Spaghetti on toast? For breakfast?

Well, the Kiwi adventure continues. We had a great weekend, though as you can guess, we had a few interesting experiences! This weekend was Labour Day Camp, with about 120 1o-14 year old campers and 50 high school and university age leaders. Dave and I joined in as leaders, and enjoyed ourselves. We met a ton of great people, and we're hoping to visit some of them as we tour around the country.

But, the weekend also led to some interesting discoveries. Here's a few of them:

1. Yes, in New Zealand it is normal to eat spaghetti on toast for breakfast. I was slightly shocked to say the least, when a camper walked by me on Saturday morning carrying a plate of spaghetti, but my campers reassured me it was completely normal. They wanted me to know that it was canned spaghetti, not the real stuff, which somehow was supposed to make me feel better. We tried it - it will be a one-time thing!

2. Apparently, tea is supper . Okay, it took us awhile to get our heads around this one, but I'll try to summarize it for you. Here's what Kiwis call their meal/snacks:

Breakfast - same as us, except for the spaghetti issue
SmoCho - that's probably not spelled right, but it refers to your morning and afternoon snack of coffee or tea and a biscuit. No complaints there!
Lunch - sometimes may be referred to as dinner
Tea - this is your main meal of the day, which we would call supper or dinner
Supper - this is your late night snack of tea or milo (kinda like hot chocolate)

Ok, you can see why we were confused when people told us we were having a BBQ tea at 5 pm. Didn't sound very appealing, but turned out to be a fairly normal BBQ of sausages at supper time.

3. Kiwis love to make people eat weird things at retreats too! Well, we felt right at home here, as we've had some Fear Factor-like camp and retreat experiences in Canada, so when they recruited Dave to eat a dog biscuit as fast as he can, we weren't that shocked. Good to know some things are the same worldwide.

Well, I think that's it for now. There's some proof that we're definitely learning lots and experiencing Kiwi culture at its best! We also spent yesterday at a tulip farm, which is more of a Dutch thing than a Kiwi, but either way it was absolutely beautiful. We will post some pictures soon, but it literally looked like someone had painted the fields with the most brilliant colours. The same farm also has a dairy component, so we ventured over and bottle-fed some calves. And, let me tell you, these calves were hungry - they left a nice wet lick-print on my pant! The weather has been steadily improving too, so we've been enjoying warm, sunny days. There is still quite a breeze (the whole Antarctic thing), but we're enjoying lots of time outside. While we miss all of you, we can't say we're going to miss the winter weather that's coming! Sorry to remind you! Thanks for your comments! They make us laugh and don't worry, we haven't actually been in a pig pen yet, Gregg! But, it might not be long for Dave!