You can call me a WWOOFer now!

Orewa beach

the view from the house!

And I’m back.  A day early… but I’m back.

My WWOOFing week in Red Beach went well and it was fun to get to explore another beautiful area of NZ and live with a kiwi family for a week.  There was a German girl, Senara, there WWOOFing as well for the first half of the week and I really enjoyed getting to know her.  She had just gotten to NZ in September and is going to be here for a YEAR just WWOOFing and couch surfing around the country.  The family that I was with had 2 kids, 9 and 10, and lived in a regular house in a suburban type area outside Auckland, not a farm.  I won’t go into the boring details of each day, but the usual routine was: wake up and be upstairs for breakfast by 7:30 (I had no prob with this one bc there were no curtains in my room. Cool.), spend a big chunk of the morning doing whatever Leonie wanted me to do (usually weeding the garden, planting veggies, building beanpoles, doing housework, vacuuming, etc) or go with them if they went somewhere, do whatever I want in the afternoon (aka explore, run, bike, walk, study, basically anything), eat a delish dinner, do the dishes, watch tv with the familiy, go to bed.  It was nice that Leonie really wanted me to feel at home in her house and help myself to anything and everything.  It took a few days for me to get comfortable though; I guess I’m just not one to kick back and put my feet up on someone else’s couch when I first meet them.  Eventually, I think I managed to make myself feel at home (which I will be ACTUALLY and TRULY be feeling in 2 short weeks!).  Leonie also was not very strict about the working hours, but I always felt like I should be doing something.  I probably annoyed her because I asked so often if I could do anything—better that than the other way around though, right?  Oh well.  Their house was about a 5 minute walk to Orewa Beach so I spent a lot of time walking/running/admiring.  There was also an awesome 7k trail around the estuary through the hills and backroads, so I also took advantage of that in the afternoons as well.

best trail ever 

weeding the garden

the bean poles I constructed

Here are some highlights from the week:

-On Sunday, Leonie took the kids to visit her sister in Takapuna.  She dropped Senara and I off in the city and told us to hang out and then eventually walk to her sister’s house via the beach.  Don’t mind if I do!  Senara and I found the Saturday market in Takapuna and it was GIGANTIC.  I’d say there were at least 150 tents set up.  Clothes, souvenirs, yard-sale type stuff, food, fruit, etc.  I caved and got some delicious donuts pictured below. YUM!

the HUGE market

my mini donuts :)  YUM

-One morning, after Senara and I had weeded the garden, I said to her, “So what do you think we should do now?” Her response—“I think we bake a cake now!”  Girlfriend, you may be German and have broken English, but we sure do speak the same language.  We ended up baking delicious cookies! YUM!

-On Tuesday, Senara and I made pancakes for lunch.  These weren’t just regular pancakes though, they were filled with apples and bananas and FOOD COLORING.  We definitely went a little overboard with this, but it was absolutely hilarious.  As we settled down to eat, Senara said, “I had not laugh this hard in long time!”  The pancakes may have looked disgusting, but they were sooo good.  I shall continue the trend at the end of each paragraph… YUM!

-I’ve never really considered myself a picky eater, but I know what I do and don’t like.  The “don’ts” include tuna and olives.  Well, I ate pasta with tuna and olives on Wednesday.  And I LIKED it.  WHO HAS THIS COUNTRY TURNED ME INTO?!

-One afternoon, I went hiking with one of Leonie’s kid’s friend’s family.  We did a perimeter track around a reserve that was right on the coast a few towns down from Red Beach.  It was MUDDY and I had dejavu of that hike with Shannon in August.  I almost cried, once again, because of the amount of wet, nasty mud on my tennies (Lindsey, you feel me right?).  I decided to stick it out and suck it up, and thankfully, it got drier on the other side.  There were gorgeous views out from the green rolling hills into the pacific ocean along the way, with islands scattered about and the coromandel peninsula in the far distance! Amazing!

-On Thursday morning, my answer to Leonie’s task request was: “Yep, sure, I’ll build you a life-size teepee out of bamboo, no problemo.”  Sure enough, about 15 bamboo sticks and 10 zip-ties later, there it was…my teepee masterpiece. 

-A conversation I overheard between Leonie’s 9 year old and his friend:

“Who is that girl anyway?”… "She stays here and does housework and we give her food and a bed”… "Oh that’s cool”… "Yeah, she’s pretty much our maid”

OOOK, kid, NOT cool—I even played connect four with him!  And that’s when I decided to leave a day early.

Overall, I’m glad that I went on this little WWOOFing escapade and got more of a glimpse of the kiwi lifestyle (morning and afternoon tea, not wearing shoes in public places, not having central heating in the house, etc…), but I definitely liked exploring the area and beaches more than doing the housework and dishes, duh!  I was supposed to stay until late Saturday afternoon, but I decided to leave on Friday morning because I felt like I had seen and done all that I wanted to do and didn’t feel like being a 9 year-old’s maid any longer.  I took a bus to Auckland and then caught the NakedBus back to Hamilton and got back just in time to squeeze in a run before dinner!  One of the reasons why I’m glad I WWOOFed with Leonie’s family is because she gave me 2 free entries for the Auckland half-marathon next Sunday! YES PLEASE!  My friend Loren will be running it with me (yeah Loren!)!  We’ll see how that goes with 2 weeks of training… yikes.

Interesting Observations:

-How are you going?=How are you doing?

-“bugger off” = “go away” Example: “You’re really annoying me.. I wish you’d bugger off”

-“Taking the piss” = “Making fun of” Example: “I can’t tell if you’re being serious of taking the piss” or “He’s been taking the piss out of me all day long”

-They call red and green peppers capsicum here.

-There are no traffic lights hung on wires, they are all on stands at the edge of the road.

-“stuff that!” = “forget that!” Example: “Stuff this lame board game, let’s play the computer game” or “No way, stuff that! I don’t want spaghetti on my morning toast!”

-bikkies=cookies.  I think bikkies is short for biscuits. I like this one.

Senara and I