Dunedin Week 3
July 18-24
Lucky for you there are only a couple of things worth sharing about this week, seeing as classes were starting to kick in. Maybe I can finally have a short entry; I do hope my readers aren’t suffering too much from my long-winded writing.
Tuesday, one of the last remnants of my childhood came to an end: I saw the final Harry Potter movie in theaters with Dave and friends from a neighboring flat. Crazy that it has been thirteen years since my mom gave me the first book of the series and I kept her up until three in the morning reading it to me (you have to admit, that’s pretty late for a nine year old).
When Thursday rolled around, so did my birthday. It felt so odd to have six hours of classes; it was definitely the first time I’ve done that on my birthday. Of course, last year I spent my birthday in a chicken coup, so maybe I’m just on a roll for first time experiences; I hope they start getting better. That night we had a big dinner with my flatties, Isabel, her flatties (same people I went to Harry Potter with), and of course, Steph. While the others played a vicious game of spoons, Steph and I cooked dinner (she took over the meat dish since Liz and I were the only veggies); Isabel’s flat brought dessert. Isabel actually didn’t know when she suggested the date for the dinner that it was my birthday. However, my flatties remembered: Liz and Dave surprised me after dinner with a delicious homemade chocolate cake (brilliant idea to put this cookie, nutella crumble on the bottom-I may have given away the fact that I love nutella by eating about 2 containers of it in a month), and Quentin was careful to remind everyone in the complex (all day) that it was my birthday.
That Saturday was a very important and fantastic day: it was my first day of rock climbing in New Zeleand (hopefully the first of many). I went with Dave and Isabel’s flat out to Long Beach-a local climbing area that has these really fascinating caves and rock formations. It was pretty much everyone else’s first time climbing outdoors, so I was more like a guide for the day, but it was a blast! And it was fun exploring around the beach and enjoying the tang-top weather in the middle of winter. I also met a couple of other climbers: Hannah and Nijal, whom I plan on doing a lot more climbing with. Hannah is a student/ice climber from England studying abroad at Otago, and Nijal, who is originally from Canada, has lived in New Zealand for the past 4 years.
Sunday was suppose to be this big 10 Km race for the Chocolate festival in Dunedin (yes, Dunedin has a Cadbury chocolate festival that lasts a week long-don’t get too excited, there wasn’t nearly as much chocolate as you would have thought there would be and a lot of it cost $$). Sadly, Dunedin is a bit like New England- maybe even worse-when it comes to weather. It turned into a sunny, rainy, hailing, and snowy day (all in a span of 2 hours). The race was canceled, but since we showed up before we knew, we still got the free chocolate bar which was all that mattered. Peter (one of Isabel’s flatties) and I proceeded on an interesting trail run where we had fun working our way up and down muddy/icy trails.
Well…It was a little shorter. I’m slowly getting better.
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