Other observations about NZ

There are TONS of Previas in NZ. Both Henry and I (when we met up in Auckland) remarked on the astounding amount of Toyota Previas in both Auckland and Wellington. It's Previa heaven. It makes me miss Julia every time I see one. Big ol' jellybean cars in beautiful tones of off-white, muddy blues and browns, and the ever popular beige.

There is a chain restaurant around here called "Monsoon Poon." Chris, Stephen, Lars and I ate there one day and all we did was joke about how delicious the poon was. There was also a drink called "poon tang" which Lars and Stephen got. Then I saw one in Auckland as well which lead to more jokes being made about how the poon was everywhere and how popular it was. Endless fun.

The New Zealand dollar is a bit strange to deal with. Ones and twos are in coin form and therefore I lose them in the abyss of my bag all the time. The rest of the money is pretty cool looking, it's got a bit of a waxy texture and is very colorful with pictures of famous people and animals. The coins are what throw me off all the time. I forget I have these coins and now I've got roughly 20 dollars worth of coins sitting on my desk and I don't even know how to deal with it because it's so heavy to carry around. My habits in the States with coins is just to throw it in my pocket or my bag to later forget about and then maybe bring to a coin machine. But here the coins are pretty frequently used and often it makes way more sense to pay in coins than in bills. So I need to rethink the way I treat my coins especially because I feel like I'll lose a lot of money if I'm not careful.