Well what a busy day today was. My Girlfriends mother, Margaret, is over from Aus and took us for a trip to the Taranaki or as Katie (my girlfriends sister) calls it, the Naki. The main reason for the trip was to visit my Girlfriends Grandmother, but we also decided to see some of the sites of the Naki too. First stop was dairy land, a small cafe, come revolving restaurant, come interactive museum of dairy history in the region. As you can imagine, from a computer geeks point of view the museum wasn’t the most fascinating place in the world, but somehow it managed to be kind of fun anyway.
After that, it was off to the Grandmothers house in Eltham for lunch which was really good, mmm quiche. Anyway once lunch was over we decided to take a walk around the town and leave Margaret to have some alone time with her mum. It was really funny walking around a small town, we all wondered what everyone did all day? Where do they work? Don’t they all go out of their mind? What I found most interesting about this is about five minutes after this conversation both girls said “I think I would like to live in a small town when I’m older”, I was quite surprised by this.
Personally at this point of my life I can’t imagine a time where I would want to live in a small town, Palmerston North is small enough. I can certainly understand a desire to live in a remote location away from the complexities of others and a city, but even that would be along way off for me, god knows I can’t wait to travel the world, see and meet endless numbers of people, and really live life in the shoes of different cultures.
My Girl is heading overseas latter this year for a conference in Ireland, and of course I’m madly jealous. Shes only going for about a month or so, so its not like shes doing an OE without me or anything but still I wish I could be with her, Personally I can’t wait to do Europe and Asia (to start) with my girl, its exciting just thinking about it.
Right now I have quite a few friends doing their OE over in Europe (hi guys) one in particular I am very jealous of is Annette. Annette has somehow managed to travel all over the globe, study, and shape herself into one of the most wonderful people Ive had the pleasure of meeting. Right now shes teaching English somewhere in Russia and I’m sure before long she be off to another exciting adventure to some far off land. I can’t wait for the day that My Girlfriend and I get to travel around with Annette and the like, meeting people and living a life less ordinary.
Anyway getting back to the Naki, once we had finished our walk around town we headed back to the house to collect Margaret and say our goodbyes before the drive back to Palmerston North. On the way home we stopped to see some historic sites which by international standards arent very old at a mere 150ish, but for our young country thats practically forever. The sites were some old Maori and English battle grounds from the wars early on in New Zealand history, quite interesting to see how well developed Maori tactics were compared to the English.
Anyway after that it was back to Palmerston north to get dressed up for drinks and dinner in the city. So now I’m feeling very well feed and quite tired so I think I’m ready for some sleep. hopefully I will get a chance tomorrow to do very little.