No School on Fridays!

No school today! Seriously, this is the best schedule—three-day weekends every week! Too bad this is not how real life is…

Before I say anything else, I'd like to give a big shoutout to my BYU basketball team. We won a second-round NCAA tournament game for the first time since 1981. Way to go cougs! And all the Jimmer excitement this season is even more exciting because he has been my favorite since he started his BYU basketball career!

We didn’t have any big plans for today, so the Colwill girls went on a looooong walk to Pak n’ Sav. It is kind of like a smaller version of Costco except you don’t need a membership. Since next Thursday is our last day in the schools, we picked up some lollies (they call all candy “lollies”) for our students. We also started to build up our stock of New Zealand food to bring home :)

Today, March 18, was dedicated as the national day of mourning for the Christchurch earthquake. They televised the memorial live from Christchurch and I was able to watch it with Sheryl and Raewyn. It was a very touching memorial, especially because I sat there with Raewyn crying through most of it. There were lots of unique cultural things and it was neat to hear Sheryl and Raewyn explain them. Prince William was there in place of his mother, the Queen. So he spoke, as did NZ prime minister John Key, and a representative from almost every religion. It was quite an interesting (and quite a long) memorial. I still can’t believe how blessed we were to have not been down in Christchurch when the earthquake happened—so blessed.

Anna and I were quite productive the rest of the day: we almost finished a big final project/paper for our online class, went shopping with Sheryl, and made the family hamburgers and kumura fries (pretty much like sweet potatoes) for dinner. Dinner was a hit—I especially LOVED our kumura fries. As they say in NZ, they were YUM AS!

The last exciting news from the day was that we had a big girls night at Nicole and Neeley’s homestay’s house. It was so fun to get together and chat and eat Emily’s AMAZING toffee cheesecake and chat some more. With all of us being in such interesting New Zealand classrooms everyday, we have LOTS to talk about. :) It was supposed to be a “spend-the-night” but most of us ended up just going home to sleep in our own beds. It was great because we just got a taxi home: it was about the same price as the bus would have been, but we could choose the time we wanted to leaven and it got us home in a fraction of the time (like 10 minutes instead of an hour!). What a steal of a deal—and for those of you who know what I’m talking about, it really was “a still of a dill” :)