so cold!

It’s very interesting going from the middle of summer to the middle of winter. I haven’t quite adjusted yet! My strep throat and ear infection are finally improving so that has made the days a lot better. The sun is supposed to shine in 2 more days- so that will be another great improvement.

The last few days I’ve spent running small errands and meeting new people. I registered for classes today and am taking 3 in the sociology department; Ethnicity, Family and Kinship, and Health and Medicine. I don’t have any classes on Friday, which will be great for travelling on the weekends. It was so much more of a hassle to register for classes here than at home. At first I was signed up for mostly economics classes, I have no idea how I managed that. I had to ask at least 4 people what to do about it until I finally found someone who cared enough to put me in the right direction! Classes start on Monday, which I am surprisingly looking forward to.

I won a phone from a study abroad student from last semester in a raffle so I didn’t have to buy one for $100! Calling is very expensive here (something like 89c a minute) so everyone texts. Carly and I went to the mall and bought phone plans. We saw a shoe store there called The Athletes Foot. Not the most convincing advertisement for us!

Every time I walk down the street I try to be polite and pass people on the right. After a lot of awkward looks I realized that they like to pass people the same way they drive on the road, so I’m trying to learn to walk on the left side of the sidewalk.

At orientation the other day we had a lot of speakers come up, many of whom talked about driving, especially as it relates to drinking. They all promoted zero tolerance and said drinking and driving is looked at very negatively in New Zealand. Then they had the campus police officer come up who actually told us that men could probably have 5 beers and women 3 and still be safe to drive. It was pretty amusing to hear that from the Police Officer and the other opinion from the students running the orientation! He also added that if we biked home drunk a police officer would definitely not stop us. He was actually a very nice, sincere man and told us to come in with any questions, but it was an entertaining, unexpected speech.

Ketchup is absolutely disgusting here, so I ended up paying 3 more dollars a bottle for Heinz. Definitely worth it. The cream cheese is kind of like sour cream icing. I really like it but I’m sure you wouldn’t approve, Rachel.

That’s about all I can think of for now, hopefully after this weekend I’ll have lots more interesting things to write!