Classes and Fun

I’ve had a week of classes now, and so far they all seem good. We call everyone by their first names, because its very unlikely that any of our teachers will have gone to enough school/taught for long enough to have the honor of being called professor. The title is reserved for the people who have been in the profession for at least 30 years and who have multiple degrees. My professor for Ethnicity is a really interesting guy. His name is Lyndon. He has a women’s style hair cut with blonde highlights and wears about 6-7 rings. On the first day of class he went around and asked my class of 50+ students our names. (He said I get an automatic A+ because Audrey is his mom’s name. YES!) He then went back through and named every single person. He got only 3 wrong on his first try, and all correct on his second. He said his point of doing this was so that we couldn’t be anonymous, so if we wanted to be then we should drop the class. I think this is very rare at such a University of 20,000 undergrads but I don’t mind it! He seems like he’ll be a very interesting professor, plus I have no final exam for that class (or any of my other classes for that matter. I’ll be done with school/finals on Oct 22!)

Grading here is really weird. A 50% is a C. So an 80% is an A. Then Butler will take all the B+ and higher grades I get here and mark them as A’s. So, I really don’t know how you get very bad grades from here! Hopefully, I don’t find out.

I’m really excited about my class called Sociology of Health and Medicine. It seems like she really knows what she’s talking about, and presents the information in a very interesting way. I hope I continue to like it. I only have class 9 hours a week. Each class has a 2 hour lecture and then a 1 hour tutorial taught by someone besides the professors. We didn’t have tutorials all last week so this week I’ll meet 3 new teachers. I’m looking forward to that.

This past Wednesday we had a “catch up dinner” put on my by program. So all the IFSA Butler students went downtown for a ROGAINE (a scavenger hunt around the city) and then out for Indian food. I got spinach and cheese NAAN, a mango smoothie drink, and some cheese and green pepper dish in a tomato-y sauce. It was really good! It was great to have a free meal too!

Thursday night, Leland, Andrew and Erin and I went on this free trip but on by BUSSOC (the bus club on campus). It brought you to a few bars around and then dropped you off downtown. It ended up being really weird! But we all made the best of the 4 hour bus ride and were very happy to finally make it back to the University! At least I became closer with Andrew and Erin and we did lots of activities together over the weekend.

On Friday night I had Operation Friendship!! It’s a program put on for the international students where you can have “a kiwi mom dad or grandparents”. My group included students from Singapore, Malaysia, England and America, and a few others. We went to a families home and they cooked a HUGE meal. The house was so warm and cozy – I think it was the first time I’d been truly warm indoors since being here! There were 4 different families there with about 15 kids under the age of 12 running around. After dinner we played a ‘get to know you’ game and then had dessert which was by far the best part! The most famous ice cream here is called Hookey Pookey. It’s basically vanilla with toffee bits. It was good!

I talked to this one kid who was about 12. He was from England but his parents were renting in NZ for 2 years. We talked about what we missed from our home countries and what we liked better about NZ. He mostly just missed the theme parks, and loved all the flavors of ice cream. I also met this girl named Alex. She was very nice and we plan on going to the classes at the gym together this week. They have Zumba here! We also talked about WOOFing. Which stands for “working on organic farms”. She is planning on doing it for the whole summer after we get done with school. She’s also going to do some WOOFing over the break. She gave me some great information and its definitely something I want to look into doing while I’m here. Best of all, I got to meet the families from New Zealand. They were so kind and welcoming and genuinely interested in our lives. I have only met nice people since being here. We will be having dinners with the same group once a month which I’m really looking forward to!

After we got back I went got tickets to a concert put on my the University. It was called the Perfect Storm and they set it up in the student union. They had 5 different stages in different rooms with local kiwi bands playing every hour. It was fun to hear the local music and dance! Then we went downtown to a place called “Boogie Nights”. It’s a bar that plays lots of fun dancing songs! We had a great time.

Saturday we woke up and went to the Christchurch Art Gallery. There was a really interesting exhibit by Taryn Simon that was about America, actually. She found a bunch of weird and strange places/things in America that no one really knows about and photographed and described them. We spent about 2 hours walking around that one exhibit. One example was a photograph of a rotting corpse. Then when you read the text, its taken at the Forensics Lab in Georgia, I think, where they take corpses and let them decompose to study the process for Forensic purposes. There were some other really interesting ones! I think I will have to go back. After that we went out for some food and then went to the Holy Grail Bar to watch the Rugby game. I’m trying to learn all of the rules so that when we go to the game on August 7^th I’ll be able to tell what is happening!

Sunday, we woke up early and went for a hike to a place called Taylor’s Mistake. It was beautiful! We were hiking up and everyone was going at a very fast pace so I just went my own speed and would catch up with them when they stopped for a brief break. Then Leland made this announcement about how when you have people who hike at different speeds either the slow ones could go first, or you could meet at big areas and wait for the slow people. This was clearly directed at me-but it was funny! I made all the fast walkers go ahead, but then once a few other people realized that I liked hiking a tad slower than a jog, they decided to join me! I also fell in the mud and had a very wet second half of the walk! It was amusing, and overall a really fun day!

Andrew, Carly, Ian, me, Leland, Erin (Anna took the picture)

I had a great bonding session with Anna my flatmate. She is a very interesting girl and I enjoyed getting to know her better. She is a New Zealander but lives in Japan. She is 19. She is engaged to her boyfriend here who is from Switzerland. She has a strong, energetic personality, and we had a very interesting conversation. I hope that we talk more soon; I think that we will.

Classes start again today! It’s weird going from adventure on weekends to learning/reading on the weekdays. I guess that’s how school works though.