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Welcome.
it's a small world
Hello. You landed at kaitlinkloss.blogspot.com and you probably know that already. kaitlin nicole, she flies with her own wings
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the first week, get comfy.
Sunday, August 29, 2010 @ 5:26 PM
So I haven't been up to date on the blogging, and not that it's any excuse but the hotel downtown we were at for the first few days had veerrryy limited access. Like I'm talking 5 dollars an hour limited. But now here we are in this cute little cottage/apartment thing on the North Shore and we have phone access and free unlimited internet. Lucky ducks. So, where to start...We arrived in Auckland at 5am on Tuesday the 24th. We skipped Monday, how nifty, I never ever lived through Monday the 23rd of August 2010. We made it through customs, the guy happened to be quite chatty, something I've never experienced before. We grabbed our 8 odd bags of luggage and headed on to biosecurity. Which we thought was going to be the hard part because Madison had brought her lovely collection of bird feathers. Once they realized that we were immigrating here and that my sister had not just brought these feathers along for vacation they were very helpful and everything went smoothly. We lined up to put all our bags through an xray machine and I started to get slightly nervous...a HUGE maori man who was helping load peoples bags onto the xray machine was getting pretty agravated with an asian woman. I was first up and just started throwing my bags on the pullee thing. When he saw the Canada Hockey bag he became very friendly, especially when he learned we were moving here. He told Emma that she had to switch from hockey to rugby down here and sent us on our way. It was dark when we got outside, we piled all our bags into the biggest taxi van we could find and headed off in the cold wet dark rain. Nice first impression. We couldn't check into our hotel until 12:30 that afternoon so we had a little time to kill. I was freezing and tired and wanted to shower and brush my teeth so badly. We sat in Starbucks for a while then wandered up and down Queen St. Which is the main downtown shopping street. As much as I wanted to look around, I was really not in the mood seeing as I was so grubby and jetlagged. We grabbed some subway for lunch and sat in an underground, unclosed food court. Meaning I froze more. Teeth chattering, shivering and shaking, I don't think I signed up for this. We had a little more time to kill after lunch so someone had the fabulous idea to go to the bank and set up all our bank accounts. Not only is that a huge process in its own, dad had to ask questions every 30 seconds about everything imagineable. Emma was the only one who didn't get a bank card and normally this wouldn't have caused any issues right? Well take into consideration that this young girl has travelled the world, walked around ALL day, been called a boy too many times to count and then to top things off she is "too young" for a silver card, disaster. In fact, it was an issue for a few days afterwards. Day 2, nothing exciting, did some shopping. So depressing because everything seemed strange to me. Mom has a new boyfriend, he works at the Billabong store, his name is Stephen, very friendly and probably 21. We met him on day one, but him and mom really bonded on day 2 talking about soccer coaches. We saw Grease the musical that night in Auckland. So incredible. I loved it. Day 3 dad had an interview and that was when the jetlag seemed to really hit. We all layed around all day and didn't do a whole lot. On Friday we bought a car...and we were sick of downtown at this point so we hopped on the public transit, in the rain, shocker, and we headed uptown to see some shops up there and explore around. That was fun. The next day we head up to the North Shore which is where we are now. We got fish and chips for lunch where the woman definitely ripped mom off and then tried to tell her she had to pay 2 dollars for 2 packets of ketchup, yaaaaright. We went grocery shopping and me and Emma did some shopping in the mall attached to the grocery store. So much shopping on this trip. Today we drove down to Hamilton, which is about an hour south of Auckland. Didn't really do a whole lot there. We just got home from Hamilton and are cooking up some dinner. We will probably go check out some schools tomorrow just for the heck of it. Looks like there's a good chance that dad will get the job here.  Where we saw Grease  The harbour
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