Rabbit on a rotisseriere! Dinner? No. This was one of the strangest things I've ever seen! The rabbit's back legs were first tied and stretched to the back posts and then the same done with the front legs to the front poles. The lady started shearing the rabbit's back and then rotated it over to do the stomach. Although the rabbit wasn't in pain and it would be almost impossible to shear by just holding it because it was very squiggly, it was still very hard to watch.
"Enter Enthusiastically" sign at the entrance to a B & B along the road. Must visitors drive in with a smile on their face? Are they supposed to look really happy to be staying in this particular place when they arrive at the reception desk? No.... I looked at the very steep driveway leading to the establishment and realized that "Enter Enthusiastically" meant, "Gun it or your car won't make it up this hill and you won't get a room for the night!"
Glow worms: The bus stopped at a glow worm cave today and some of the passengers took an inner tube float through a cave with glow worms lighting the way. Glow worms are really a kind of fly in the larvae stage and because of some chemical reaction are bioluminescent. The Maori word for them means "stars in the water". I went through the free museum that explained the phenomenon instead of taking this tour today because I had already seen glow worms at Rainbow Springs in Rotorua with the Friendship Force group.
A road blessing: yesterday's hostel in Taupo had NEW washers AND dryers! Many people and hostels use clotheslines to dry clothes here, so I got my week's laundry washed AND dried yesterday afternoon!
Taupo's lake, appropriately called Lake Taupo, is larger than Singapore!
FAKE GEYSER!!! On the way to Taupo, we stopped to watch a geyser erupt. Rows of wooden seats were set up for this daily occurence, which goes off at exactly 10:15 every morning. Why exactly at 10:15? Because some guy walks over to it, gives a lecture and then pours a chemical compound into the hole which makes it start foaming and erupting!! This geyser is on a natural cycle of 48 to 72 hours between eruptions, but that doesn't make regular money for the owners, so they "fake it to make it" erupt. We got in free, but I still felt ripped off. I told the bus driver that "Old Faithful" in Yellowstone Nat'l Park was a REAL geyser and Americans wouldn't stand for that fake eruption stuff! And, by the way, they kept calling it a "geezer", so actually that name fits because it really is just an old fart!
The bus stopped at "Hobbiton", one of the places where 'Lord of the Rings' was filmed here in NZ. We got to see a sheep shearing and - best of all - got to feed lambs! What a hoot! You could even just stick out your finger and the lambs would suck and the hold they got on it was strong!
The other night in Rotorua before an early turn-in, one of the German guys traveling on my bus asked me, "Do you want to do the wee?" huh? Oh! Did I want to play Wii? (translating German English into American English takes some thought!) I told him I'd love to because I've never played it before. I proceeded to beat him 630 to 260 in dog catching frisbee, but then he slaughtered me in three other games!
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