Day 1: Auckland

After our 6 hour flight from New York to LA and 12.5 hour flight to New Zealand, we finally arrived in Auckland at around 5 AM Monday morning, New Zealand time. The time difference is pretty crazy (16 hours) and it's weird to cross the international date line. Still our Delegation Manager, a New Zealand local named Tony gave us no time at all to nap or throw ourselves further off. Instead, we began by taking a trip up a volcano, called Mount Eden, where we got our first view of the City of Auckland. While on Mount Eden, we also got to see 4 rainbows. Does anyone see the religious symbolism in this one?

From there we went to a protected beach on the Eastern shore of New Zealand, where the students got to play various team building games.



The Delegation Leaders:
We then zipped off to the Millennium Institute of Sport, New Zealand's Olympic training facility, to learn how to play rugby and do a few more team building exercises:


After that we took about an hour and a half long ride to the opposite coast of New Zealand, where we got to check out a black sand beach that was very rocky. According to our Delegation Manager, the waves are normally smoother and it is normally a great surfing beach. A few people were surfing while we were there.


We finally checked into our hotel at 5:00 PM, had dinner at 6:30, and a very tired lights out at 8:30 PM. All in all it turned out to be a tiring and amazing first day in New Zealand!