Day 1- Jet lag

"I hopped of the plane at LAX" and immediately found my fellow UVMers. As one of the only elementary education study abroad options, there are quite a few of us in New Zealand for the semester.    Six of us in total went through a study abroad company called "Global Links Learning Abroad". The company set up our housing for us as well as planned trips and flights. The first week in New Zealand is known as our "Bridging Cultures Program".  Essentially, we spend some time getting to know some other Americans who are going to the same college (Auckland University of Technology) and get acquainted with the country and do some cool stuff.

These UVM friends were all girls who I had had class with, but never really hung out with other than doing school work. Six hours waiting for our next flight definitely lent us some serious bonding time. We met a couple of other kids who were in Global Links as well, and we boarded the plane.

As most people know, (or unless you've lived under a rock the past 10 years) the Lord of the Rings movies as well as the Hobbit were all filmed in New Zealand. So naturally, one would assume that would be a source of pride for Kiwis. But I would now have to say that the word "pride" is bit of an understatement. As shown by the Flight Safety video shown to start off our 12 hour flight.

I bet you can all guess what the top 3 movies were on the flight there?? 

For those of you who don't know, Auckland is New Zealand's largest city. It is located on the North Island and contains about 1 million of the 4 million total population. Once we arrived at the Auckland International Airport, we met up with the rest of our Global Links Group. There were 24 of us in total, and we were brought to our hotel to drop off our stuff. As Vermonters, we had the furthest flights of everyone in the group, and our dragging feet showed it. 

We had our first of 3 info sessions to acquaint ourselves with some of the New Zealand culture and history and then we hit the water front. It was positively beautiful, especially when knowing that this was to be my city for the next 12 weeks. 

After my first LEGAL beer (sorry mom and dad.... you knew it would happen eventually) we hit up a cheesy Italian Restaurant and headed to bed. I would have explored Auckland all that night, but jet lag got the best of me. The next day we headed for Rotorua.