I've come off the "transition high" in the last week. I don't know about you but it happens to me all at once. One moment I'm walking around looking around saying "hum-de-dum" the next I'm standing staring saying "frick...." But it's good eh, to hit the ground and find my feet in reality. It rained hard all last week, kind of made me pine a little for the northwest. I can't say my time here is always easy. I'm definitely out of my comfort zone trying to learn how to cope. Learning how to interact with people in another culture is... interesting sometimes. People in my own culture can be scary enough. It's a totally different ball game than YWAM... there we were all learning how to interact with individuals from a whole spectrum of different cultures. Now I'm in the middle all alone... thinking "you do... what?" Not alot of internationals in Tauranga. At least not as far as i can tell. The large majority of people I meet are born and bred Kiwi. A few English. I met an English chap yesterday who just moved here a week ago and I could hardly understand what he was saying. Unbelievable. I don't even notice how New Zealanders talk anymore. The other day I was informed that my accent comes through really thick when I sing. Someone even described it as a "twang." Yeah buddy, true to the Central Oregon cowboy roots. Even though I've never been a cowboy or liked country music... except Johnny Cash. Funny.

Our youth group trip is on schedule. It's going to be a lot of fun. Just praying for good weather, we're headed up to Mt Ruapehu and what I hear is that like most mountains... on a nice day it's amazing but on a bad day it's really bad. That'll be the 10th through the 12th of July. I'll take my camera. We're going up Friday afternoon, going sledding on Saturday, and coming back midday on Sunday.

My social life is picking up, which is nice. I'm still going to City Church on Sunday nights, probably will just keep that habit up. Got invited over for dinner at some girls' house on Saturday night, had a grand old time. One of them is from Canada, and was in a DTS at Faith Bible College when we camped on the front lawn and turned it into the third world. Hilarious. Last night after church a large number of us went out to kick it. It warmed my heart to have hangout time after a Sunday night church service, reminded me of so many great post-journey evenings. As people trickled out I lost count of how many "text me let's hang out this week" comments I got. Which is awesome... but I do have responsibilities... on that note... people do the sms thing to death here. It's a lot cheaper than calling on a cell. I'm not really a fan of text messaging in the first place, but a lot of them abbreviate the life out of the ol' sms. So sometimes it takes me a while to decode. But hey that's cool. The only thing is that the buttons on the phone I have don't exactly "work" in the traditional sense. It's one of those old nokias with an antenna! Oh man it's awesome. Except for the text messaging with "special" buttons. So I'm sure you can imagine what it would be like to watch me try to write a text message... concentrating very hard, and anger mounting with each button malfunction. I haven't thrown the phone yet but believe me..... there have been a couple of close calls. I played foosball yesterday. People seem to find it amusing when I yell incoherently in frustrated competitive rage. I don't find it so amusing.

K gotta go. Things to do.