So I arrived on Saturday March 8th pretty early in the morning. I had successfully gone international all on my own! After finding Petro (the woman I am staying with who is also the head of the Math Department at Thames High School) who was holding a sign with my name on it, we found her husband Gary and headed towards Thames, New Zealand from Auckland. It was still dark when I arrived, so I didn't get a chance to actually see what the big city of Auckland looked like quite yet. It was pretty interesting driving on the left side of the road instead of the right. I still forget which way to look first when trying to cross the street! Thames (pronounced "Tims") is a town in the Coromandel Peninsula of about 6,500 people.
I was expecting a really small town, but after driving through it, I realized it had quite a bit to offer! (This is a good thing since it is about an hour and fifteen minutes from the big city of Auckland, the Firth of Thames is on the left, and almost everything to the right of the city up until the coast is just mountains!) The city has a main street called Pollen Street where there are a ton of shops.
These shops range from MULTIPLE cafes/coffee shops, shoe stores, clothes stores, and even some historical stores. I guess it's a typical "strip mall". There is even a movie theater available if I wanted to see a new movie. The town also has multiple museums that range from museums about the gold industry (which will be discussed in another post) to a museum of technology, to random museums about the town. I'm hoping to enjoy them all at one point!
There is another smaller mall which has a general store which would be comparable to a Wal-Mart, although I think it is a bit cleaner, and then a general grocery store called Pak'n'Save which are pretty common here in NZ. There are some older buildings in the town, but you can tell a lot of the town, especially the houses, don't have that old fashioned look like they've been there long. I can easily walk to this downtown area in about fifteen minutes from where I'm living...which is on the side of a mountain! (Although Gary and Petro don't consider it that cool since they have seen much bigger mountains and few houses are higher up, but it's still way higher than any house I've seen) We're not that high up, but it is still quite the incline to walk up after school each day. I did my best to tough it out and deal with my jet lag to try and get on this schedule! For dinner (or tea as it is called here), Petro invited two math teachers over, one of whom I'll be working with). It was interesting meeting them and just learning bits and pieces about the town and school.
I was able to visit the school on the following day. This school is nice because it actually allows the students to get outside during the day. More is explained about the school in the previous post, but I just thought I should mention that I got to tour it on this day. All math classes are in one building, so we are able to all be in one spot together which is nice for me since I'll be teaching in three different classrooms. We also went tramping in the bush on Sunday, but I'll type about this in another post. This is all I've got for now!
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