Holidays

Hello again,

It is currently our mid-semester break -two weeks without classes. However, I have been busy. I've started working at Borders, which I'm quite enjoying. Working in a bookstore has been pretty much the height of my ambitions as far as part-time jobs go. Before Borders, I briefly worked in a grocery store deli. My main job there seemed to be putting dozens of raw chickens on racks and into the oven, and I am glad to be done with that. I think if I ate meat before that experience I might not now.

Anyway, apart from training at Borders and doing school work, I've gone on a couple of beautiful hikes. I did one in the hills northwest of town and another today with my flatmate Theresa from town south to the sea. The one today was really nice. We weren't quite clear on how to get to the beginning of the hike so we spent about an hour following a creek bed more or less straight up a hill in the hope of eventually getting to somewhere useful. Thankfully, our scrabbling through the forest did eventually bring us to where we wanted to be (pictures below.) There is pretty much nothing that can kill you in the New Zealand bush (unlike Australia, the land of death) and it's hard to get lost since you're never far from the sea, so wandering the forest in the general direction you want tends to be a feasible option.

My classes have all been going pretty well. I'm really enjoying Brain and Behavior, as I'm constantly fascinated by all the things our brains are constantly doing.

Coming up, I'm going to go see K.D. Lang in concert on the 5th, which I'm quite excited about, and also going to see Cats with my flatmates at the end of May. I'm less excited about Cats, as it's never been high on my list of musicals I want to see and I'm prejudiced against Andrew Lloyd Webber, but hopefully it will be fun.

Hike #1

The top of this mushroom was about the size of my hand.












One of those "shall I / shan't I?" kind of fences.


































Hills and the South Island in the background.














The Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship based in New Zealand. This ship is named for the original which was sabotaged and sunk by operatives of the French government in 1985 when it was part of protests against and monitoring of French nuclear testing.




Hike #2

This is what we were rewarded with after blundering through the woods.








We came round a hill and what should we see but ostriches! It was kind of surreal. Later on one of them did a very strange sort of flapping, neck rolling thing at us. We kept our distance.








Theresa and the hills.