Sorry about the long wait between posts this time! Olli has been uploading some more photos, but we haven't written an entry in quite a while. I'll do my best to fill in the gaps.

One of our last evenings in Rotorua, New Zealand, was spent at a Maori concert and traditional "Hangi" dinner. The Maori tribe dressed in their tradional costumes and demonstrated some of the ancient jobs and customs like basket weaving, wood carving and a hand gesture game (don't worry, all gestures were "clean" ones) to improve hand-eye coordination. They also sang some songs and danced for us. It was very interesting overall and we enjoyed learning about these native New Zealand people.

The best part was the yummy dinner that they prepared in the traditional way by putting the food on top of hot volcanic stones (in containers of course) in a pit, covering the pit with dirt and then letting the food cook inside the pit for three to four hours. It was like an early Thanksgiving feast and everything had a lightly smoked flavor that was delicious!

After leaving New Zealand, we spent five days on O'ahu (an island in Hawaii), in Waikiki. The weather was perfect! Each day was sunny, warm and just right for heading to the beach, which is exactly what we did every day except our first day.
That day was a bit of a let down because we decided to travel to downtown Honolulu for a flea market by bus. Due to the lack of proper signage for the bus stands on the side of the road as well as a lack of posted timetables, we spent 5 hours waiting and riding the bus and only 1 hour at the Flea Market. :-(

However, the rest of our trip was lovely. We saw many gorgeous sunsets, a fun hula dancing show and Olli even surfed for the first time in his life! The Hawaiian part of our round-the-world trip actually felt like a whole vacation in itself because basically all we did for five days was go to the beach, so time was passing a whole lot more slowly than during the previous two months! (We also saw the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, which served as a great history lesson for us both.)


We've been in Colorado for almost two weeks now and we leave in a few days for New York City. Our time in CO has been very enjoyable. It's always good to be with family and friends here. Although everyone has been working full time, we've still found many opportunities to make wonderful memories together. We celebrated Thanksgiving and Olli's birthday within the first weekend, which was a great way to start! I've also been able to help out at my mom's school one day and shared photos and read a story to my sister's third grade class.

There has also been a trip to the Ahlgrim's family's cabin (Olli's host family when he first came to CO 15 yrs. ago) in Winter Park and a day of skiing there. Snow has been abundant and ironically enough, exactly one week after sitting on the beach in Hawaii basking in the hot sun, we were shoveling my parents' driveway after about a foot of snow!

Also, Olli has now become a skydiver! He even did this without jumping out of an airplane, for which I was very thankful. Olli, my dad, and brother-in-law Derrick, did what's called "indoor skydiving" at a place called Skyventure. They had a blast and we took lots of pictures and video of them while they floated through the air. It was pretty cool!

Another special event was seeing a Dinner Theatre production of Crazy For You, the musical in which I performed my senior year in high school. It brought back a lot of fun memories for me.

We're off to dinner at our favorite Greek restaurant tonight and then to our church's Christmas show tomorrow so we have a few more special events to experience before we're off to NYC.