An awesome weekend & Summertime.

Hey Mates!

How's it going? I'm very good, but veeeeery sleepy. I'm awake for about 37hours with only two hours of sleeping-time now, so I'm not tired for nothing ;D.

I'm very sorry it took me so long to get up this new blog text but I was quite busy.

I'll just give you a very quick summary of the last week and then tell you about the Rotary-Orientation-weekend.

Monday:

It's nearly a week ago, so I actually have no idea what I did Monday xD. Oh yeah, right, I think one of the parcels from Mum & Dad arrived on Monday. The only weird thing is, that they sent two parcels and the one they sent second arrived, while the first one isn't here. Hope it didn't get lost in the wide wide world :P.

Tuesday:

Actually I can't think of what I did on Tuesday...argh.

Wednesday:

Wednesady morning I carried my saxophone to the post-office to sent it back to where it came from (China, I think) just to hear that it would cost me between 120 and 220 bucks. That's why I won't sent it back but I'll sell it here in New Zealand.
In the evening I went dancing and talked to my dad on the phone.

Thursday:

In the morning I went to Starbucks to use my Netbook on the internet there to upload photos.
Due to the fact that here are no new photos uploaded (but tomorrow or the day after tomorrow our fast internet will be back -> new photos!) you can conclude that I failed. Why? Well, I bought the internet-access but my battery was uncharged after 2 Minutes because I forgot to charge it beforehand -.- ...
I met three girls from Germany at Starbucks and quickly talked to them, then I met up with Alex and we strolled a bit through the city.
In the evening I helped out at the dance-center with the beginner-class.


THE ROTARY-ORIENTATION-WEEKEND:

Friday:

Friday morning, of course, I went to the normal Rotary-meeting. Because we had some primary school kids as guests I did some magic instead of talking about my week. The kids already knew me, they were from the school I went to Tuesday and Wednesday last week ;D.

After the meeting Jim dropped me at Alex's place and we went to Theo de Leeuw's place (our dutch ex magic-circle-president) because he wants to get rid of plenty of magic-things and we would have a look. Just wanna' say: I hate Alex's bike, it just hurt sooo much to ride it xD.

Well, we arrived at Theo's place and stayed for about 1.5 hours, looking at magic things and talking. We'll go back some other day again.

I went home afterwards and started to pack my things for the Rotary-Orientation-weekend. At 1:20 Stewart and his mum picked me up to take me down to Taupo. We would stay at a Christian-Camp.
We arrived at 4 I think and immediatly everybody would welcome each other, it was really nice.
There were also some people we didn't meet before: The South-Americans. They arrived in summer (January) and stay 'till december. They are really really nice and it was good to meet them. We'll see them again at the South-Island tour in November.

There were a few organisational-things planned for the evening and we talked about the south-island tour and listened to different speeches. After that we pretty much had free time.

I met a girl from Austria, it was quite funny xD. I was introducing myself to someone else and said 'Hey, I'm Timon. Why can't you remember that? Well, if you can't remember that you can call me Christiaan.' (since my second name and stage name is Christiaan). Suddenly that girl from Austria turned around and asked 'Oh, you're Christian? Do you go to church often?' - 'Now, I am Christian.' - 'Yeah, so do you..?' - 'No! My name is Christiaan, allthough I am christian as well!' ... she just cracked up laughing :P.

We didn't get much sleep the first night, I think we fell asleep at 3 and got up at 7...

Saturday:

We had breakfast quite early and then the inbound-students (that's us, the ones not from NZ) would leave to do some activities. I was in a car with a boy and a girl from South-America (Xavier and Khawanna -> pronounce like 'cow' and 'wannabe' without be. Yeah). We talked for a while.

The first thing we'd do with our group was going to a military-history-museum. If I got it right it was also the place where everyone who goes to the NZ-army goes before entering the army.

The museum was quite good, most of the time I talked to Anne-Catherine, a girl from Belgium, or Carl (I hope I spelled his name right xD ) from Sweden.

Afterwards we had lunch and then we went tramping. Well, nobody wanted to go tramping. Alberto, a guy from South-America, solved the problem quite creative :D.... since the care-givers said the only case when we'd turn around is when somebody would be complete wet Alberto took off his clothes and jumped into a (very cold) lake. The result: Much laughter, but we went back to the cars to go to the next thing planned: The hot Pools.

The hot Pools are basically...yeah, hot pools with water that from the NZ-Vulcanic-area I guess. The first 10 minutes it was really nice to be in there after walking through the rain, but later on it was just way to hot.

After visiting the hot pools we went back to the camp.
In the evening a Maori-culture-group came along and performed some Maori-songs and dances and thought as a Maori-Haka (some war-dance I think) and the lyrics to a song. They also taught some girls how to use a poi, which is a Maori-music-instrument.
The culture-group was really good and entertaining :).


Beforehand Colin Sanderson asked us per e-mail if somebody would like to perform something and of course I would perform magic. So first I performed some magic which was really good and then I acted as the Moderator for a while, which was fun as well.
My magic-perfomance was followed by a father/daughter - duett. They played guitar and sing.
After that the South-American guys showed us some disco-dance...highly entertaining :D.

Of course that was only the start of the night.
We installed a black-light-lightbulb in one of the rooms and set up speakers and created a little disco-room. It was really cool, because of the black-light everything white was glowing.
When the other students wanted to get me to dance in the middle of the circle (which I hate. Since I dance ballroom and latin dances I really hate dancing disco-style-dance :D ) I 'spontaneously' had something with me to perform a very impressive dance-magic-effect. They liked it ;D.

All over the weekend I did heaps of magic and metalism/psychology effects, the other students liked it (allthough some were scared later on :D ). My magic-performance on stage (which was for the students, their parents, the rotary-members and everybody else) got very good feedback. All in all I'm happy with that :).

It was quite strange, last year I would go to an orientation-weekend in the Netherlands (which was heaps of fun as well, by the way), without knowing to what country I would go and so on, and now I'm in New Zealand, watching the Kiwis getting more and more excited because they'll be leaving soon...
I think a lot of things have become very different since then and I think I myself changed somehow as well.

So, we did party on Saturday-evening.
Afterwards we would talk for a loong time and Xavier and I decided to take a bed outside and sat down outside till about 7 hours. The good thing was, that everybody would come along from the different rooms (when they were on the way to the bathroom, or to go for a walk or whatever) and talk to us :P. Actually it started when Xavier, Jan from Belgium and I went outside. Jan would play the guitar and we would sing, but when Jan went to bed Xavier and I got a bed outside.

Two girls and one boy joined us for a while and left after a few hours again, but we had heaps of fun. A cat joined us from time to time to get strocked :D.
We thought there was an oppossum beneath a tree but it was just a bag...while the girls were with us I told scary stories (that's what I'm good at ;D ... muhahahahaha).
So Xavier and I didn't sleep for the whole night.

In the morning there were some more Rotary-things and some more pin-swapping (the rotary-pins every student has from his country. We're ment to put them on our Rotary-blazer, mine already has quite a few on it).
We also went to high-rope-gardens with the inbound-group. Since I'm not afraid of heights it wasn't to hard but just great fun. I talked to Nehir quite a lot. She's from Switzerland and really cool.

Afterwards we just had lunch, packed our things and then...yeah, goodbye for the moment. We said goodbye to everyone (there are already more meetings in planning :P ) and then Stewart and I went off, back home.

I was at home at 5 I think (oh, yeah...tonight we lost one hour since we had to put the watches one hour forward. Daylight-Saving-Time) and immediatly went to bed. At 7 I went to the evening-church. It was cool, allthough there where no youths today because they would go to another christian-camp as group-leaders.

I discovered that Heather set up a little book-shelf for my magic-books in my room, very nice :).

So...after church I pretty much started to write my blog and I think I'll go to bed soon.

Oh, when you managed to read through the whole blog just leave a comment, congratulations :P. I bet half the readers stopped reading halfway-through because this text is quite long ;D.

Well, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow there'll be photos.

I'd say 'See ya!'.

Yours,

Timon.