Travelling to the other side of the planet

Hi all!

A few days ago the big adventure started! Tuesday night my parents, sister and boyfriend were taking me to Schiphol airport. I was quite nervous, because it's a whole new experience, going on such a big trip on my own. Luckily it's not my first time on an airplane, so that made it a bit easier. As the plane took off, I saw a beautiful view of Amsterdam, with a lot of beautiful lights. When we were too high to see the view I started to explore the tv screen in front of me. It had loads of different movies, tv series and games, so there's always something fun to do. There also was an option where you could see the route of the plane, and where it was at the moment. Next to that there were several cameras so you could see a live view from what was outside! One camera was facing to the ground, so you could see which city you were flying over, and the other one was facing to the front, so you had a great view as if you were looking from the front window. After 6 hours I finally arrived in Dubai. That really is a strange city. When you fly over it, it looks like they have put a bunch of buildings in the middle of a desert, which probably is pretty much how they've done it. When we landed, the first thing I noticed whas the luxury carpet on the floor. The shops also loooked expensive, but I can't say if they were. All the prices were in Dirham, the money from the UAE. Later I found out that 1 Dirham is about E0,20. Fortunately my transfer was only 3 hours, so soon I could get onto the next plane, the one to Auckland with a stopover in Sydney. This plane was a whole lot bigger than the one to Dubai, it was an airbus A380 with two floors in it. This time I prepared for a really long flight, it would take 13 hours for the plane to land in Sydney. Luckily there were enough movies that I hadn'd seen yet, so boredom was impossible! Time really flew (guess that's not very hard, travelling time zones at 800km/h). Finally, after having lunch and breakfast, in that order, I arrived in Sydney. The stopover here would only take 1,5 hours, luckily, so soon again I could get on the airplane. Only 3 hours to go now! In that three hours the most interesting thing I did was eating breakfast for the second time, which was quite good :) I think I like scrambled eggs. The arriving to Auckland was much better than the arrival in Dubai and Sydney. Here the view was really beautiful. This time it took a while before we could get off the plane, I guess the luggage guys were taking a break :) At the airport everyone needed to get in line for the stamp guy, so now I have a nice New Zealand stamp in my passport. After some additional checks (they don't even want 1 germ to enter the country I think), I could get to the entrance hall, where a taxi driver was waiting for me to bring me to the hostel. The journey from the airport to the hostel was quite nice, with all kinds of beautiful tropical plants, and of course a nice hot summer sun. When we arrived, I immediately wanted to go to sleep, but unfortunately that wasn't a good idea, because it was about 4pm. My jet lag would only get worse. So instead I went shopping for my dinner, which took great effort. As soon as I was back at the hostel, I prepared some of the food, ate it and went to bed as soon as possible. Guess I've slept for almost 12 hours straight.