Kia Ora

January 3, 2008

Day 16 out of this 18 day cruise is almost over!!! Let’s just say this many days with the same kids is a long long time! We finally got sound in Club Hal – the electrician came in and fixed it all for me J I told him he was my best friend and he just laughed at me like I was crazy! But that made my day yesterday. Our Explorations Café Manager was quarantined yesterday for 3 days, so I didn’t even work in Club Hal yesterday – I just worked in the library to help out. She’s not the most organized person – all of the shelves are out of order and it looks like a bomb went off in there – so me and a couple cruise staff got it looking pretty spectacular!

Today I went on an excursion called Kiwifruit and Tarangua Sights. (We’re in the city of Tarangua in New Zealand) We went to a place called Kiwi 360 which was a huge Kiwi Orchard that grew primarily Kiwi fruit, but had lots of the stone fruits and tons of other various fruits growing on trees. I can’t believe how amazing Kiwi’s are! They are basically a self-sufficient fruit – they never get water or have a water supply going to them, the roots just dig themselves deep enough into the ground to seek water. They have the green Kiwi Fruits and the gold kiwi fruits. I didn’t get to taste the gold, but everyone said it was delicious. There are these huge pine-looking trees growing all around the orchards to protect the Kiwi’s from the winds. I also didn’t realize that they grew just like grapes do!

After we took a tour of the Orchard, we went inside to the store (of course!), but in the Courtyard they served scones with Kiwi Jam and home made whipped cream, slices of Kiwi (that they picked back in April and they still tasted amazing!), and Kiwi Juice along with Tea. Quite a cool trip – learned a lot! Did you know that a kiwi has more Vitamin C than an orange and more potassium than a banana?

Next we headed to a winery called Mills Reef. They didn’t grow the grapes there, but at a vineyard 5 hours away. We sampled wines for about 30 minutes, but none of them really impressed me…they were all really dry! And that was really all there was to the excursion!

Other than that, life is going good….just relaxing a lot lately. The ship is a lot quieter than my last one, but I’m trying to give it a chance!

That’s all for now! Another excursion tomorrow about my favorites – the Maori’s. Will update soon!