So much to tell!

Alright so I've been in Brisbane for a few days now and things are hectic as O-week proceeds! I left the MD to go to LA on the 3rd and spent a few days at my mom's friend's Audrey's house with my mom. I got a mini tour of LA over the few days I was there which was good since I had never been there. My ipod tragically died the morning of my flight to new Zealand, so we had to rush to a mall and buy a new one because there was no way to fix it. It all worked out and I got to LAX with plenty of time to spare. My flight left at 8:30pm west coast time on Tuesday the 5th and I arrived early in the morning (around 6am) Thursday morning in Auckland. I then flew from Auckland which is on the north island to Christchurch on the south island. I figured out where the shuttles were and I got to the hostel my tour group would be staying at for the night. I arrived too early for check-in and had to leave some bags in the back room of the hostel while i explored the city. There was a lot going on as it was a gorgeous sunny afternoon. I wandered for a few hours and then at 1pm i checked in. When i got up to the room there was a guy there named Matt. We still joke that we were the originals of the trip. We talked for a while and walked around. He went out on his own and i met more people as they arrived.By the evening there was 6 of us, but we had heard nothing about our tour guide and we were all just clueless about how anything was going down! We got some dinner and stopped by the bottle shop--that's the liquor store for you Americans ;) -- and hung out in the room for a bit before going out to a few bars that turned out to be quite fun. When we got back late that night around 2am, we still had no information about our tour except that we should be leaving early the next morning. We get a knock on the door and it was our tour guide, Bruce, a 25 year-old native of Sydney. He told us we had to be up early--6am! Just after that our 7th person showed up and we were all happy to have another in our group. I will make a new post for the actual trip just because I know reading a giant paragraph is no fun!