Only in heaven would an angel apologize for smoking (Part 1)

Not true. In New Zealand, people apologize for smoking as well. I was walking to a bus stop the other day, and as I passed a woman talking on her cellphone, sitting on a bench, smoking, she looked up at my and whispered, “Sorry!” with a look of horror on her face as she waved her hand through the cloud of smoke that she just exhaled.

So far Liz and I have only been here for 12 days, but we have seen so many spectacular things, it’s unbelievable. I’ve seen more of the coastline here in these two short weeks then I have my entire live living on the east coast. It’s awesome. You can’t beat enormous snow-capped mountains that cruise right down to the clear blue ocean, with hundreds of big black-eyed seals lining the coast. Once again, Liz probably captured our campervan (I hated that thing) trip pretty well, so I won’t rehash our trip in words. I do have a video of our first week here though that I’m dying to upload. I just need a fast/reliable/not $5 for 30 minutes of internet usage connection before I can upload it. I think the video sums up our first week pretty well.

So, we have arrived at our semi-final destination of Dunedin, a really cool little city on the South Island. We first arrived here by bus, which dropped us off at the train station I believe, at 10 o’clock Wednesday night. At first sight, first night, the city looked really…funky (I think is the word I’m looking for). On our walk to the hostel, we passed by a massage parlor with a simple sign that read Upstairs Downstairs Massage, with an arrow pointing up through a dimly lit stairway. It was conveniently positioned next to a lingerie store. That type of establishment doesn’t usually grace its presence in a classy neighborhood.

After lugging our bags to the hostel from the train station, we entered our room to the sight of water damaged ceilings, an odd hole in the wall, and our cold breath. It was a pretty dingy room, but whatever. We feel asleep pretty quickly (probably so that we didn’t have to think about the hole in the wall/what could be looking through it). While sleeping in la-la-land, I hear a voice. “Brad. Brad!” It’s Liz. “What?” I asked. “I just got stung by a bee!” she said. “WHAT!” Sure enough, we turn on the light and see this big bee flying around. It’s like…40° in Dunedin. What is a bee doing here! We both grabbed a shoe to throw at it, but quickly remembered that the walls are paper-thin and that we probably shouldn’t throw anything. I’m pretty sure if we did throw a shoe it would have burst through every single wall in the hostel before flying out the side of the building and then thrust into orbit. Anyhow, I heroically slapped the (expletive deleted) out of the bee, and won over Liz Van Winkle with my bravery. We’re still not sure why a killer African bee was in our room, but when all was said and done, Liz continued to breath. Oh! I forgot to mention, this all happened around 3:30 in the morning.

Part 2 will follow tomorrow. Too much reading for one day.

Til’ next time, here’s some art! This guy was on the plane out to San Francisco. I thought he had a bomb in his foot cast and was going to kill us on the flight, so I decided to draw him. I’m sad it has come to this, but without a scanner I’ll have to take pictures of my drawings for posting. BOOOO!

Crazy Plane Man