discin day

the stars are freaking incredible here. seeing the milky way and tons of other stars so brightly illuminated with the lack of major cities amazes me... its such a nice change. today and tonight were very chill... we started sharing our own life stories and now that everyone involved has gone we have a deeper understanding of who we each are and where we have come from, and so our sibling bond has already grown solid. i’ve been here barely 3 days and it feels like i’ve been here weeks. i talked to alana tonight and she said the same thing... when you’re with the same group of people in highly intimate situations its impossible to not become close. i feel so blessed and am so thankful to be here... were all screwed up and we all have our issues but nobody knows.

the dudes are singing in the next room... musically bonding. i am bonding by listening but i am separate from the musical side of things. minus bands and stuff, which john mark has shown me a ton of bands i’ll soon steal from his computer and explore. its weird, i hadn’t listened to music other than acoustic worship since i got on the plane to NZ, so it sounded amazing after such a long (pfffft) withdrawal. we finally played some ultimate tonight.. nothing serious, just a little group gathered disc. it wasn’t intense but it was still a blast and i probably played a little too hard but it was amazing and hopefully these games will happen more often with a few other guys who love it as much as i do. and ping pong... OHHH ping pong... didn’t play once today, because we destroyed the only ball we had yesterday. BUT then i discovered a room in the old destroyed pool that had another table, away from everything else (like noise courtesy rules and such) and had lots more balls and paddles and was a better quality table. this room has a fable until this point, and it was nice to discover since opening doors that are unfamiliar to me tend to send me running with my shy tail between my legs. what if there were people having sex or like a possum family dwelling? the shock! these are the things i think before opening an unknown door. alana says that there are hedgehogs here too. i want one to reside near anywhere i am so i can feed him things that hedgehogs eat and name him curly or something ironic.

i found another guy who can’t bend his fingers very far at all... jacob from northern california seems to have the same digit affliction that i have. cept he’s wicked good at guitar. i’ve learned a few things but i forgot to mention them... that australian ‘shrimp on the barbie’ is incorrect. its ‘prawn on the fryer’ if its even mentioned... prawn, not shrimp. europeans play weird pool rules. when you scratch, you get two shots. when you sink the last ball before the 8 ball, you must sink the 8 ball in the opposite pocket of the ball you just sunk. it makes the game really interesting... and since it was doubles it took forever. people are good at backflips and sweet things like that here. it strikes me into awe and starry eyes. tomorrow is our first ‘lecture’ and i’m really looking forward to it. this week will be very chill in comparison to next week when we actually start this thing call ‘school’... but i’m excited. there isn’t much free time to explore, mebe two hours at most sometimes like today when we took a hike to the river and explored a little. its kinda cramped not bein able to leave the base cuz of things we need to do... but soon the mountains in the east will be fully conquered. and surfing will happen soon... yayyyyy

i didn’t do any pushups today. but i made lukas do 10. -110 vs. +10.