Smores&Spoons

Hey everyone, so it has been about four days since I arrived here at the Crossing and things have been pretty sweet so far. It’s been a lot of orientation stuff lately, just getting settled in you know all that jazz. Let me give you an idea of what our schedule is like. We usually have breakfast every morning at 8:00 am and we have porridge, toast, cereal, tea and/or milo. Milo is kind of like hot chocolate it’s weird, but still good. Then we have two periods of classes, then morning tea! Morning tea is the greatest thing ever. People all over the planet should most definitely practice morning tea. It’s basically where the whole country stops for 15 minutes (half an hour in our case) around 10:30 am to just chill and have some tea. At that time in stores and what not it would be hard to get service because people are having morning tea. Isn’t that the greatest idea ever? Then after that we have some time to do worship music and pray together or a have book study or just another class. Then lunch time after that. From 1-5 pm every day we usually just have free time, but on Wednesdays we have work days and later in the semester we will have some ministry stuff to fill in some of those times I think. Then we have supper and after that we have free time and our last classes go from 7-9 pm. We don’t have these night classes on Wednesdays and Fridays though. Everything here is pretty flexible and nothing is too set in stone.

We live right by this small town of Geraldine (population approx. 2200), it’s a really nice little town that has everything we would really need right by us, we can go get some groceries, has a post office, library (free internet!), etc. Our school has a limited internet plan because internet here is super expensive so I can only really check email with the internet at the crossing. I can’t do anything that uploads photos or music or video, so no facebook or skype at the crossing, but I can go into the town often enough and use the free internet there to keep in touch! This Saturday we’re all going on a trip to a bigger town called Timaru which is pretty nice apparently, so that should be sweet. AND in two weeks from now it’s a 2 week break all the schools in New Zealand have so I get to be a camp counselor over here! That should be a really awesome ministry, camps are the best.

Some random things that we’ve been up to are the other day all of us here (all the staff too) divided up into teams and played some capture the flag on our property, it was really fun, good times. I think my team lost 2/3 though. Awe dang. After that we hung out for a bit and had a fire later in the back part of our property. We attempted to make smores because it’s not really a common thing here but we still attempted. They don’t have graham crackers here (sheer madness) so we used digestive crackers haha and their marshmallows are about the size of a toonie and a couple inches thick. We just put a bunch on some twigs from the ground, I have to admit the smores were actually pretty decent. After that Kelsey, Bryan, Joel, Ben and I went inside while people stayed at the fire and played spoons inside. Spoons can be an extremely violent game, be very cautious. At one point we put the spoons at the top of the stairs and I’m pretty sure while we were running up the stairs Kelsey was “rhino head butted” and “speared”, quite traumatic for her.

I am going to upload the video of the crossing ASAP but I can’t from the crossing internet here is lamesauce, I shall also upload the rap that Jonas, Joel and Ben did for Michael’s birthday today haha that was pretty great. But I have to go to the library to do that so I shall do that later. I wrote the earlier part of this blog before so today I actually have gone to Timaru and that was good, I GOT ANOTHER SWEATER! Wow. I don’t know if I mentioned this yet, but I am going to explain it again if I did because I don’t remember. So right now in New Zealand its uber cold because their winter is just ending so it was rainy and about 9 degrees Celsius the other day. So now their spring is starting and then comes summer so it’s going to get really hot here now, so I can deal with this little winter ending for now, EXCEPT for one thing. Everywhere in New Zealand pretty much doesn’t have central heating in their homes because it’s super expensive to install and run so my whole house is heated by fireplaces. It is cold inside ALL THE TIME, I have never been so cold so much in my life. I have never been so dependent on fire in my life. I still love it here though, even though I may freeze to death, but it is getting warmer quite quickly not going to lie. Anyways I have to go now, I wish I could add some more photos for you all because I have some, but I can’t upload anything really from here just some words for you haha.

Love Cara!