Greetings from Matamata!!

Hello from New Zealand!! Sorry it has taken me a few days to update you all, but things have been awesome here and I am keeping pretty busy.

The flight over was amazing, I never had anybody in the seat beside me the entire trip. The jet lag hasn't been too bad at all, I was able to sleep on the plane pretty well because I had an emergency exit row to myself from LA to Sydney, and I made sure I stayed up until the proper time for this time zone every night. The first night we stayed in Auckland at the old base that they used before they moved to Matamata. This base is WAAAAYYYYY better!!! The other base didn't have much to do, but here there's a ping pong and pool table, plus it's on around 12 acres or so, so there's lots of room and there's a soccer field and volleyball courts too.

Like I said, things are keeping pretty busy, we spent the first couple days this week sharing our life stories with eachother, which is where you basically tell everybody about yourself in about 10 minutes. It was pretty awesome, and people were very honest with their past and current situations and struggles. Today we had our first lecture from an older man from New Zealand named Meynard. He is speaking on the character of God, he's very soft spoken, but is pretty interesting and I've enjoyed it so far, even if it's nothing I haven't really heard before.

There's about 25 of us, and we all get along really well. For the most part we're pretty outgoing, and we're all pretty active, so it's been a lot of fun! We play a lot of ping pong and we broke out the cards tonight, (13 player round of spoons!!) and we've even had a few impromptu worship sessions too. We have a room called the GAP that we can hang out in and there's some drums, guitars and a piano that we can use.

I'm staying in a cabin with 2 other guys, Matt, who is from Auckland, and Joēp, who is from the Netherlands. Matt is 25 and Joēp is 22, so they're a little closer to my age than most of the other students. I am the oldest of all the students, and there is only 1 staff member that is older than me, but I'm having no problem getting along with everybody, so the age difference doesn't seem to be a problem at all.

Anyways, I'm hoping to upload some pictures soon to show you all what the base looks like and also a beautiful waterfall that we hiked to the other day. It is so beautiful here, and I can't wait until the weather gets nicer (it's only been about 15-18 degrees everyday and has rained most days as well). I'm absolutely loving it here, and I can't wait to see what God is going to do during this time. I hope all is well over in North America, and I will try to keep you all updated as much as possible.

God bless,

Matt