class, week 1

two days of class down, so far so good. schedule this semester is looking good, no class on wednesdays and i’m done at noon on friday! i’m taking animal physiology, biochemistry, abnormal psychology, and industrial & organizational psychology. all of my profs so far are really laid back, students here tend to call them by their first name and overall they seem very approachable.

last weekend was a weekend of true exploration. saturday i participated in what is called “the not so great race”, a sort of scavenger hunt around christchurch for new international students. i was in a team with another canadian, a german, and a girl from iceland! we spent a good part of the day walking around downtown, picking up things on our list, getting lost, getting lost some more….we found our way back though and had a great bbq. kiwis are crazy about bbqs here but so far the only thing they seem to cook on a grill are sausages. I have yet to see someone eat a sausage on any sort of bun, they always serve them with plain white bread. interesting. saturday night a group of us took the bus towards town to hagley park, a huge park near downtown complete with a golf course, running trails, cricket pitches, rugby fields, tennis courts…etc. the city council was holding a musical concert called “starry nights”, a whole show of broadway songs complete with dancers and the symphony. it was awesome. They estimated that over 100,000 people were there, which works out to be about one third of the city’s population.

sunday was equally exciting and exhausting…my roommate katie found a place on the web that pointed out some of the filming sites for the movie “narnia”. off we went in my little white corona (car, not beer…similar to a toyota corolla) up towards arthur’s pass, about an hour west of christchurch. we didn’t really expect to find the place we were looking for, all we had was a name and that it was an hour from Christchurch. amazingly we found it, a place called flock hill in cave springs scenic reserve. we ended up doing a fairly strenuous hike, up and around flock hill, down to broken river, around another hill…at one point we got stuck on the wrong side of the river and had to hike all the way back to the road to cross at the bridge! thorbjorg, my icelandic friend was clearly in better shape and myself and katie, we were quite content walking along the river bed but she kept “suggesting” that we climb just a little higher. it was well worth it though, the scenery was amazing and the weather was beautiful. also in cave springs is a huge cave that you can go “caving” through. we didn’t bring the right gear but i think i’ll try to get back there sometime soon to check it out.

that’s about all…please feel free to leave comments, notes, jokes, etc…

cheers-

s.

PS-more pictures coming soon, i promise. internet is expensive here and they charge me per MB, so posting pictures gets to be quite expensive!