Marie | Orewa
“I had fun last Friday afternoon when I gathered together all of my friends from the Maygrove Lake area, and we played three different games; Trivial Pursuit and sort of forming words from letters.
I’ve only lived in Orewa for six years. Because I live around the lake I have made lots of friends with the other people who live on the lakeside, because we look after the lake, and because we work together in the lake, to do all the weeding and trimming of the trees, and pulling of the weeds, we have become friends, and a lot of them are single people on their own, and all in my age group between 60 and 80. I think it’s very, very important, especially to laugh, and we find that just playing a game, such as Trivial Pursuit provides quite a bit of hilarity, though you might not think that that would be what you would produce.
I was on my own with three children I found it very difficult for a couple of years, but I started dancing, and first of all I did ballroom dancing, and when that became just a little bit too challenging, I started to do square dancing and really, really enjoyed that, and that was where I met my second husband. I’m very keen on fitness, and in my 60s did a fitness instructors course, and ran Swiss ball classes in my English language school down on the North Shore, to try and encourage my Asian students to have more physical exercise, because especially the girls were all the time worried about the sun. They didn’t like having sun on their bodies, but doing indoor exercise was very good for them.”