9 months!

A long while has passed since I last wrote, and as always so much has been going on that I don't know where to start.
March and April brought a cold wind announcing the winter. 99% of New Zealand's trees are evergreen, which means they don't loose their leaves in autumn, so rare are the trees colouring yellow, some imported species are though...
I've been playing a lot of volleyball lately. Since joining the school's team I have two practices a week and a game every Thursday afternoon. It is a very nice team. I really enjoy practicing with them. Sadly it is only a summer sport, so now that term one has finished so has the volleyball season.
With the end of the season ended the outdoors free concerts. I went to my last two with my friends. I've now heard heaps of very good Kiwi bands and seen them live.
Chris and Karen's friend Roger came back to visit us. For those of you who remember, Roger is the friend that took me to a hospitality show all the way back in October, and there I cooked mussels and scallops. This time Roger took me up north with a tour of French foresters that he was organizing. We drove about an hour and a half north to visit a Kauri forest. Kauri is the largest New Zealand tree. It can grow over thirty meters high and 2 meters wide! It doesn't stop growing for the first 1500 years of its life! Maori used to use them to make their wakas (canoes). Sadly when Europeans settlers came here they cut them down by the thousands and now rare are the big, old Kauris. The biggest ones I got to see where 800 years old and incredibly huge!
And so came the end of school and the end of term holidays! On the last week of term, as always, we had a mufti day. This wasn't nearly as cool as last year since this year I'm a year thirteen and wear mufti all the time. But we set a theme and tried to come as hippie as we could. It was a really cool day.

These holidays I went traveling around NZ. On Wednesday the 16th Filipe and I caught a bus down to Wellington were we stayed for a couple of days with friends of my host family. WE had a lovely time there, visited the Te Papa museum, the botanical gardens, walked around town. Wellington is such a beautiful city! I really like it.
We then flew down to Christchurch in the South Island to join 40 other AFS students from all over the world and all over New Zealand and tour around the South Island.
The trip was fantastic! I met heaps of new students that like me were having the time of their lives. We saw some magnificent places and did really thrilling things!
The highlights of my trip were my bungy jump and a trip to Milford Sounds. The bungy jump was off Kawarau bridge, the first bungy of the world, 43 meters high. It was incredible!
Milford Sound is the most beautiful place I've ever visited. It is actually a fiord (which are not, as I was made believe, only in Norway...). The difference between a fiord and a sound is that fiords are created by retrieving glaciers and sounds are created by the actions of rivers. Milford Sound was just awe inspiring! No words to describe it, but to encourage you to visit sometime.
It was really sad leaving all my friends, not knowing when we'll see each other again, but it was really nice to come home and sleep in my own bed.

SO that's it for now. Hope you all take the opportunity to visit this corner of the world because it truly is beautiful!
Cheers,
Camila