At last!!!!

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I've finally made it to New Zealand!!! Yesterday after I arrived, I was walking around town with a huge silly grin on my face. That's how excited I am to be here!!! My journey here was pretty interesting as well! I flew out of Dubai at 10:30 pm on wed 26th and finally got into Auckland friday morning at 11. Whew, a long couple days of traveling. The Dubai airport was a ZOO! So many lines to get through. I assumed two hours would give me plenty of time to walk around the airport and gawk at the indoor palm trees, but I was lucky to make my flight. Then I had an 8 hour layover in Brunei where I was informed I had to have on onward ticket from NZ to be able to get my boarding pass. Luckily enough the airport had an internet cafe so I spur of the moment bought a ticket to Australia for Feb 27th. After that mess got taken care of, I lounged in the airport and watched a few movies. The time went by pretty quickly. That airport is set up for long layovers. They had a few restaurants, an internet cafe, a tv showing nonstop movies, showers, toilets and seats without arm rest so you can lay down! genius! Eventually I got on my 8pm flight and arrived in Auckland at 11am. It didn't hit me how much traveling I've done until I was filling out the NZ arrival documents and one question asked to list the countries I have been in the last 30 days. Well, end of october I was in Greece, then onto Bulgaria, Turkey, Dubai, and the airport in Brunei and finally into NZ. Wow, 5 countries in 30 days! I love it!!! Once in Auckland I checked into my hostel- Surf N Snow backpackers- located right down town. I'm still trying to adjust to the time change. I'm finding that I get pretty tired around 4pm and somehow at that time the past two days I've been in parks, so I've just layed down and taken a nice nap. Hopefully people aren't mistaking me for a homeless person. Well, at least I'm not sleeping ON the benches...

And now that I am in New Zealand I've activated my travel phone. Here's the number: (no one's attempted to call me yet, so it's yet to be determined if this is right. maybe YOU can be the first ;-)

calling from US: 64 2102731720

otherwise: 02102731720

And since I'm at it, here's my travel blog and picture site from my Japan/Australia/Fiji trip from 2007:

http://adventures-of-annalise.blogspot.com/
http://community.webshots.com/user/Annalise_13

Cheers from NZ!

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