hothothot

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hey! A morning entry, would you believe it.

I am, unsurprisingly, sort of waiting for a bus. Yesterday night I went to the Maori Arts 'n' Craft centre where we had a guided tour round natural phenomena like geysers, hot mud splashy things (98 degrees centigrade at top) and plants, and indeed real life Kiwis (the birds). These geysers are apparently real and uninterfered with, unlike some rival geyser that goes off at 10:30 every day apparently, even when daylight savings time is on. Magic, no? Even so, they spurted magnificently.

Also saw them doing actual arts and crafts, weaving, carving and the like.

Follow that with Maori welcome/challenge/dance 'n' sing type cultural event. And then Maori FEAST. This consisted of an all-you-can eat buffet cooked by traditional means, which even though it had a fish course went down a treat. This is probably the first decent meal I had outside my wonderful host household and I made the most of it. Especially the traditional chocolate gateaux, icecream and custard - all in one bowl, so naughty! Met some guys from Ireland who were only here for 2 weeks (first people I met that came for less than me) and found the quantity of pudding I could absorb extremely funny for some reason, and some young couple from South England who are world-travelling, as you do. They worked doing telesales that sounded very like my old job at ANT marketing for several months in Australia which was the only downside. Bizaarely they intended to go back and live in UK - crazy. An Israeli couple asked us the obvious-yet-unthought-of-by-me queston of where is Zealand? new Amsterdam = Amsterdam, Holland, New York = York, UK, New England = England, but Zealand? The Irish guys say there is a Zealand in Scandanavia somewhere, but were slow and unsure enough to make me wonder if they made it up...?

Today...bus to Whakatane, which is pronounced Whakatane by tourists and something like Forkatarn by people who actually know stuff. Wh = f here so the hosts informed me, but not always. White Island is not Fite Island to anyone.

I learnt the 3rd longest Maori place name yesterday, but immedaitely forgot it of course. It was something like

Whakastaossbststsptnpasotnpastpoespespeospeopseopaeoeeanapsnsepnasesapoensa

Going to Sulphur bay beach quickly for non-suplhur icecream.

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Comments

[anonymous]

Zeeland
To answer your question....via the internet... Zeeland Province of southwest Netherlands, consisting of five islands lying in the Schelde river estuary, and the region north of the Belgian province of East Flanders; area 1,790 sq km/691 sq mi; population (1997) 368,400. The capital is Middelburg. There are shipbuilding, engineering, and petrochemical industries. There is livestock raising, dairying, and cereals and potatoes are grown. Now you can amaze people with your knowledge. - Dad

[anonymous]

Impressive
There's a wealth of knowledge shown by Anon. Dad. Most NZ'rs know that "Old Zealand" is somewhere in the Netherlands because that's where Abel Tasman was from, and what we made him think of, for some reason - must have been our agricultural potential. But the actual details aren't known to most of us. - homestay provider