BOSTON!

Well! This here blog has been dormant for a long time! I have been working on a post of all the things I've been doing in Georgia, however it will have to wait because I'm off again on another big trip. I'm sitting right now in a hotel room in BOSTON! I finished my semester on Thursday afternoon, then left at 6 30 am on Saturday morning to get here.

Here's me and my room mates about to leave! Behind us is our transportation, dora the ford explorer. It get's us from A to B with a little bit of trouble. There's Philip from Denmark on the right, and Ben from Nigeria in the middle. Gustavo from Brasil is taking the photo. This was taken in Augusta, GA with Boston MA as the destination. If you drove it without stopping, it'd be a 17 hour drive, no biggie :)

 We started at 6 30, and drove with a few stops on the way until we reached Berlin Connecticut at about 11 that night. First real experience of cabin fever i reckon haha, we checked in at a cheap motel for the night, then got straight back on the road at 8 30

Over the trip we passed through 11 states (if you include DC) and finally made it to boston at about 10 30 on Sunday.

Here's me and Philip and Gustavo trying to figure out where to go first.. as you can probably tell by the photo, it's blooooody cold here! -1 or -2 i think!! wow.

We wasted no time in getting out and checking out the city, our hotel was right in downtown, so we just dropped our things and started our sight seeing. Here's me sliding down the rails outside the town hall, the building in the centre that I'm facing is Faneuil Hall, the first stop on the freedom trail.

Here's the four of us with Samuel Adams, the guy who kicked off the american revolution, and also the inspiration for the name of a tasty Boston brewed beer.

Here's me in Faneuil Hall.

Here's the stage in the hall, it's a pretty amazing building

We planned to meet up with four of the GRSP girls who were in Boston at the same time as us, so here we all are outside Massachusetts State House. This building was particularly exciting for me because it's on the Boston level of Tony Hawks underground 2, and you have to grind off the heads of the statues, it was really cool walking around Boston because i kept seeing land marks from the game. From right to left you have Ben, Me, Michaela from South Africa, Philipa from Sweden, Becky from Wales, Agnetha from Denmark, Gustavo and Philip.

Once we found the girls we all got back on the freedom trail. Boom!

Donkey riding, that's becky from wales on the right

all of us by a maaaaassive christmas tree!

made a quick stop at urban outfitters for a pair of boots, the canvas shoes just weren't cutting it in the cold! 

 Got my feet nice and toasty, then while the girls were still shopping, me and the boys found a little tavern for a liquid lunch with Samuel Adams, not a bad drop.

Then I lost the bottom of my legs but got to wear larry birds shoes

Found a rotary sign!

Got all the rotary students in for a photo with the sign!

Made friends with a statue

Found the coolest part of town!

Ran into a christmas parade, with santas, marching bands, mini fire trucks, all that good stuff.

Everyone enjoying the show..

We then hit a restaurant for coffee while the sun went down (at 4 30 in the afternoon!) then carried on the freedom trail which took us all over the city, took a self timed photo on the steps outside the bunker hill monument.

The monument, I never caught this guys name but he looks like Zoro without his mask

Wandered round some wicked cool streets

I even found the skinniest house in the world! If I ever move to boston then I'll have to live here. I'm pretty sure this house was purpose built for skinny people haha skinny hall ways and everything

We really wanted to go sing Karaoke but couldn't find any Karaoke bars so we got back to the hotel room and improvised. The rules were you couldn't pick your own song, and everybody had to sing. This is me singing ricky martin, liiiivin la vida loca yeow!

We even had the youtube karaoke videos going on.

after a bloody good day the girls went back to their hotel and we crashed.. It's now monday morning as I'm finishing up here, and the boys have all gone off to check out the harvard campus, I've decided to spend my morning checking out the Berklee music campus, see what it's got on Auckland Uni. While try and keep updating as I go, we leave for NY tomorrow! YEEEEEEOW!!

Grand Canyon!

So I've arrived in Georgia now, It's beautiful here! Really hot and muggy. Not quite as hot as phoenix which is nice but the humidity is pretty gnarly! the air is always really thick. Augusta is SUCH a beautiful town, its really green. The houses are epic too, they're all massive and super old! and all the people here talk with really southern accents. I almost feel like I'm living in a movie haha

Anyway.. The day before I flew out Cody's brother Butch and his wife Heidi, took me and they're daughter Addy up to the Grand Canyon! We left at 12, and it took us 4 hours to get there. Butch's car stereo was broken, so to keep ourselves entertained on the drive we played an alphabet game, where you start at A and have to get to Z, to progress to a new letter you have to spot a word somewhere outside the car on a road sign or another car, so you progress pretty fast until letters like Q or X or Z.. we were both stuck on Z, so basically the first one to see a Z word would win the game, butch got distracted just as we got to a 'no passing zone' and i took it out :) so stoked haha! we pretty much ate jerky and sun flower seeds and played the alphabet game til we got there.

Got to the canyon, and because we were so high up it wasn't too hot which was nice. Back in Phoenix there's never relief from the heat when you're outside, so it was so sick being outside in the sun and not dying from the heat. We basically just wandered around and had our minds blown! here's some photos we got from the day .....


This is Heidi, and Addy

 Butch and Addy

 Now you can kind of see the canyon..

 IT'S SOOOO BIG!

 Just being a tourist ha

 Me and Butch got off the track and climbed out this part that didn't have railings on it, Heidi was freeeeeaking out ha! It was mean though, I got a few snaps out there on my disposable.. I'll scan em on when I develop it.

 There were all these animals there too, I tried to get close but they kept freaking out

 Addy is the coolest baby, she's so chilled out! I've never seen her cry, she just laughs all the time. She's epic! so cute

So we drove back after about an hour and a half of checking out the canyon, got back at like 12 so I packed my things and then we went to a little party at one of Cody's friends houses where I said goodbye to all the people I'd met, then we went straight to the airport at 3 30, flew out at 5 30 from Phoenix to Charlotte in North Carolina. I basically had to walk straight from one terminal to the next and got straight on the other plane, which was this tiny little thing. No toilet, an aisle with one seat on the left and another with two seats on the right. And that flight took like half an hour. Straight up and down again. Got to Augusta at 2pm where I was met by Sonny who is the head of the rotary club who's sponsoring me, Billy who is one of my host parents, and then Rafael who is one of my other host fathers.

I stayed with Rafael, his wife Avita and they're daughter the first night. They took me to a steak house for dinner, where I got the smallest meal on the menu and still couldn't finish it haha and then to target where I got a 20 dollar cell phone. The prepaid plan I'm on gives me 1500 txts and minutes for 30 dollars! So cheap! Then went back to their place where I slept on a bed for the first time in 2 weeks :) Had the best sleep ever, which was good considering I didn't sleep at all since before we went to the grand canyon!! woke up to a coffee and toad in the hole, that avita made. So sick. Then came here to the place I'm living. It's a student village about 5 min drive from the Uni. I'm in a 4 bedroom apartment with 3 other dudes who are on the same scholarship program as me. Phillip is from denmark, he's studying computer science. Ben is from Nigeria and he's doing Medicine, and Gustavo is from Brazil, he's also doing medicine. The dudes are real sweet, me and Phillip walked to this mexican place last night and got some food, he's the man. And since then I've just been going to orientation things and getting to know the place. I'm pretty certain I'm gonna like it here :)

Will post soon with some more stories and photos from Georgia. I start Uni next monday so I'm looking forward to that. Hope your all doing well back home!

Phoenix

Just thought I'd keep everyone posted on where I'm up to, what I've been doing etc. We got to Phoenix last weekend, on Saturday avo. First thing you figure out when you get here is that your in the middle of the desert and its SO HOT! The car was getting stuffy so i rolled the windows down and just got this heat wave exploding in my face, and this was before we were even in Arizona, we were just coming to the end of california.. Every now and then for the rest of the journey I'd just roll down the window to check the temp and every time was SO much hotter! It was crazy. So its been over 40 degrees celsius here everyday, even at night, I find it too hot to be outside.

Right now its monsoon season, so it's quite humid as well (Arizona's normally real dry) but the epic thing about that is pretty much every night there's been these amazing thunder storms off in the distance. We'll be driving around and there will just be flashes every 5 or 10 seconds. Sometimes you'll even see these big lightning bolts, its so sick!

Phoenix is big and suburban.. there isn't really a downtown, just miles and miles of suburbs, and everything's painted the same colour.. There's 4 million people living here, so the size of NZ in this big suburb out in the desert. And right now its so hot that everyone just lives indoors, its so weird. Coming from NZ where you stay inside because its colder outside, right now we stay inside because its too hot outside.

It's been such a great week though, I'm LOVING phoenix. Cody's been amazing with introducing me to people, already I've met so many cool people. I watched Cody's band play a pool party the saturday night we got here, went to his MASSIVE church on Sunday night, we've spent a lot of time just hanging out with different people, on monday we went to this epic coffee shop, had to teach the guy how to make a flat white again.. I've gotten used to saying 'double latte but easy on the froth there bro' and then they go 'froth?' and then cody goes 'he means foam man'. then we checked out Tempe, which is a little bit out of Phoenix. Got some more Record shopping in.. Got some CHEAP as dylan, springsteen, doors, eagles etc. After Tempe we cruised over to this guy Robs house. Rob is a crazy music collector. He has the biggest record collection I've ever seen. He's got these framed records everywhere, some of which are mindblowing! In one of them, on the cover of the record is a photo with a big group of people sitting on some steps, Tim Buckley's in the photo, and Rob showed us his mum in the picture and then he showed us himself sitting on the corner picking his nose!! Incredible. He's a got a signed copy of Jeff Buckley's Grace album, he said when he met Jeff, he told him he'd met his father tim when he was 5 years old... To which jeff replied 'you and me both man' !!!!!!!! so sick! So we had an epic time looking at all his stuff, watched some Dylan and Led Zep videos and he cooked us a real tasty dinner.. burritos. Such a good night!

I swear every single meal I've had in Phoenix until last night (when we had in and out burger) has been mexican.. burritos, tacos, quesadillas.. I love mexican food right now. every time we drive past a del taco or a taco bell I have to stop and have a chicken burrito haha

Tuesday night I played a show at this little bar, was kind of unsure because I don't really know anyone here, but it was SO sick, all the dudes I'd met over the last few days came out to watch and were super stoked on my set.. It was really sweet. Cody played a few songs with me on the mando... Here's some photos:

Cody and Me playing Girl From The North Country

 That's Cody's store manager Mike on the left and his older brother Butch on the right

 That's brent on the right and Jordan on the left, epic dudes

 This is a table full of people I've met here, they'd all cheer really loud when I finished a song haha

This is me chewing my hair

 Good times

So that was sick.

Wednesday we went to a mall where they had a vans store, Cody's friend Jason is the manager. He gave us half off anything! So sick! I got a pair of brand new vans for 22 dollars american! Then we went to this mexican place called Chipotle. I could only eat half my 6 dollar chicken burrito. So mean, then Cody went to work so I went and helped his brother Butch do some prep work on a house he was painting. We had a sick day hanging out and getting it done.

Now it's Thursday, not too sure what today has in store.. But tomorrow, me and Butch and his wife Heidi are taking a little trip to THE GRAND CANYON! I'm soooooo fricken stoked! So hopefully I'll have some more interesting pictures for the blog by tomorrow. Can't wait to go check out the grand canyon! Then I fly out at 5 30 am on Saturday to settle down in Georgia. It's all happening very quick but I'm having such a good time. Missing home a little! Wouldn't mind a flat white and game of MD down at Alleluya haha

Hope your all doing well back home!