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,