Hello all,

Let's see. The semester has started out well enough. I had a lot of fun the weekend before classes started helping out at a program for international students who had just arrived for the new semester. I kind of got shanghaied into staying for a quiz night thing, but it turned out to be really fun. I had forgotten how much I like hanging out with, for lack of a better word, foreign students. I also went for another short hike on a thin strip of beach between the sea and cliffs. The hike went past a place called Red Rocks, where the cliff face and fallen rocks are indeed red, and then went out to Sinclair Head, where there were many seals hanging out. It was a blustery day, but there were constantly rainbows appearing and disappearing, so it was quite pretty anyway.

My classes have changed somewhat. I spent the first week going to heaps of them to try to decide what to take and ended up with Literature of New Zealand and the Pacific (despite all my Kiwi friends telling me they don't have any good literature), a philosophy class on the Big Questions, Psychology (more brain based this time around), and *I pause to stand up straighter* Sexuality and Society. Don't judge me on that last one, though I admit it sounds a bit fluffy: it comes highly recommended and it has been quite interesting so far. They're going to bring in professors from lots of different disicplines so we'll have art history lecturers talking about sexuality in art, classics lecturers doing the ancient world, etc.

Let's see, other than that, the big news is that there are like 4 different diseases (the chicken pox, colds, stomach bugs) or strains of diseases going around my hostel, and I've caught 2 of them so far (or else a single particularly tenacious, tricky, and adaptive one). I think I'm on the upswing now, though, so I'm confident that I will get better before long. Luckily the Harry Potter book came out when I was sickest so I had something to do. The book came out at 11:00 AM here, and there was a huge line at Borders, where I got my copy. For an hour or so after 11, everybody on the street seemed to be carrying a bookstore bag of one kind or another.

Anyway, I shall leave you with a few photos of my most recent excursion.
until later,

Back from Auckland

Hello everybody,

Well my exams went off okay, and after spending several weeks waiting for my Spanish exam to come and go I headed up to Auckland to stay with two of my friends. They're a lot more casual about flights here than in the States. I was waaay early for my flight to Auckland. I arrived at the airport about an hour before my flight was to depart, but most of the other passengers didn't start filtering in until about 10 minutes before departure. I knew I was going to be comparatively early but I didn't expect to be the only one in the gate area and to be asked what I was doing there! The flight to Auckland takes about 45 minutes, and my friends Jess and Danielle picked me up at the airport. That day, Thursday, we walked around the suburb of Auckland where they live, Devonport. Auckland is a massive sprawling city of about 1 million people. The group of suburbs (including Devonport) referred to as the north shore is part of a peninsula across the bay from the CBD. Anyway, Devonport is quite a pretty place with lots of old houses, small beaches, and several large dormant volcanic cones that allow you to look out on the cityscape and the ocean.

That night we took the ferry across to the city, wandered through Auckland a bit, and ate dinner in the rotating restaurant at the top of the Sky Tower (at 328 meters or 1076 feet it's about twice the height of Seattle's Space Needle and half of Toronto's CN Tower and is the tallest tower in the southern hemisphere) in celebration of Jess' birthday. The view was very impressive.

I actually spent most of my time in Devonport hanging out with my friends and their friends and families. It was, overall, a lovely relaxed kind of trip. I'm back in Wellington now and I have a few days before classes start again on Monday. Next semester I'll be taking another psyc class, an English one, the philosophy of Art, and Spanish once again. I also need to look for a job . . .

Some fun kiwi words for you:

gutted -"I was so gutted when we lost the Americas Cup." =disappointed, laid low
and my personal favorite:
the wop wops -"They went out to the wop wops a few days ago and haven't been seen since." =the middle of nowhere, the countryside

until next time