Metric, Ozone, and Voltage, Oh My!

So who would've guessed? NZ is a tad bit different than the states. So needless to say, I've learned a thing or two in the past couple of days.

As soon as I got here, I tried to fully immerse myself in the metric system. I was introduced to the world of grams, meters, and celsius years ago in chemistry class. Basically, I know that 0 degrees is freezing, 100 is boiling, and 25 is about room temperature. Not terribly helpful for understanding weather reports. And I know that my rope is 60 meters, roughly 200 feet. And my Nalgene holds 1 liter of water. So for the most part, these are my reference points. Ha, kind of lame I know.

So on my first day here, before I succumbed to jet lag, I armed myself with a list of handy conversions and ventured to the grocery store. I never imagined it'd be so hard to just figure out how much apples cost. First I needed to convert the kg price to lbs and then divide by two for the exchange rate before I could compare to US prices. Kind of silly. My other option is to just hand over my NZ dollars without asking any questions. But where's the fun in that?

So does anyone remember in the 90s when there was talk of this "hole in the ozone layer?" Everyone was pretty worried about it for awhile and we stopped using CFCs in hair spray, but 10+ years later, I think most people have forgotten about it. To tell you the truth, I kind of forgot about it as well, or at least where this hole is. So guess where it is? Yup, over NZ. So I probably chose the worst possible place in the world for my ghostly skin with the exception of maybe Antarctica. Ha. I'll live.

You know that advice that you received before going abroad about checking what voltage your electronics can handle before willy-nilly plugging them into foreign outlets? Yea well I forgot. I suppose I didn't completely forget, I just assumed that my ipod dock would be alright. But the smoking and burning smell coming out of the outlet made me think otherwise. Oops. At least I didn't get electrocuted, that's never fun, I would know.

I believe that is all for now. I will post pictures soon.

peace