As I arrived in the Queenstown airport and found the leaders of the TEAN program that were there to take a bus load of us to our hostel just outside the center of town. Once we arrived I met up with my friend from Rollins who arrived a few days before me. I got acquainted with the people that I would be spending the rest of the semester with and some from other universities on the North Island. We spent the week in Queenstown doing a wide variety of fun activities including hiking the Ben Lomond Trail, jet boating with Dart River, and wine tasting. My favorite time was hiking the Ben Lomond Trail because of how challenging and rewarding it was. It was an eight-hour hike that wasn’t very difficult until the last hour, which could’ve been done in 15 minutes if not for the steep incline and sketchy surface. The summit was breathtakingly gorgeous looking out above the clouds, but my legs could barely support my body by the time we got back to the bottom. Fast forward to the end of the week, when we left for Dunedin. We had made a few good friends that were attending a different university so the goodbyes weren’t fun, but we all decided we had to visit each other’s University. Arriving in Dunedin, I met my Kiwi host (Claudia) and we got to know one another at a casual party next door to our flat. I quickly found out that we have a lot in common and we’ll make great flatmates. As the rest of my flatmates (all of them Americans) they arrived over the next 2 days we spent time relaxing, partying, and trying to learn more about each other. By the end of the first week together we all felt very comfortable and enjoyed spending time together, especially cooking our communal dinners.
