Happy New Year!

This year I was one of the first people in the world to enter 2015. I figured that being in one of the first countries, the party would be huge. I could not have been any more wrong. First of all, fireworks are not really a thing in New Zealand. They sell it only once a year, around Guy Fawkes’s day.

People told me that I might have been in the wrong bar, because I had a very strange change of the year. We were in a bar in Napier where a reggae band was playing, next to the harbour and the beach. We danced a bit to the beats and waited for midnight to come. A bit before midnight we all got a drink to cheers to the new year and then…. Nothing happened. Five minutes before twelve the band took a half an hour break and a few minutes after twelve we realized that the Kiwi’s didn’t count. They didn’t count, they didn’t scream happy new year and they didn’t celebrate one single bit.

Flabbergasted, we decided to celebrate our own real new year the next day when the European time zone would enter 2015. And how to do that better than with a new years’ dive in the Pacific Ocean? (Luckily, you can do a twelve hour time travel when you are on the other side of the world) At noon we counted back from 10 to 1, screamed happy new year and ran into the sea. It was great to start the new year like this and with 28 degrees outside the dive was more a pleasure than a pain.