Arrival in Dunedin

We arrived in Dunedin on the evening of July 6th and were met at the airport by an Otago (the university I'm attending) rep. He gave us our keys to our flats and gave us a little rundown on how things would work for the next day or two. We were then driven to our respective places. My place was a little confusing to find at first, but once I found it I was able to settle in. I was the last of my international flatmates to arrive. Our flats are 3 stories with 2 bedrooms on each floor and a kitchen, bathroom and living room on the main floor. My floor has a shower as well and the 3rd floor has another bathroom. The place is relatively new and is a nice place, and to boot I have a balcony directly off my room, but unfortunately it's been too cold to properly use it. My flatmates are all nice, interesting, and cool people. There is a girl that lives in Vermont, a guy that lives in Santa Barbara, a girl from England, a guy from Czech Republic, and then my Kiwi host who is from the North Island.

The first night here we found this neat little Irish pub that is kist 2 blocks away from my place, but unfortunately those 2 blocks consist of long and steep hills (if I want to go anywhere I have to walk up and down these hills, which sucks, but at least I'll have legs of steel by the time I come home). Anyways, the pub is a great place and we go there pretty regularly. After that I was introduced to "Scrumpy", which is basically the nectar of the Gods. It's a spiced cider that comes in 1.25 litre bottle, is relatively cheap (relative to the rest of the alcohol here which is quite expensive), and is delicious. Scrumpy does wonderful things and can be used as a noun, adjective, verb, adverb, and any other part of speech you want to use it as. Enough about that, I'm here to explore, not to drink, right?

As far as my classes go they are all pretty interesting and enjoyable so far. I'm taking 2 film classes, a music class and a business class. My film classes are Film Genres which focuses on science fiction films, Film Music which is all about musical scores from films and seems very interesting. My music class is a world music class that focuses on African music and is a ton of fun. The other day I learned to play the djembe (an African drum). My business class is a management and organisation class which is incredibly boring and uninteresting (there's a reason I switched from a business major to a film major). However, since it counts as a 300 level course back home and is only a 100 level course here, I'm taking it as part of my minor.

The first week in Dunedin (also called O-Week) is when all the fun happens. All the students return and really the only way to phrase it is "shit gets crazy". Unfortunately I had a pretty bad cold that week, but I didn't miss out on all the fun. There were bock parties for 2 or 3 days in a row, in which the fun thing to do is burn couches. Yes, light couches (that you sit on) on fire, and enjoy. There is a whole section on the Wikipedia article for the University of Otago on couch burnings. They even addressed it in an introduction lecture we had to attend. A couple of students get arrested here and there and everyone has a good time (except those that got arrested).

That weekend I started doing a little exploring. We went to Aramoana Beach, which is way out on the Otago peninsula. Despite the weather being cloudy, raining, and cold, the beach was still an amazing place. The beach itself was really nice and fine sand covered in sea shells. Directly off the beach was about 50ft of grassland. Behind that was a pine forest. Next to the pine forest was a tropical area with palm trees and various kinds of large plants. It was a very diverse and cool place, like nothing I'd ever seen before. The pine forest was so dense and thick with pines that just walking around felt like you were walking on a mattress. We walked further down the beach and there were these large cliffs coming almost straight out of the water and since it was foggy it literally looked like a scene straight out of Jurassic Park. We climbed around on some rocks for a while attempting to dodge the incoming waves and it was fun. While we were there we saw our first penguins playing in the surf! Very cool stuff.