At last, after a two month break I went back to school this week. This semester I am going to the University of Otago. The campus is beautiful -- a river called Leith River flows through the middle of campus :)
Otago University clocktower & Leith River
Here, classes are called papers, and full-time is 3-4 papers. I thought I knew which papers I was going to take... but it turns out the math paper (Introduction to Functional Analysis) that I was planning on taking and honestly looking forward to is way too fast-paced, to put it lightly. I realized that I think I'll have to drop this paper because it's too hard. Tomorrow morning I'm going to go to one more lecture just to make sure it's too hard, and then I'll switch it out for a computer science elective (graphics and computer vision). Actually, my flatmate Rory is in this replacement paper I am planning on taking! I also have an environment paper with my other flatmate Savage. My other two papers are Introduction to Geography (fun!) and Theory of Computation (pretty interesting so far!). The Theory of Computation paper has EIGHT people in it. This is a class at McGill that would have at least 200 people. Even the graphics paper only has 15 people in it. I will append this blog post with a day-in-the-life from this week, once all my papers are sorted out. This week I also am going to make the effort to talk to people in my classes because I haven't made any class friends on my own yet. It's a bit funny to realize that even though I'm on the other side of the world at the end of the day, university is university, and it's all kind of the same thing. Although in my geography paper I'm going to get to do a field trip to a beach, so that's pretty special. And the small class sizes are great.
I also forgot to mention that the university has free breakfast and $4 lunch everyday and you best believe I am taking advantage of that. I went almost every day this week to try it out, and it's hard to complain about free/cheap food. Also, have I mentioned that I live less than 5 minutes from campus? Some buildings are so close that I can almost see them from the street outside my flat. This is luxurious.
The best thing I did this week was a glowworm forest walk with Emily (from McGill) and Aidan (flatmate). Glowworms are moth larvae that glow in the dark. We took the bus to Ross Creek Reservoir for a beautiful walk where we saw a waterfall. Then we walked to the Nicols Creek and Waterfall trail head. It was already starting to get dark so that by the time we made it to that waterfall we couldn't even see it :P. Then we saw some glowworms! It was like the forest was twinkling with stars. They were quite faint and I couldn't capture it with my camera though so you'll just have to Google it to know what it looks like. Once we got back to the road, it was a bit nerveracking to realize that we had just emerged from the pitch black forest -- and boy, were we glad that we weren't in Australia with all the scorpions and snakes and spiders.
Aidan and Emily
Ross Creek Reservoir
Goose
Ross CreekRoss Creek Waterfall
On Friday night, me, Aidan (flatmate) and Benji (kiwi host flatmate) had a baking evening. I made a chocolate cake, Aidan make a lemon olive oil cake, and Benji made baked churros. Fun :)
Baking night
On Saturday evening, Emily and I went to the climbing gym. When you're a member you get after-hours access so we were there all alone and it was so fun climbing in an empty gym! I'm hoping to climb a lot this semester, and the Tramping Club runs outdoor climbs at Long Beach!!
Today (Sunday) we (me, Aidan and Bejamin (Aidan's friend)) went to Smaill's beach for a lovely beach day. It was 24 degrees Celcius here today :)
I got a bit better at replying to people from home this week and talked on the phone to some friends. It's nice to keep in touch with people from home.
