Living out of a suitcase

All righty. To start off with, New Zealanders are stingy about their internet. We did a trek across the city while Kaylee tried to find a place to connect to with her phone, but to no avail.
Our two most successful finds though - McDonalds gives you free internet for half an hour if you buy something, and Starbucks only charges 6 dollars for an entire day. That's where we are now.

So, parents, that 6 dollars was spent to assure you all that we're not dead.

We're staying in a hostel swarming with people ranging from 18 to 25ish. Feels....a little bit like summer camp, community breakfasts and suppers, wash your own dishes, shoes optional, be aggressive or you won't get any food. It's cool. I feel like our group is the odd one out.
Oh wait, it is..

The city is surrounded by mountains. Seriously. It doesn't matter which way you look there are mountains as far as the eye can see. It's incredible. I'm so blown away by the magnificence of my surroundings. I could live here and be satisfied for the rest of my life.
I mean...there's no Walmart but...

This week we're looking at going kayaking on the lake, and then doing some canyoning. You might be wondering what canyoning is...well so am I. I think it involves some sort of waterfall sliding...whatever it is, it's a fun alternative to skydiving, which I was seriously considering for a while. (don't tell papa)

Also, it's like 20 dollars to ride this gondola all the way up the side of the mountain, so I think we're doing that tomorrow. It looks something like this:

Ahem, yes please.

Yesterday we had our free supper at the hostel, after which we got a few groceries to snack on and then retired to our rooms for a quick nap before we were going to head out to the bar for live music aannnnddd that's the last thing I remember before I woke up at 5:30 fully clothed and realized all of us had basically passed out in our beds. So we missed the live music but also managed to get over any jet lag we might have had relatively quickly.

Manders