Home, Home on the Strange!

Well it has been nearly a week since I've been home. It has been sooooo busy, as I only had about 3 days to get in, do my visiting, do some shopping (new socks and underwear, etc) and then I had to go straight into school Monday night and then straight into moving to the new apartment on Tuesday morning. I spent all day moving that day, and then had a good long sleep yesterday before having to go BACK to school in the afternoon.

But I'm getting ahead of myself by giving you my excuses for not blogging.

My trip home was rather eventful. I had a few things that I made a mental note of remembering in order to tell you all on my very last blog.

I woke up on Friday morning (yes, I slept! w00t!) knowing that everything I had to do was almost done. ALMOST! I still had to run around and hand out thank-you cards to people's mailboxes. I planned to do that overnight on Thursday but I decided to sleep while I could - as I was actually tired for once at 11 pm! So I had to get up around 7:00 or so to hop on the pushbike (I had to bring the car I was using back to Finn and Sarah the day before) and go for a jaunt.

So I did, and it was tiring. But I got home just in time to see Donald off to school. It was a sappy moment so let's not go there. *sniff sniff*

Then after a bit more running around, I sat back at the house and Rae came home to see me off. The bus would be picking me up and she wanted to make sure to say goodbye to me as I was leaving.

I got on the bus absolutely in tears. I stayed in tears for almost half an hour straight. Blech. Goodbye Te Anau...

But shortly after putting on my headphones and listening to Idina Menzel to make me happy again, the ladies behind me piped up and asked "Oh you're from Canada?!" and then we had a bit of a chat the entire time. Like the WHOLE time they were talking to me and it made me a little car sick coz I was sitting sideways and looking backwards and the bus was weaving and swerving with the land. They were really friendly and asked for my email address when I got dropped off at the airport. They were cute - from Sydney and one of them smelled like smoke.

In the airport, I walked up to the lady at the front counter, quite pleased with myself (or kind of scared) at the fact that there weren't many other people around. This meant that I could be one of the first to check in...or one of the last. I wanted my window seat SOOOO badly coz I can't sleep without it.

Well she told me that because of the weather (ACK) they weren't allowing check-ins for the flight until 1:00 (it was noon. I had originally planned to be there at 10 or 11...good thing no one could drive me and I was made to take a bus or I would have been sitting around doing nothing for even longer!). So I went for a wander to the cafe to get some food, then I tried phoning my parents and didn't get a hold of them. Then I went into the book store looking around when all of a sudden my name gets paged over the loudspeaker. I was like "awww crap what did I do?"

It was Rae phoning me at the airport just to make sure I got there and to give me a familiar voice for a couple of minutes. How cute.

Anyways, long story short, I went on the flights and we took off with no issues. We landed in Auckland and I hung around there with nothing special happening.

On my flight to LA, I was beside an Asian guy with bad breath who was separated from his wife (as in she was in another row of seats), and I slept only about 3 hours but watched a few good movies: "The Lake House" and "DaVinci Code" and a few episodes of Will and Grace and the Family Guy. BUT when I got OFF the plane, as one of the goofy Maori flight attendants was thanking us all for coming and wishing us a happy day, the Asian couple was in front of me and as he saw them, he bowed his head low and started his string of bad Japanese with "Ahhh, domo domo..." and I can't remember the rest. The look on their faces was priceless! They weren't even close to Japenese, I don't think, and this buddy just pulled one of the most politically incorrect things ever!

But you can DO THAT when you're a kiwi! It's not grossly offensive if you make a cultural blunder when you're not completely knowledgeable about what particular "brand" of Asians you're working with (I could never tell you to be honest) or any other race of people. I had to contain my obnoxious laughter and the flight attendant saw how hard I was laughing and even made a face like "hehe I'm an ignorant kiwi" at me. It was fun.

Then nothing much happened til I got to the gate for leaving LA. I talked on the phone with my brother and made quiet jokes about the CIA and me being dropped off in Guam for being a verbal terrorist (for calling the CIA doodyheads). I know it's inappropriate, likely, but it was fun.

Mom had told me before leaving New Zealand that I should watch out for celebrities on my flight coming to Toronto for the Film Festival. I didn't even bother looking around but just as they were boarding my plane, I heard a loud obnoxious girly laugh and looked towards it.

It was SO Brittany Murphy (haha I can imagine some of your reactions right now...*COUGHrachelcurleCOUGH* and she was about to board my plane!

I was a creepy stalker most of the way home; craning my neck to get a glimpse whenever I could. Then as we were stuck circling Toronto for 30 minutes (of course due to a lightning storm) she was up joking with her buddies and being very teenager-ish. She knew that people were watching her and so she would act overly obnoxious about something and then peek out of the corner of her eye to see who is watching her. Those celebrities are sooo dramatic. Haha some of them want to be left alone but some want to rub it in our faces that we can look but we can't approach...that is how she was.

We finally landed and then found out that we were stuck on the tarmack because the ground crew wasn't allowed outside of the building due to the close lightning strike and that we would have to wait roughly a half hour at LEAST to get off the plane. Soooo I was stuck on a plane. With Brittany Murphy.

I later found out I was also stuck on that plane with Tommy Lee but I didn't see him as I was busy stalking Brittany.

We got off the plane finally and I strategically chose which line I would stand in at the customs gate - right behind the producer Brittany was travelling with (Alek something?) It was funny to be near her because she was being so dramatic and goofy. She ruined her customs card and started freaking out until some man told her that there were lots of spares at the back desk. She was running over in her stilletos (looking hilarious) and it was then that I noticed that her calves were as skinny as Mary Kate Olsen's arms. Like it was sick.

Anyways, we got through customs with lots of laughs and then we waited for our baggage to come out standing side by side. It was then that we exchanged a few words and laughs and then I had to leave because my bags were two of the first to come out.

I walked away from the airport kicking myself for not having asked her for ONE picture. Or an autograph. Anything. I know I am not necessarily a HUGE fan of her work (besides her role as Daisy Randone in Girl, Interrupted), but I knew my youth would go nuts to see a picture of me with Brittany Murphy. hehe...

Well that's the story of my flight. Sorry it's so long but hey now you don't have to put up with a whole bunch of my stories anymore coz this is my very last entry (unless I think of something else fun that I forgot to mention.


I am sitting here on my brand new bed (well, new to me) with a messy yet empty room all around. My new cat, Tess, is resting beside me and I have no phone to get a hold of the outside world.

Okay here's the plan. I'll write one more journal entry to give you guys my contact details when I know them. Like, my phone number, etc.

But for now, I would ask that you pray for me to find a job because Ruffins decided to hire someone else and didn't tell me. They told me I was prettymuch guaranteed to get hired and I relied on that instead of looking for other jobs. And now I don't have anything except 4 hours a week at the bank and that won't pay the rent. So if you could pray for that, that'd be great.

I hope that I haven't bored y'all too much but I will at least be able to look back on my time in New Zealand and remember almost every detail of my time there. In the end I don't care how long the entries are because they're more for me than they are for you, I think.

I will also try to post a few more pictures from the last couple of days in New Zealand when I get a bit more time.

And this concludes my New Zealand journal. Thanks for reading and staying updated on my life! Thanks for your comments and support and love and all the mushy feelings you gave me from the very beginning. It was nice to know that I had people from home who care that much about me.

Take care - I will leave you with a picture of my Tess. *meow*