I'm in the little town of Raglan, on the west coast about 1.5 hours south of Auckland, as I didn't want to stay in Hamilton (bigger city) or Auckland (giant city) for longer than necessary.
This hostel is great! its sort of built like a giant doughnut around a central courtyard/garden. They've got an enormous stash of surfboards and sea kayaks, and all sorts of free things to borrow, like bikes and lake kayaks for the inlet that is literally right outside the door and fishing gear (if you're into that :p ) and more! It is right on the water on a sheltered little inlet, which is great for the paddle boarders and kayakers. They have a small fleet of cars and make multiple trips each day out to the open beaches for people to go surfing. Super cheery, laid back, friendly place full of surfers and soon-to-be-surfers (except most of the people here, being surfers, think the North Island is the only part of NZ worth seeing. I disagree. :p ) I had a good chat about the excessive windiness of the roads up in the Coromandel with four Americans (three of whom were from Boulder, Colorado! But I'm not going there after all... :p ) I realized as we were talking, though, that I'm going to have to learn to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head pretty quickly. I knew I'd have to do it with miles, but that's a much easier conversion... C = (F - 32)*5/9 ... roughly -30 then divide by 2? geh... I'm pretty sure most of the school stuff will be in Celsius, but I may very well be wrong... This begs the question, what on Earth is the Fahrenheit system based off of? There must have been better justification than "I like the number 32. Lets make that the temperature water freezes, and go from there!" In a nutshell, this seems to be how the system came about: German-Polish physicist named Daniel Gabriel (I think my mom was going to name me Gabriel...) Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer! Cool. Good on him. But in 1724 he proposed the whole F temperature scale. Apparently its worth noting that the freezing and boiling point of water are exactly 180 degrees apart, so one degree is equal to 1/180 the difference between freezing and boiling water? (So Wikipedia is telling me...) The part I'm more interested in: zero F is the freezing point of brine (I take it brine has a specific salinity, otherwise you'd think that would vary a significant amount...)
Ooooh k, I found the paragraph I care about. He used three reference points. Zero point is the result of putting a thermometer in a 1:1:1 mix of ice, water, and ammonium chloride (salt). (This mixture stabilizes temperature automatically, so its not just picking any old mixture on a whim. :p Chemistry is cool. Its been too long since I've done any chemistry...). 32 (I don't know why he chose the number 32, though) is a 1:1 mix of water and ice (freezing temp of water), and the third point is body temperature, about 96, called "blood-heat" at the time. Ah. The reason for 32 and 96: he met some guy earlier who had made his own scale with 0 as freezing bring, 7.5 as freezing water, and 22.5 as body temp. Then he multiplied everything by 4 to get rid of fractions and re-calibrated it. This seems all very arbitrary, to me... Its even got its own version of Kelvin (sort of), called the Rankine Scale, with 0=absolute zero.
ANYHOW, most of the above has absolutely NOTHING to do with my trip, so sorry about that little tangent! :p
Super-cool hostel, awesome people, saw some very cool clouds on the drive up, saw a very cool "gremlin forest" back at Taranaki, and tomorrow is my last full day in New Zealand. :(
EEEK! Okay, I have a relatively large stack of postcards that have been riding around in my backpack for about a week waiting to get deposited in a mailbox. I really need to do that before I leave since I doubt the Aussies want Kiwi stamps :p
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