Ok, so I'll be a blogger...

So I’ve been very reluctant to actually start this whole blogging process, but I figured that since I told almost everyone who said “Keep in touch” that I’d be blogging, I should probably do something about it. So here goes!

I’ve been here in NZ for officially over a week, and am finally starting to get a hang of the campus. University of Otago is just a wee bit bigger than SLU… and by that I mean almost 10 times as big. This is also my first time living in a city (it’s about 120,000 people. A bit of a step up from the 500 who live in Avon.), which I am really excited about and enjoying so far. My flat is great; I live with 3 other American girls and a Kiwi host. Our street is quite the bumping place. For those of you at SLU, picture the Spring Fest atmosphere on the quad… 24/7… on a street where only college students reside… where the drinking age is 18. And that my friends, is Castle Street North… always an adventure. But it’s great, I love it, and I love all of my flatmates. One of them was actually on my soccer team at the World Scholar Athlete Games I attended in the summer of 2006. Small world, huh?

So an overview of what has happened so far: The first few days I was here was be-a-utiful! It’s the summer that everyone was jealous that I was going to be living in basically.

Since we had a whole week for orientation, there was a lot of free time to do whatever we wanted. Dani and Julia (two of my flatmates), Jackie (a friend through Julia’s program) and I all walked into Dunedin hoping to just hop on the city bus that would bring us to the beach, but because of a bagpipe competition (of all things) the bus schedule was all screwed up.

So the 5 minute walk into town for the 15 minute bus ride ended up being a 2 hour ordeal. But we did get to the beach, swam, tanned, and took some touristy photos.

SIDENOTE: Because of the ozone depletion over Antarctica (go USA!), it is reallllly easy to get sunburned here. Take this advice from the girl whose legs were blindingly white a week ago. And the fact that sunscreen is $20 a bottle doesn’t help either.

Orientation Week other than that was cut pretty short for me because of my ALPINE GEOMORPH TRIP TO THE TASMAN VALLEY OF THE SOUTHERN ALPS. Yeah, I was a little excited. Basically for this paper (Kiwi term for class) everything from here on out is based on this trip that we had to Mt. Cook village this past week. My pictures go nowhere near capturing the beauty of this area, it really makes me want to buy a nice camera… or have LG send me hers? Yes? Just kidding… but really. I want it. I went into the trip thinking that I would be one a few international students, and the people wouldn’t know each other already. False. I was the only American in the group of 6 Kiwis, who were all really good friends…. Geo families are around the world apparently. But thankfully, the stereotype that Kiwis are some of the nicest people you will meet has been proved true so far, so it was no problem getting along with them. We left campus at 5:30, so by the time we to our cabins it was really dark and we couldn’t see any of the mountains. Here’s the view of what I saw when I woke up in the morning.

It’s safe to say I finally felt like I was in New Zealand. So that day we split up into 2 groups and mapped separate glaciers. My group did the Mueller Glacier, while the others did the Hooker Glacier. It was sort of rainy and windy when we got up there, but the next 2 days provided plenty of great views of Mt. Cook and the surrounding area. The fact that I was in a contemporary glacial environment got me really excited, it’s a lot more thrilling than Cincinasty. Speaking of… the next day we went to a terminal moraine and logged the sedimentary features through it. Not the most thrilling, but it was beautiful weather (meaning my snow-white legs were a burning red by the end of the day, and now are sort of tan), and hello, we were still in New Zealand. I managed to push though it =)

So then the final day we went back up into the mountains and mapped a bit around the Tasman Glacier, which was the best day there by far. It was crystal clear, with a bit of a breeze coming off the proglacial lake with some massive icebergs to keep us just cool enough. Then later that afternoon we went back out to the terminal moraines and did some GPR collecting… which ended up failing on us about 15 times, but again, it was a beautiful day and I was surrounded by one of the most amazing landscapes in the world.

So my Christmas break has officially come to an end, my classes started today. Along with the Alpine Geomorphology, I am taking Minerals and Rocks, Environmental History of New Zealand, and Cinema of New Zealand. The cinema was sort of a last minute call, but I’m pretty excited about it. I took a film class at SLU my freshman year and loved it, so it will be nice to have a lower key class.

Alright, if you’re still reading, I am thoroughly impressed. I will try to keep up on my entries so I don’t write a short novel every time. Now comes the fun part: pictures. The scale of these mountains is impossible to capture, even when we were there, it's hard to take in just how BIG everything is! There were some kayakers in the lake, which were specks.

Tasman Glacier. Unfortunately, I'm blocking Mt. Cook right behind me

My Kiwi group mapping the Mueller glacier the first day.

Mueller Glacier