autumn

I think autumn is officially here- today (Thursday) is the first day all week I’ve seen the sun! The leaves are starting to change though and my view from the 10th floor of the library is stunning. I’ll take pictures soon, I promise!

Yesterday Rebecca and Katie skipped school and we headed north of Christchurch about an hour an a half to Hamner Springs, a little mountain town famous for their hot springs! We ate lunch at a really good café and then soaked in the hot springs (and the rain) for the afternoon. It was soo relaxing!

Last night I was invited to the Christchurch South Rotary meeting for dinner. I was connected to one of their members through someone in my host club, and he invited me to come along to dinner and meet his club members. The speaker last night was really interesting- he worked as an engineer for Air New Zealand for several years and then decided to do some private work. His talk last night was the story of how he was involved in the secret repossession of 7 airbus aircrafts from a budget Italian airline in 2004. It sounded like something straight out of Hollywood! Anyway, a few of their members are on the board of directors at Christchurch Hospital and said that they would help me find a volunteer position within the hospital…hopefully something will work out!

Next week is the last week of term 1…where have the past 7 weeks gone?! I have a physiology lab exam next week and then we have a 3 week break! Next weekend is the Rotary District Conference on the west coast in a town called Hokitika which is close to where a lot of the gold mines used to be! Then on April 10th I fly from Christchurch to Singapore, spend the night there and then head “home” to Kuantan. I’ll study there for about a week and a half and then head back to Singapore to take the MCAT. The week after will be a good holiday! We’re planning on doing some scuba diving on Redang Island north of Kuantan on the east coast of Malaysia.

cheers-

s.

Wellington Pictures

Here are a few pictures from last weekend...sorry it's taken awhile!

The Christchurch crew- Valda our counsellor and the 5 scholars- Daisy, me, Glen, Andrea and Jesse

view of wellington and the harbour from our conference room...kinda reminded me of san francisco!

Te Papa National museum- everything you could ever want to know about New Zealand, for free!!

scary Maori caving in Te Papa- I think he has paua shells as eyes. Paua is a very common shell here, the meat is commonly known as abalone. We met some guys up the coast who fished for them- when they caught one they held it to their wetsuit and after a few seconds the paua would just stick to their suit. cool.

Sometime this week I plan to take some pictures from the top of the library- the 11th floor has great views of downtown (not exactly a Manhatten skyline) and the surrounding hills. It's especially neat since the leaves are starting to change colour. Yep- that means that fall (autumn) is here, which means cool (ok, downright cold) nights are getting more frequent. We have heat in our bedrooms in our flat. Heat, yes! Heating units on the ceiling---what?! Yep, we have ceiling heat. I don't really understand it either. Apparently it's more efficient (maybe the fact that heat rises doesn't apply in the southern hemisphere or something). Who knows...I'm not convinced yet. I'll let you know in July when I'm freezing in my little concrete iceblock and you're playing at the beach!

have a great week!

cheers-

s.

Wellington Adventure!

This past weekend I left the mainland (South Island…although this is subject of much debate from North Islanders!) and headed to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, on the southern part of the North Island. I went with the other 4 scholars from Christchurch (Jesse from Kelowna, BC, Andrea from Germany, Daisy from upstate New York and Glen from Michigan) and our counselor Valda. We left Christchurch at 5am (my earliest start yet in New Zealand) and flew to Wellington.

There, we met with the other 9 scholars who are studying in New Zealand, from Dunedin, Wellington, and Auckland. All of the others were post-graduate students of some sort (Masters or PhD)…I was the only undergrad! It was awesome though- a really intelligent and well traveled group. From working in the Peacecorps in South Africa to teaching in Tanzania and mountaineering in Alaska, the experiences that the group had had made for some interesting conversation!

The conference was held in a lawyers’ office on the 13th floor of a downtown Wellington office building with an amazing view of the harbour and surrounding mountains. We had sessions on Rotary and its role in New Zealand, tertiary education in the Pacific, our roles and responsibilities as scholars, as well as breakout sessions on ideas for community service projects, adjusting to life here, etc. We also ate…a lot! Morning tea complete with biscuits, muffins, fruit and cookies, then lunch two hours later, then afternoon tea, then dinner, and finally tea before bed! Kiwis eat non-stop! The food was awesome though, it was completely catered and very yummy!

Saturday afternoon we had a tour of the New Zealand Parliament building, nicknamed the “beehive” for its obvious beehive structure. The government recently spent $4M adding hundreds of base isolators to the foundation that will supposedly absorb the movement of an earthquake up to 7.5 on the Richter scale. As a result, the building essentially floats on these metal and rubber disks and is no longer attached to the foundation…pretty cool! Although I think someone should have told them not to build the Parliament in the dead centre of a fault line!

We had most of Sunday afternoon free to explore the city. A group of us walked around downtown and then headed over to the National Museum, Te Papa (Our Place in Maori). It was an awesome museum completely dedicated to all aspects of New Zealand history, the wool industry, etc. Outside of the museum were photos from the “Earth from Above” exhibit that travels around the world. I saw it in Montreal a few years ago but there were new pictures I hadn’t seen before. One of East New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina showing just the rooftops was a pretty neat perspective.

We stayed in a youth hostel downtown which was great- I shared a room with Daisy and Andrea from Christchurch. Unfortunately Andrea was the only one smart enough to bring a towel with her! Daisy and I had to be resourceful and use extra sheets to dry off! We were well prepared for a toga party…

Anyway, enough for now- too much reading and studying to do!

Cheers-

s.

PS- I tried to post pictures here but something isn't working, I'll try to get them up in the next few days!

weekend in Christchurch, take 2

Well, I did just have a nice post written and as I pressed the "submit" button....bam! It was all gone. Let's try this again...

This past weekend was pretty laid back for me, I stayed here in Christchurch and at least attempted to get some work done. Friday night I went to see the movie "Firewall" which was actually better than I expected. It was a mindless 2 hours but overall a decent movie.

Saturday was fun- I went downtown with some friends to check out some outdoors/outfitter stores. The general opinion was that no matter where in the world you're from (Europe, Africa, or North America) hiking and camping gear is more expensive in New Zealand. Considering this country is well known for it's adventure sports and has so much to offer, it doesn't really make sense to me. But, I guess it I had to import my goods from the otherside of the world I would jack up the prices too. Oh well.

Also on Saturday we checked out the market on Cathedral Square. There was a festival going on with people dressed in period costumes, children playing with antique toys, and dancing. It wasn't until I went to church on Sunday morning that I realized it was in celebration of the past 150 years that Christ Cathedral and the Anglican Church has been part of Christchurch. Pretty cool.

Classes continue to go well. I'm beginning to learn that there's a good chance at least one of my classes will have a different lecturer on any given day. Today the new guy was a Brit yelling at us about the digestive system in physiology (he clearly didn't learn about indoor voices in kindergarten). The crazy Russian is still lecturing in I/O Psychology and the old boring Kiwi is back again in Biochemistry. Never a dull moment.

I hope all is well on your side of the world where it should be warming up for spring. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that April means autumn and July means winter here. What happens to "April showers brings May flowers"?

have a great week.

cheers-

s.

caving update

I have a few more photos from Saturday's adventures (see below). Out of the group of 9, 5 of us were brave enough to jump into the ~12C water to explore the cave. It's really quite unique- the cave itself is 362m long and has about 4-5m clearance throughout. At the deepest, the water is waist deep on an adult (more like chest deep for me!). Inside the walls are limestone and the river bed is lined with rocks. The water is crystal clear and since there is no natural light, there is no algae or anything growing on the rocks (otherwise it would have been really slick!) There are three separate waterfalls that you climb up in the cave, two that are about 1m high and the third and last one leading out of the cave that's about 3m high. It took us about 45min to walk through, we kept a fairly fast pace mostly to keep warm! Although it was about 24C that day you could see your breath in the cave and my toes were numb after the first few minutes! The waterfall at the end has metal ladder rungs drilled into the rock to climb out- we ended up on the other side of the hill from where we entered the cave! Overall an awsome experience unlike anything I had done before...and best of all it was free!

Classes continue to go well- I'm still getting used to having several lecturers come in and out of classes; most profs lecture on certain subjects which means there are anywhere from 3-6 lecturers for the class. Today I walked into what I thought was the wrong class but it turned out to be our new psychology prof- a very enthusiastic Russian...it made for an interesting class.

I attended my first Rotary club meeting today over lunchtime. My host counsellor Valda brought me and introduced me to lots of the members...the lunch was awesome! The speaker today was Jesse, another scholar here for the year from Kelowna, British Columbia. He definitely gave me some good ideas for my presentations! It's a rather elderly club (with lots of retired members) and mostly men but overall they were very welcoming and friendly. In two weeks time the 5 scholars who are in Christchurch are going to Wellington for the weekend for a conference and then in April there is the district conference on the west coast of the South Island.


me, Daniel, Darragh and Anja in the middle of the cave!

Matthias with the remains of previous trampers...maybe just a cattle bone

me on a rock ledge overlooking the valley where the Great Battle of "Narnia" was filmed...or so I'm told, I have yet to see the movie. Awesome rock though- the picture doesn't really do it justice!

all for now- please feel free to post comments on here...I'm beginning to think that nobody ever reads this! You shouldn't have to sign up or make any sort of commitments!

cheers-

s.

pictures!

a few pictures from the past few weeks (it's after midnight here and internet is half price so it doesn't break the bank to upload pics!)

s.


rebecca, me and katie at birdlings flat on the way to akaroa (the waves were huge!)

beautiful akaroa (french town close to chch)

view from the other side of Banks Peninsula

March 4, 2006 Hiking at Flock Hill (caving pictues to come later, they're not on my camera!)

the group- (L to R) Chris, Daniel, Matthais, me, Darragh, Anja, Herdis, and Rob

picnic at the top of lunch hill, accompanied with some not so welcome bees and flies...

entrance to the cave...more pics to come, but basically it was awesome! we estimated that the water was about 12C and waist deep at times, but it was an incredible experience.

weird weather

I had class at 9am today (probably the most boring lecture yet- about the osomoregulation of new zealand freshwater crayfish...not exactly high on my interest list). Anyway, as I left for class today it was sunny, a little breezy, and about 15C. Leaving physiology it was a few degrees cooler, slightly windy, and getting to be overcast. Less than an hour later it was frigid, and starting to drizzle with near hurricane force winds, appropriately called a squall. Ok, so that may be a bit of an overstatement but not by much.
People say that the east coast of NZ (where Christchurch is located) is one of the driest places on the island. That may be true but I'm not quite convinced. I guess it's not so much the rain that bothers me but the cold wind that comes with it. I think I inherited the "I hate wind" gene from mum...

Anyway, classes this week went well, the reading list is piling up and the assignments are beginning to be assigned. Tomorrow the plan is to head west of here back towards Arthur's Pass for some caving/hiking. I'm not so keen on going if the weather continues as it is right now but we'll wait and see. The group that's going consists of Germans, a guy from Sweden and one from South Africa. The Germans are always cold here and the Swede thinks it's tropical...go figure.

cheers-

s.