It's been over a month since I've last written, so I'm gonna try to summarize everything up. ^these pics are from the beginning of September when the other rotary students and I walked through the Wairapa.

8 September I had dinner at parliament with 2 mps, Chris and Trevor something. I went with Peter and Phil (rotarians) and Kendyl and Pia, 2 other exchange students. We got a tour around the "bee hive" and then just had dinner there.

Wednesday 9 September was the last day of school till mock exams, which we got a week off for. I took english, spanish, and maths. The grading system really makes no sense. The grades are "not achieved", "achieved", "achieved with merit", and "achieved with excellence". (NA, A, M, E) And there are specific points that you must include in an answer in order to get a certain grade.

Monday was my birthday and Danielle and Anna came over with a cake. Anne made me go to rotary (because apparently it's absolutely necessary that I attend every week), but afterwards I went to Danielle's house where she threw me a surprise party.

On Friday, I was put on a bus and sent to Paraparam to stay with my couselour for the night and then go with her the next day to Tatum Park for the Rotary orientation weekend. There are 10 inbounds and 6 outbound students and we all just listened to lectures and speeches and did some team building activites all weekend. Saturday night, we were supposed to have dinner and speeches by the students, but the All Blacks were playing the Wallabies so the speeches were postponed (we won 26-6). When we actually did them, I talked about how NZ is unique and I think it went well. Kendyl (the other American) spoke about what NZ can learn from America. She talked about how NZ has no national pride and it should be more like America. Most people in the world don't like America because of its national pride and because we like to flaunt that we're the best. So you can imagine how her speech went over. I could hear the rotarians in the audience grunting and I was sitting there watching her make us look bad, just waiting for it to end.

Anyways, Monday I went back to school for one week because we have 2 weeks of holidays now (like spring break). It was kind of a pointless week really, we just got our mock exams back and talked about them. I brought a bunch of candy and things that mom sent me for my birthday and people really liked them. Especially shockers, I don't know why, and reese's and everyone thought twinkies were a really big deal, but most people could only eat a few bites of it.

Over the holidays I've been going to the beach, mall, laser strike, movies, hanging out at friends houses..nothing real special.

These are all from Belmont regional park, which is right behind Anne's house.

And this one is for dad cause he always makes me put people in my pictures...