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	Letters from students abroad Julius R. << zurück New Zealand 2003 The flight: Saying goodbye was hard, especially for such a long time. Even the flight was very long. All four flights together took about 26 hours, us sitting on the plane, playing Nintendo or sleeping. The stay in Singapore wasn't very interesting: the whole group was just sitting there and waiting for boarding the next plane to Auckland. In Auckland passports and visa were controlled which was a bit more action than in Singapore, but again meant standing around and waiting. The flight from Auckland to Wellington was short compared to the big flight. It was like: "One hour more or less. Who cares?". In Wellington there was a bit stress about the luggage, but at last all the luggage arrived and there weren't any other problems. My host family: At first glance my host family is a normal family, when one looks again, it is a bit different. But then again, no family is like another one. My host parents, Paul and Tina, picked me up from the ferry terminal and in a truck we went to my home of the next three months. It was a big house and I had my own big room with a separate bathroom and, most important, a very large bed. The next day we went to a town which was two hours away by car: Kaikoura. The grandparents live there and the two daughters, Toya and Neena, often spend their holidays there. Paul is a builder, he has got a small truck and a Harley Davidson. He loves his Harley. Tina is more quiet, she cooks the dinner for the family and also goes to work. But I don't know that much about her. Toya (9) and Neena (8) are the two daughters; they love to sing and to dance. They are smart and sometimes a bit noisy. Toya likes to write stories and sends them to writing contests, she has already won some prizes. School: Every morning school starts at 8.45. At first there is the form class. You go to your form class where sometimes you are told some things, but most of the time your are not told anything important. At 9 o'clock the regular lesson starts. You've got two periods and then there is the fifteen-minutes break. After that you've got two periods again and lunchtime. In lunchtime you can go home or you can buy something to eat in the cafeteria or you play touch or netball or you go to a fish'n'chips-shop to get some food or you do something else and you have 50 minutes. Then you've got two more lessons and afterwards you can go home at 3.10. In the afternoon you play soccer or rugby. The way of life: Meat, pork, beef, fish, chicken, sheep – all that you can eat in New Zealand, even sheep hearts. Most of the time I had pumpkin, cucumbers or potatoes with it and corn or carrots. The kiwis (that's how the people from New Zealand are called) obviously eat lots of gravy. In school I often had chocolate chip cookies. They are very nice, they are not like the ones you buy in Germany, Germans don't put so much chocolate in the cookies. The language: At first, of course, it was hard to understand the people but during the first week in Wellington I most of the time spoke to other German people who were learning English as well. The second week was the hardest but my host family helped me a lot. If I hadn't understood what they said they said it again and again until I got it. They were very nice. In school I met a boy from Switzerland who spoke some German and helped me with my English. Sometimes he told me things again clearly, so I was able to understand it. The hardest part of school was the chemistry lesson with all the special words, but again the teacher helped me very often with that and I learned a lot. Sports: Nearly everybody in New Zealand does a sport. If you don't play rugby you play netball or cricket or both or something else. At the weekend you have a match or you watch your friends playing and during the week you have practice. I had soccer practice every Thursday and a match on Saturday against a team from another town. My host dad asked me if I wanted to play rugby. I told him I'd never played rugby before, but he wanted me to play. I did play and it was real fun. I nearly scored a try but I did't know the exact rules and so I made a mistake. Julius R., 2004