Our big adventure

My friend and I recently put our hands up to join in on a project that involved travelling to another part of the country for a night and interviewing a doctor. Pretty simple stuff. Our accommodation, petrol, and food is paid for, and once we have the interview out of the way we can spend the rest of our time here chilling out and exploring.

So here we are, living it up in New Plymouth. Well, as much as you can live it up in New Plymouth anyway.

I woke up at quarter to six this morning to make it from Tauranga to Hamilton in time to leave Hamilton for New Plymouth at 7.30. Sacha and I left the house at 7.40, and ended up turning around three times to get something from home. The first time Sacha realised she’d forgotten her laptop. The second time we figured out that neither one of us had brought the important piece of paper telling us about what we were interviewing the doctor about. The third time we decided we wanted to get the cassette thing that lets me plug my ipod into the car. By this point we realised we were actually running well on time and could afford to turn back one more time.

When we reached the hospital we got a little lost, but everything went well once we found our guy. After the interview we set off in search of our hotel.

Now, as we reached the hotel, I started to get a deep feeling of dread in my stomach. It looked like a dump. We pulled into the hotel carpark and I thought to myself “this is the place where dreams go to die”. There was a strong possibility, in my mind, that we would get murdered or abducted as we walked from the carpark to the hotel reception.

When we went inside, I breathed a sigh of relief. It was nice. It looked classy. We survived the treacherous trek from the car.

So as it turns out, the place isn’t half bad, and we did not, in fact, choose a dud. That being said, here’s the view from our room’s window.

The flood

When I went to France in High School, my friends and I made a lot of memories, of which the weirdest was by far the time I was attacked by a ravenous mob of goats in a petting zoo visit that went terribly wrong.

But one of the funniest ones (and most panic-inducing at the time), was when my friend flooded the toilet at a five star Korean hotel.

On our way to France, our flight had to stop off overnight in Korea, so the airline was responsible for providing us with accommodation, hence the five stars. My classmate, Shannon, was sharing a room with me. It was amazing; this fancy room in a high rise hotel, with a gigantic window overlooking all the city lights in Seoul. Absolutely gorgeous.

Sorry about the bad photo quality.

Korea was weird, the bugs there were like bugs here, except three times bigger, and the bus that took us to our hotel had toilet paper holders on it.

So Shannon and I were sharing this hotel room, and the bathroom had one of those showers with the gigantic shower heads, and a toilet with a heated seat. The toilet had settings – there were settings on the toilet. And there were buttons galore. We didn’t know what the buttons were for, and we weren’t really interested in finding out. All I know is that at some point during the evening, Shannon started shrieking, and I ran in to see the toilet overflowing, and all the water starting to pool on the floor. Don’t worry, that’s all there was, water.

The two of us started to freak out, naturally. We grabbed towels from the rail and tried to mop it up, but that toilet just kept going. From what I can recall, there was a big red button on the wall, and I think it might have said ‘help’, so as a final, desperate attempt, we pressed it.

The toilet stopped overflowing, and the day was saved. That was a harrowing experience.