you can tell i am ready to get on the airplane when i start making strange comments on sunsets, but seriously, the last hike and the best sunset. awesome.
‘i had a very sexual experience with a swan.’
-rodrigo, drunk, while being destroyed!! in chess by me
well, the last few days have been a blast. i met up with rodrigo, a brazilian hiker who shares an interest in drinking, california, and eating good food when we aren’t on the trail. he introduced me to marie, and mikhaila, two cool girls who also share our passion for the awesome. together we have been storming all over wellington, the capital of new zealand, and having a blast. the other day was the cuba street festival, it was a carnival-esque parade and music festival in the famed cuba street area of central wellington. it was a pretty cool get together, a few of the bands were playing buena vista and the whole city was there to have good, clean fun.
‘my grandma experiments with chemicals’
-me, drunk, explaining how my grandma gets stains out of clothes…
the weather has been nothing but awesome for the majority of the week i have spent here, sothere has been quite a bit of walking around and seeing the city. the one day we had bad weather turned out to be an excellent day to see the national museum, te papa. it was a pretty impressive museum, the only one in the world with a collossal squid specimen! i know, not so exciting, but it was actually pretty cool, and most of the other exhibits were impressive.
convinced mikhaila of the existence of a dehydrated water product for camping, you just add water. no, really.
today we all went to see the monet exhibit at the museum, the largest of it’s kind, on loan from a museum in boston. i have never seen monet in person, and it was a pretty short(for $15), but interesting experience, who would have thought that water lillies could be so pretty? the rest of the week has been a semi-coherent blur of chess, drinking, and women’s clothing, but man have i had fun. it is so nice to be around people with shared interests again, something i haven’t really had since wanaka. three of us are on our way out of the country so i think we were all living a bit above what we normally would, which made every experience that much more memorable. for the rest of my life, spoons will make me smile.
‘to the sun, to the sky, to the spoon…’
a few of the many toasts
and that’s it. i wake up at 3:30am tomorrow for a 6:40 flight to australia, after a 9 hour layover i fly to bangkok for the next adventure. sleep deprived and high on the events of the last five months i can’t help but be excited. i will experience six different languages in as many countries, visit the largest muslim population country in the world, and have the privelege of eating so much good food that i might not come home. i really have no idea what i am going to do when i get into thailand at 11:30pm with no hotel reservation or any clue where i am going, but i survived the snowing passes and flooded rivers of new zealand, so a little malaria and political unrest should be no problem. see you all on the other side.
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