Safely arrived in Auckland

Despite a time change and crossing the international date line, I'm not actually that jet lagged. My plane took off at around 9:30 pm on Tuesday in California, and after a 13 hours of restless airplane sleep I arrived here at 4:30 am on Thursday in New Zealand. Other than being sad that I will never experience May 14, 2008, I feel pretty good.

I didn't do anything too exciting today, other than busting into my room at the hostel at 7:00 this morning to the disgruntled sleepy moans of my roommates. It's now about at 4:30 pm and I've spent most of the day wandering around the streets and park around the University I will be studying. I think I might take a ferry out to an island this weekend, but I'm not sure yet.

Some interesting cultural differences:

Crosswalks
At the major intersections I have seen, pedestrians never cross the street when any cars are moving. So instead of having pedestrians walk parallel to the cars, the traffic lights stop all of the cars for about a minute and let all of the pedestrians (regardless of direction) cross the street. The result is that there is a fairly long wait at a crosswalk, so people pile up at the corners, and then when they finally can go this flood of people pours into the intersection crossing every which way. It's difficult to describe but it's funny to see people crossing the street diagonally which never happens in the US.

Accents
I want one. They're awesome.

Volume of sushi places
About one out of every five store fronts is a hole in the wall take out sushi place. It's like Starbucks in Seattle, but instead of coffee it seems like people here can't live without two servings of raw fish in their daily diet. It's the only explanation for how they all stay open.

I've been warned that it's almost winter here, but today was around 70 and beautiful so I'm hoping that my luck holds. I'm off to go meet people in my hostel and get ready for some interviews tomorrow.