What a beautiful day is today! After raining straight since getting
here, today we can see patches of blue sky, the sun, and shadows! It is hot.
Finally. This is my kind of weather.
A couple things. So we were all under the impression class was starting Feb. 13th. Wrong. I guess it starts the 20th. Which means we have soooo much time until then. Which is good and bad. Good because, obviously, who really WANTS to be in class if they don't have to be? Bad because getting to know people just out of the blue is hard. Also bad because we don't know what classes we're taking, and we won't get our school IDs for until then. Having them would be useful...with them I think we can get discounts and the city bus is free. I'm thinking we should spend this free time canoeing the Wanganui river or going to Wellington or seeing Mt. Doom.
Alcohol here is very expensive. If I remember correctly, a bottle of Smirnoff in the states is like around $20? Here it is $40. Twice as much. Baileys is about the same though. Beer seems to be a lot...anywhere from $12-$17 dollars for a 6 pack...compared to $8 for a 6 pack of spotted cow back home. (My parents are going to be so disappointed in me that I know these things.) Wine appears to be the drink of choice around here. And alcohol being expensive is probably a good thing for me anyway.
Actually, everything here is expensive. Even when I calculate the price to what it would be in US dollars, it still seems like a lot.
And everyone drives a really fricken nice car. Just saying.
Today is NZ independence day...but it doesn't seem like anyone cares other than that they get the day off from work.
Chris and Beth have made it here safely. And last night Vicky introduced us to one of our neighbors. He is Malaysian (I think?) and seems nice. Going to McDonalds is getting old. Its the only place we've found so far that has free internet. Other places cost so much per half hour or hour. We would like to get internet in the flat especially since we'll need it to connect to the stupid VPN and open our adobe programs (the Stout students will understand me when I say the internet at McDonalds is so bad that connecting to the VPN doesn't work AT ALL. And skype doesn't work either. Balhhhhhaksa;hs.)
Today we had a long chat with Vicky over lunch. She was talking about how studying abroad is good because some Americans don't understand what it is like outside America...that they don't realize some countries have bad perceptions of America...and that other cultures go about living life in entirely different ways. And the same can be said about any country. And since our media kind of rules the world (nearly every radio station is playing american pop music...and on tv there were american shows and movies like Everybody Loves Raymond...Criminal Minds...Avatar...etc) people think the US is just like how it is in our tv shows and movies. She said she had a student once that was afraid of black people because it is thought that all black people have guns and shoot people at random.
That said...I'm going to make an effort of complaining less, expecting less, and being thankful that there is electricity and flushing toilets at the very least.
No comments:
Post a Comment