Chapter Eight: 14 October, 2004
Good morning!
Some of the girls at work asked me what I did over the weekend. I said that we went to Leigh. They said, "Where?"
I said, "Leigh. We drove north. Leigh."
They said, "Lee?"
I said, "Yes, Leigh."
They asked, "Where is that?"
I responded, "We drove north, we passed Waiwera and Orewa heading towards Whangarei, but stopped in Albany and a few other places and went on the glass bottomed boat."
"OH! LAY!"
jesus christ.
One of the girls is leaving. It was her last day yesterday. I think she's angry that management didn't sign her up on a contract and she's afraid that if someone finds out she's working without a contract she'll get in a lot of trouble. She loves my fruit salad, dreamed about it after she first had it - that she was stuffing her face with her bare hands - so I made her some. She's a great teacher, I'm really going to miss her. One of the kids is leaving today. I'm going to give her 'mama do you love me' because she's a real avid book fan.
The request form is in the teacher's room for that teacher exchange with the Colorado reggio centre. You spend four weeks teaching in another centre (paid) and you get one week for 'reflection'. You pay for half your airfare which is refunded after you've spent the next twelve months here at the home centre. You also have to give presentations on your experience at the Colorado centre. I WANT TO DO IT! It's set up for July/Aug 2005. I'd have to stay here until Sept 2006 if I wanted to honor the contract and get my airfare money back. We don't really know where we'll be next summer. A lot of that is entirely up to Shayne. Anyway, Patrick sort of dismissed the Colorado thing altogether since we don't know what's going to happen. I'd love to go. My work visa is up in May 2006 but I could probably get an extension.
On to the pictures! This first one is of a female manta ray through the bottom of a glass bottomed boat
. The boat comes right up to the sandy beach on a government protected park in Leigh. There are rocks that jut out into the water and when you're standing on the rock, you can SEE FISH!
They're bright blue and bright orange/red with bright blue spots!!! It was super cool! The manta ray was really close to this waterfall, I don't know if I included that waterfall pic or not . . . Anyway, we saw the boat, wondered how to get on it, it wandered up to the beach, we ran to it and they asked us if we were with the group.
What group?
Turns out it was a group of lesbians celebrating a birthday. They popped open a bottle of Lindauer (which bites, I tried it on another occasion) and said happy birthday. The bottle sprayed all over the glass that the woman just cleaned. Patrick thought it was a lesbian convention. It looked like it was a couples only celebration too, they all paired off. You might be able to see one couple's reflection in the glass of the pictures.
We'd stopped in a cheese shop in a heritage town on the way to Leigh.
I took about five pictures of this damned spider, and most of them were too blurry.
Beside the shop was this cute little pond. The signs said to keep close tabs on your children as they might harass the ducks. People are very wary of children in NZ - a lot of signs say to keep your children from jumping on things, running around, and being noisy / destructive. Anyway, Patrick didn't want me getting to close to the water because of my shoes (he thought I'd fall in) so I was all "LEAVE ME ALONE" and he took this picture KNOWING I'd look at him like this! ahahahahaha :D
That bird was stalking me around the pond. I hate that bird.
There was a beautiful highway sign along the way. We were going too fast for me to take a picture. Bus Driver Tara would have loved it though, it's a beautiful representation of a dolphin. Patrick didn't notice till I'd pointed it out.
There are more pictures from this past weekend. I'm doing a tour of four bear park centres on saturday, so I don't think we'll be doing a lot this weekend.
Last weekend at the housewarming party, I asked a few of Patrick's students, "Why on God's green earth would you invite your TEACHER to your PARTY????? What were you thinking?" I'd had about half a bottle of wine out of a coffee mug by then . . .
They love him. They raved about him. He's SOOOOOO cool they said, he's the best teacher I've ever met they said. They were sincere, they were serious, dead serious when they said why they liked him. Patrick? cool? Super cool enough to hang out with the twenty somethings from his class? Check out the pic of his new super cool shirt in the next email - he wore it to the party. I'm so proud that patricks students think so highly of him! ooooooh I'm just bursting!
Missing you millions!
April