weeeeee!!!

Oh lord have mercy, I'm having fun. The American crew that I happened upon at the pseudo-hippie commune has been honed down and awesomed out. Yesterday Olivia and I spent the morning working exceptionally hard as extras in "Bride-Flight", some Dutch movie that's being filmed in a Queenstown winery. We left Wanaka at 5am with a few others that were doing the extra work and after the typical movie-set hours of eating and shuffling about found ourselves cast as vineyard workers on their smoke break. I have to give a big thank you to my tobacco-happy friends who so kindly assissted me in learning the art of smoking naturally in recent months (you know who you are). Your kind and patient assistance provided me with the opportunity to earn $120 for going through half a pack of herbal cigarettes and talking crap with my current best travel buddy. Now that is good stuff. With our wads of cash in hand, Olivia and I took off to Queenstown with nothing but our jackets and purses and no real plan of how long we'd stay or how we'd even get home. Travelling in South Island New Zealand gives you an incredible sense of security, though, and so such things tend to work out. I mean, you've essentially got all all the community of college minus the all night cram sessions.

So we wandered into a little park and proceeded to spend the afternoon collecting friends. Jeff and Jim (the other half of our US Team) had left Wanaka in the morning and happened to show up at the same park with similarly little on their agenda, then came Mark the English builder with his buddy's dog; a photographer; a juggler; some crazy kids who manipulated us into buying them KFC and lord knows how many others. 6 hours later we were all sun burned and happy and just as devoid of plans. And that's just how it goes here, things are slower, people aren't as busy and are up for anything, even just lazing about in a park for hours on end. Perhaps it also helps that many of us are jobless, homeless and kidless, but just let me idealize here.

So after a night of dancing; the crew and I decided Qtown was the place to be, at least for this week, and Olivia and I hitched a ride back to Wanaka to pack our stuff, say our goodbyes and head back to Qtown. The guys'll be there too and we're all itching for a couple days hiking in the woods as well as some good r&r on the beach. The Flying Kiwi bus picks me up next Saturday, and I'm quite certain I'll be able to occupy myself until then.