Goodbye Paihia

Jen here - (This post was written a few days ago but wasn't able to be posted until today.)

We left Paihia yesterday morning.

We weren’t necessarily sad to leave the town of Paihia; we were really sad to leave our friends and co-workers. We’ll miss Jack and Ryona, the centabay owner and his daughter who first welcomed us to their family and to New Zealand. We’ll miss Holly, our fellow Centabay cleaner from Peru, who was always up for going out for a night of dancing. We’ll especially miss our Swiss “family.” We’ll miss Kelly, the owner of Swiss, who was always there to give advice and look out for us. As much as we gave here a hard time, she truly was a good boss. She was fair and treated all of her workers well. We’ll miss Peini, the Maori chef, who snuck us food and taught us about Maori culture. We’ll miss Julian and Jana, our German co-workers who were always smiling and up for…anything. We’ll miss Mani, our manager who*tried* to teach us all about being Maori gangster. :)

The day before we left, we packed up our bags, loaded up the car, said goodbye to Pam the landlady who still calls us all “Liz”, and moved out of the flat. We then checked into Centabay for one last night. We figured that we started our time in Paihia in Centabay and that we would end it in Centabay.

Liz and I had one last night working at Swiss and then after closing, Kelly had a small party for us on the deck. We put away all of the tables and chairs save a few, and sat on the deck reminiscing about the season. And as everyone parted, hugs and kisses were given and tears were shed.

We made a bunch of promises to see people again and so hopefully we’ll run into Holly in Queenstown, hopefully we’ll run into Jana and Julian along their travels in NZ…..but it’s horribly sad to think that we might never see some of these truly good people again. They were the friends who worked every day with us, went to the beach with us, drank with us, cooked with us, laughed and danced with us, shared secrets and gossiped with us, hugged us when we missed our family and friends back home……

We’ll really, really miss them.