London to Auckland . As summarised by a close friend.

I had pretty much an entire diary of the first 10 days of this, my most recent excursion to a place where there is snow. New Zealand actually. Where I intend on staying until late October if I can find gainful employment. It was sent out in an e-mail. Some of you may have deleted it immediately, some may have skimmed through to get the general gist after realising there is not much there to read, and that any debauchery or illicit activity was omitted to spare me shame. There are a few that may have read it. And then strained so hard at the tediousness of it that you gave yourself an anal fissure. To those of you, I say well done. I got a helpful e-mail in reply from a very close friend summarising my activity in 3 short sentences, which I have repeated below, as I can't even be bothered to cut and paste that entire dross into this, my first blog entry. So here we go:

• Flew in (could have caused the plane to crash) - expl. my mobile turned on in my pocket as I slept. I began panicking as it vibrated with "welcome to New Zealand" texts on the landing approach.
• Bummed around not getting drunk nearly enough
• Saw some sights but didn't know, or particularly care, what they were

Beautifully put as it goes, and more concise than the original mail. So thanks buddy!

My time wasn't completed wasted. I was shown around by the sister and husband of a friend from home, and a cousin (of which I was very grateful, as I would never have ventured out of the city otherwise), and took in some amazing views, a lot of which can be found in this facebook album.