Orientation (again...)

On Monday, the University of Otago started O-Week: an entire week of events, special deal (at restaurants and local businesses) and parties – all designed to help over 500 international students and some thousands of freshman get oriented in Dunedin. The week started with an entire day of course approval. We stood in line to speak with members of the academic departments in order to get our classes straightened out. My finalized schedule looks like this:

I am really excited about geography and marine ecology because both of these courses involve several field trips -- a great way to see some of the country.

The other big event that was held was the Taieri Gorge Train ride for all international students, followed by a BBQ. Although the weather was pretty gray and rainy, we got to see some of Central Otago’s beautiful scenery from the window of the New Zealand equivalent of the Hogwarts Express.

The rest of the week was filled with a lot of walking around the city, visits to tent city and meeting a lot of other international students. We walked through the botanical gardens, and down to the octagon, which is the center of all the downtown shops and restaurant. Tent city is in this quad near the university where all of the local businesses have tents set up and are luring students in with free giveaways. I won 2 candy bars, a mug, and a sim-card at the Flybuys prize van over the course of several visits.

The University of Otago is a popular place for Americans to study (over half of the 500 international students), but there are also many people from around the world. In my flat and the neighboring units, we represent Mexico, China, France, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Canada, New Zealand (each flat has a Kiwi Host living in it) and I’m sure there are several others. It is certainly a great place to meet really interesting people and I’m looking forward to meeting more Kiwis when classes begin next week!

O-week has also been a popular time for drinking. Day of the week seems irrelevant because classes haven’t started yet. Earlier this week we visited a bar where there was a pie eating contest. In New Zealand, small meat pies are a common lunch food, but I was content to only be a spectator for this particular event. On Wednesday we taught some other international students how to play Slap Cup (shout out to my Brown friends) which was a total riot. Thursday night, after a potluck dinner with our neighbors, we went to one of the big O-Week concerts held down at the stadium. The crowd put all Williams College social events to shame and we had a really good time.

Today, my flat-mate and I went for a walk up Signal Hill, a massive 5km climb up to a spectacular lookout over the city, harbor and peninsula. Just as we got to the top a huge raincloud blew in off the ocean and made all my photos come out really dark (touched them up a little, didn’t really help – but this is definitely a place I will revisit, so I might get some better photos in the future). Fortunately, the wind was strong enough that it moved the cloud past fairly quickly, so we had a pleasant walk back down.

I still need to work on using the panoramic setting on my camera.

I certainly had a good time exploring Dunedin, a really fun and beautiful college town. There are still plenty of things I want to do, like take a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory and the Speights Factory and I’m looking forward to using some of the upcoming weekends to get out of the city and explore the rest of the South Island!