Phenomenal Palmerston (North)

After leaving home on the third of February, four days in Fiji, and five in Auckland, it was finally time to reach the final destination.  No, not that one.  Palmerston North.  The final goal of all the travelling.  No more living out of suitcases, no more sandy sheets, no more washer/dryers that only wash and refuse to dry.

It was the morning of February 14, 2011 and it was finally time to fly to Palmerston North.  I began the morning by losing one of the beautiful earrings that I received for Christmas.  That was extremely depressing.  Next was the trip to the airport.  Out of every airport I had been in in the the past two weeks, I think the Auckland airport was by far the easiest.  And there was one simple reason why... no security.  Absolutely none.  It was the strangest thing.  I don't know why, but we walked in, got our tickets, checked our bags and walked in the direction of our terminal.  Turns out there was just a big waiting room and when your plane was loading you would walk through the doors and follow signs to the proper terminal.  The terminals turned out to be doors onto the tarmac.  Now, maybe there was no security because they were just domestic flights?  I have no idea.  But nothing bad happened so I don't really mind.  Anyways, our plane was one of the coolest I've ever been on.  We sat under the wing, and check out these propellers-

Right, so, we were off the Palmerston North, from now on referred to as Palmy.  Sadly there are no palm trees.  But there are plenty of mountains, greenery, sheep, and wind farms.  Oh yeah, there is an epic wind farm that you can see from most of town and almost anywhere on campus.

So we arrived at the airport, which is quite small, and headed out to our new 'hostels' aka dorms.  We were given our new, fancy keys unique to the Palmy campus-

Once we were dropped off we were on our own.  Luckily we had such things as cell phones and easily met up again.  While wandering campus a bit we found the veterinary pond, aka the duck pond.

After the morning I had I should have known better than to go anywhere near a body of water with electronics on my person, but I didn't.  I proceeded to drop my camera in the nasty pond water.  So yes, both of my darling cameras were now waterlogged.  Luckily I found a bag of rice at one of the shops on campus and kept my camera in it for about three days.  After which I took it out, shook out all the rice that managed to make it's way into the inner workings of the camera, and re-installed the batteries and memory card.  I felt like I was Dr. Frankenstein, bringing my poor camera back to life.  But man is that thing a trooper.  It works perfectly fine, no spasms or anything.

After my camera was reborn, I took some pictures of my beautiful, single- person room in my new place of residence- Miro Hall.

So there you go.  My new home for the next five months.  Now that all my backed- up blogs are completed, I can start some sweet as blogs on Kiwi culture that I'm sure you'll be super interested in...