Sights Last a Second, but FRIENDS Last a Lifetime :) (excuse my cheesiness)

chicken wrap! Mmmm

This weekend was another great one!  On Saturday I my sweet friend Shannon and I had made plans to grab lunch in town, so she picked me up from Uni and we headed down there.  There are a few restaurants downtown that have lunch specials aka $10 or $12 lunch, which is about as good as it gets here price-wise unless you want some takeaway fish and chips or something real casual like that.  We settled for a place called Furnace, chose some outside seating next to the sidewalk, and ate delicious chicken wraps.  After lunch we walked around and found an ice cream/sorbet/froyo place. YUM!  Passing that up was not an option.  Just for the record, I’m totally okay with the lack of self-control that I have when it comes to ice cream or froyo.  They had this machine that mixes the froyo with the fruit and squirts it out into a cone, which just seems like a lot of work compared to Yogurt Mountain/Menchie’s/Sweet CeCe’s style of self-serve with toppings.  Good thing it took me 3 months to find this place.  If anyone is looking to start a business in NZ, a self-serve froyo place would make a FORTUNE over here and you’d be the first!  Anyways, Shannon eventually dropped me back off at Uni with plans to hang out again that night to watch the All Blacks vs France game downtown. Yes please!

YUM!

So that night, I ended up watching the game in the most exciting rugby atmosphere I’ve experienced yet.  They closed off one of the main streets downtown and set up a big-screen in the middle of the road.  It ended up being me, Shannon, her boyfriend Alex, Alex’s sister and her boyfriend, and a few of their friends from church.  We had a prime table outside of one of the bars... the early bird gets the worm once again.  We hung out, chatted, soaked in the atmosphere, and cheered the NZ All Blacks to victory over France. Wooo!  My favorite part is still when they do the Haka before kickoff.  You should watch it on YouTube... just type in some combination of NZ, All Blacks, Haka, rugby, etc and I’m sure you’ll find it.  It’s SO intense and they get so into it! 

The RWC set-up in downtown Hamilton

The “she-must-not-be-from-here” moment of the night (besides me taking pictures of the set-up in the middle of the game): The crowdedness of the area unfortunately did not take away any of the coldness in the air, so I decided to get a cup of tea to help keep me warm.  I walked up to the bar, ordered a Green Tea, the bartender questioned me and then repeated my order once again in the form of a question, and gave me a number to put on my table.  A few minutes later, my tea was delivered... in a teapot with an empty mug by its side.  Wait, I’m sorry, WHAT?!  A teapot at a rugby game is like climbing a mountain in heels (I hope that analogy made sense). You know when you can just feel people staring at you? Yep that’s the feeling I got.  I then realized that I should have asked for takeaway tea so it would’ve come in a little red cup instead of an actual TEAPOT.  I’m sure everyone around me holding beer bottles did a double take and pondered my dainty teapot/rugby watching combination.  Eventually I went and got a to-go cup and poured my yummy, warm, tea in it :)  Nevertheless, it was a great game and a great night.  There’s never a dull moment with Shannon and I always feel like I just laugh the whole time, which isn’t that out of character for me I guess, but she’s just so hilarious… and her and Alex together are such an entertaining duo.  Shannon and I tried to switch accents for some of the night, but she would’ve passed as American, or at least a ditzy valley girl, WAY before I could have been mistaken for a kiwi.  The hilarious part was when she would, in an American accent, say a word wrong and then I would say it right and then she would repeat me and then I would say it again and then she would repeat me again, and we would repeat this process until she got it down. We also coined some American abbreviations/kiwi lingo mixtures... for example, totes as, perf as, probs as.  SO funny.

Shannon, me, and Alex before the game started

On a more serious note, I have really been missing my friends from home lately.  I think it’s kind of hit me that not many people here, maybe like 2 actually, know me on a deeper than surface level.  I am so thankful that I have Shannon as one of these deeper than surface friends here.  She is so genuine, has such a caring and sweet heart, and is just REAL.  This weekend I had a last minute chance to travel to Coromandel, which is a beachy area in the north island not too far away, but I decided that I would rather hang out with Shannon and get the chance to develop a friendship further than spend the weekend with Americans (no offense Americans) and see more sights.  Also, I have to take advantage of my Shanon hangouts when I can since she doesn’t go to my Uni and it’s not everyday that I see her!  This past week I got kind of down when I thought about how I’m not seeing all of New Zealand and got scared that I would get home and realize that I actually barely saw any of it.  Then I found my brain and memory laying on the ground and screwed them back into my head and reminded myself that I have done SO much here already and seen SO much more of NZ than even most kiwis have ever seen.  I came to the realization that it would be impossible to do ALL that I want to do and see ALL that I want to see of this amazing country even in 4+ months; all the more reason to have to come back someday, right? RIGHT!  The weekends are getting slimmer and slimmer, which not only means that I’ll be going home soon (I’ll save the elaboration on that for another post, too many emotions here gosh!), but also that I have to make decisions about what to do with the time that I have left.  Of course the tourist in me (which is actually probs only like 10% of me) wants to travel all around and see all the places that are in all the little booklets, but I really just want to soak up the fact that I am in NZ for another 6 weeks.  To me, that means traveling, yes of course, but it also means devoting time to and soaking up the friendships that I’ve made, the real ones at least.  While it would’ve been ideal to combine traveling to Coromandel and hanging out with Shannon, my motto for this weekend was cheesy but so true: you can see a sight once, but friends can last a lifetime.  SO cheesy and cliché I know I know, but that’s exactly how I felt about it!  No way would I give up time with a real friend (and an amazing family, read on) in a foreign country for some beach (just kidding, I bet it’s super gorgeous out there and not just some ol’ beach).  Don't get me wrong, the sight-seeing is a MUST here, but you know what I mean.

I’m also SO glad that I didn’t go away this weekend because the sermon at church this morning was so great and relatable.  Gosh doe God know what He’s doing or what!  It was on Psalm 13 which reads:

How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

and every day have sorrow in my heart?

How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Look on me and answer, O Lord my God.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;

My enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”

And my foes will rejoice when I fall.

But I must trust in your unfailing love;

my heart rejoices in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord,

For he has been good to me.

I don’t think I realized it until this morning, but this basically sums up how I felt last week and the week before.  Even though I know that God is in control, I kind of felt like He had forgotten about me over here and I just wanted to go home so badly. But like always, the Lord gave light to my eyes, just like the psalmist prays for, and He heard my prayers, which were sometimes in the form of tears.  Although I struggle to think more about God and less about my daily problems and stresses, He still answers prayers by renewing my trust in Him, just like this Psalm says.  It was so comforting to sit there in church this morning and be reminded that not only is Jesus my salvation (and yours!), but since He has already dealt with and conquered sin, the biggest problem of all, then you betcha he’ll deal with all the petty things like homesickness, familysickness, niecesickness, cousinsickness, friendsickness, and furmansickness, among other things… PS how awesome and cool and spectacular and amazing is it that I’m on the other side of the world and yet God still never fails to reach me through the people and the church over here!  It’s so humbling and amazing that He is at work literally everywhere!

Ok this is getting WAY TOO long and I keep getting carried away, but I can’t end this post without my when-I’m-in-town weekly Sunday lunch at the Hemmes’!!! This might be my favorite part of the week.  After church, the first thing Jackie said to me was, “Allison, someone has already invited you over for lunch right?!”  And yep, they had!  I hopped in and went home with them again.  I walked in to a kitchen full of the smell of homemade bread... Mmmmm.  Two of their five kids who are out of the house and on their own (who I had never met) came over for lunch after church as well, so it was a full house!  It was neat to see their whole family interact and be together.  We had savories (aka mini meat pies), bread (I may have eaten half the loaf on my own), and delicious desserts that Lisa had made (I’d say her baking level is professional).  I am SOOO beyond blessed to be included in their fellowship and Sunday lunches after church.  All in all, I am SO glad that the plan was for me to stay in Hamilton this weekend and hang out with Shannon and the Hemmes family!!!

The Hemmes girls--Jackie, Lisa, Carla, Jessica and Me (excuse my awkward squatting)

Shannon and I with our froyo/sorbet :)

As if this post wasn’t long enough already…

Interesting Observations:

-pajamas is spelled with a Y… pyjamas.

-kumara=sweet potato

-They say tomato the opposite way that I (and can I generalize that to all Americans?) say tomato.  That is my best explanation that I can come up with for this observation seeing that I can’t exactly say it in writing... but you know what I mean.

-Daylight savings time was last night.  I lost an hour over here, but the US didn’t…?  I’m really confused as to how there are still 24 hours in the day right now. How does that even work? What?!

-Uni is a ghost town on the weekends.  EVERYONE goes home! What the heck!

-They pronounce garage like gare-edge with the emphasis on gare.  Just sound it out.  I feel like these observations are getting complicated so I’m going to stop now.