leave Queenstown and the last 2 days are for our own exploring and partying so it will be fun! Thats my trip, and only the first week of my break. We haven't decided what to do for the second week of the holiday but I'm sure we'll land on something.

So with the exception of school work, I still am having the time of my life! I mean we have a lot of European friends and the other night they made us stay out till 6 in the morning! So its a blast. So I will leave you with a couple more pictures of Welly.

-Karl

Also if anyone wants to add to the "Karl Needs Money" fund, just contact me and I can give you further details of the donation process. Thanks you.

Abel Tasman

I'm back! Classes have started and they are all pretty awesome. Except I think I need to pick up on more class. But that's neither here nor there. The big thing that has happened was our trip to the south island last week. We did it as cheap as we could so it brought up many troubles that proved to be a lot of fun. So the story begins.

We had an idea to go on a trip the week before classes started and everything we had planned fell through or was too expensive. The problem with traveling in NZ is that it is expensive because you need to take buses everywhere and pay for the camping sites and such. But after all previous trip ideas failing, George, Sam, Dave, and I decided to just pack up and go to the south island. No plans, no idea of what to do except camp and hike. So we packed our bags for 4 days of hiking, jumped on the ferry to go to the south island, and started our adventure.

We got off the ferry in the town of Picton where we caught a 3 hour bus ride to the town of Nelson. Now we were suppose to catch the next bus to Marahau to start our hike but that left before our bus in got to Nelson. So we had to spend the night in Nelson. We had a map and on the map we saw which campsite to go to but we had a whole day to hang out before we would go to the campsite... bad idea. On the bus, we were talking about food and that is when George realized that he had forgot the stove and pans. So in Nelson we had to stock up on what we could carry/ live off of for the next 3 nights. And we didn't have a tent because they were too expensive so we bought blue tarps for each ourselves. After we stocked up with blue tarps, twine, apples, trail mix, and matches, we went to explore. As we were exploring the beaches we began to get hungry so we stopped at this little pizza place that was ok, nothing great, then we stopped at a liquor store to stock up on the important stuff. And at this point it was dark and time to find our campsite. But lucky for us as we were walking, it started to pour. Luckily we bought trash bags so after we were soaked, we got under a tree and put trash bags over our packs to waterproof them. We ended up getting lost for 15 minutes but finally came across our campsite where we were planning on building our tent with blue tarp and twine, in the rain. Thank god it was only 3 dollars more to stay in a cabin so we did that instead. We got beds, pillows, a TV, and dry shelter. It was amazing because it allowed us to let everything dry, repack our bags, and relax about it. Oh and we could shower so it was a good night.

The next morning we got at it and had our last real meal at the McDonald's for breakfast. Now we got to hop on the bus to Marahua which was another 2 hours long. But we finally made it to our destination and from there we decided our plans for the next 3 days. We were going to hike to Bark's Bay which was a SEVEN HOUR hike and then camp there. Then the next day we would get up and hike back 4 hours to watering cove, stay the night there, then make the 3 hour hike back by 12:45 and catch the bus back home. The first hike was incredible yet unincredible. The views and the scenery was amazing because we would be hiking on the coast overlooking the ocean then we would take a corner and be in a legit jungle. But I had a lot of stuff on my back (food, tarp, sleeping bag, beer, vodka, etc.) and walking up mountains for 7 hours takes a toll. But after some detours, rest stops, and picture spots we arrived at the bay in time to still have sunlight and set up our tent. It was pretty ghetto but we did it and it kept us dry so we were happy. We ate our cookies and power bars and drank some while fishing on a rock that night. Oh ya in Nelson when we had to sleep there, we decided to get little hand fishing rods (little wooden dowels with green yarn and a hook) and some bait. We knew it was a lost cause but it was fun. After our binding time we went to sleep, not a very comfortable slumber, but a slumber nonetheless. A side note that I forgot to mention was that for dinner, we planned on being able to make a fire and cook something somehow but when we got to the trail, there was a fire bad because of the weather so no fires for us. And to top things off, we also didn't have a map to go along with our no stove, no tent, no food...

The night went on with a scare from a possum going through our stuff and we had to scare it off. But other than that it was uneventful. We woke up to big, dark rain clouds so it forced us to put a little hop in our step and get moving before we got rained on. The rain luckily never came but it made us more prepared, i.e. putting our rain jackets on the top of our bags. We had to get out of there by ten because we had to make it to the low tide track on time. This low tide track took an hour off the walk, but like it sounds, it had to be low tide to take it. The tide here rises and falls about every 5 hours we decided and it rises about .5- 1 meter tall so its quite the change. We got to the crossing a little early so we took that time to rest, throw on a bathing suits, do some drinking, fishing, and swimming. It was a good break and we actually almost caught a fish. They were just too small, but they loved the bait and were nipping at it constantly. After the tide went down some more, we got dressed and left. Funny side story was that coming to the bay the first day, we took the same crossing but still had to take our shoes off because there were still some big rivers that we couldn't jump over. But this time, the rivers were still there but we didn't want to take off our shoes so we kept looking for branches and such to use as bridges. We succeeded until the last big river where we almost took off our shoes. But at that moment, an Australian guy who was camping next to us saw us and asked if we needed help. He ended up carrying all of us across the river on his shoulders. It was a lot of fun. But we soon got to Watering Cove.

We were hoping for a campsite that had a handful of people, and trees so we could string up our tent. This site had no one there (which would be awesome if we had our own stove) and it had no trees. and it had no drinkable water. All the water had to be treated or boiled... So after we settled in, we went for an hour hike to the next site to get some water while one of the guys stayed back and built the tent. The tent/ structure ended up working out really well for us and we got it done early. So we decided to do some fishing. after an hour, I end up catching two fish (about 7 inch Snappers) and it made our day. We were all so excited and it took the depression out. And as we started fishing, a German couple got there and said they would lend us their stove. Also at the last site we saw a couple cook mussels in a pot so we wanted some too. We went out swimming and gathered a bag full of fresh mussels. We filleted the fish and cooked the mussels that night. We went from starving and surviving on bread and power bars to having freshly caught mussels and fish on a beach in New Zealand. It was a great night. We went to bed full and happy. That was our night.

We woke up a little late but still got out of there in good timing. We took our time walking back and we made it in time to catch the next bus and get a good meal in the town. We slept on the way back and at around 9:30 pm, we got home. All in all, the trip didn't go as planned, but that is what made it so much fun. It was also great because I didn't get sunburned because of my awesome hat! And that was our Abel Tasman trip.