I bought a car! And I have definitly no idea if it was a good decision (I mean buying this one, I thought the car thing over and over for the last week and talked to many people about it and only one didn't share my opinion that it was a good idea).

The obvious problem is that I have not the slighest idea about cars. I always used to be the kind of girl who thinks that the colour is probably the most interesting thing on a car. And now I wanted to buy one. So I read lots of stuff in the internet, learned that I have to pay attention for technical details I've never heard of and that I am supposed to negotiate the price - which I'm a total loser at (and just kind of don't like to do). So I brooded over it for hours and days, looked for ads on various websides and just got so many different information. The friend of the family I stay with didn't have any vans for sale at the moment, so that wasn't an option as well. So yesterday Nick and I drove to the city, where I picked up my banking account details, and had a look at the Backpacker car world, where they sell cars that were used by other backspackers before. I had read about it and some comments were not that good, but at least they check the cars before they sell them. It acutally looked all right, so today we went back there, took a test drive on one of the cars and when Nick said it felt good to drive, I just decided to buy it.

They check it now and built a bed in the back of the car and on Sunday I am going to pick it up. I already had to pay 800 dollars, so there is no going back. So now I am going to have a car for eigher two persons to sleep in or - when taking out the bed - six persons to drive in. I'm a bit nervous about acutally driving it - especially alone - but I'll go for short distances in the beginning and hopefully get used to it quite soon. At least I already drove a much larger caravan through New Zealand.

Besides from buying a car, I enjoy very much to stay here for a few days. My hosts are really great, yesterday I took a nice walk not far outside from Auckland with Nick and in the evenings we played games. As Nick and his parents are bridge players, I planned some bridge events I am going to attend in the next weeks - so I actually have some rough plans for the upcoming months.

Everything may change of course, but right now it looks like I'll be on the North Island until the middle of march. There'll be some tournaments I am going to play and it is quite likely that I will go to the Gold Coast Congress in Australia over my birthday - which is supposed to be really cool and when I'm already here in NZ... you know. For the second half of march and probably april I think of going to explore the South Island - until it's too cold. And afterwards I might come back to Auckland and work - I'll try to find something with psychology. In between the travelling I'll probably work a bit on fruitpicking orchards or something like that. And when I'm back in september - let's see.

Well, now you're up to date. It might look like I'm arranging my travels around bridge events. But I got the feeling that the bridge scene is my key to so many cool opportunities - and of course I will be travelling all the time anyway :)