first week of class: is this a captcha?

"So," the professor was saying, "how many words can you recognize from the passage on your worksheet?"

I looked down at the sheet. It looked like a very long captcha.

Pa laeg se graega wulf pe bewiste paet heafod, and mid his twam fotum haefde paet heafod beclypped, gaedig and hungrig, and for Gode ne dorste paes heafedes abrygan, and heold hit wid deor.

And... for... and God. And then maybe something about being very hungrig. Old English is dead for a reason. The rest of the class was looking as baffled as me. Some of them were trying to say the words out loud. They sounded like a meeting of Ents. After ten brutal minutes of unsuccessful translation, our professor finally helped us out. Apparently this story is about a wolf holding a saint's heafod in between his fotum because Gode told him to protect it from the deer. My head felt like it was going to explode.

That was my first class of the week.

First of all, this is called "Uni." Nobody says college. If they do, they're talking about high school. What weird backwards ways. Classes at this university are pretty different from the ones I'm used to at Wooster. First of all, kids get to class fifteen minutes early. And the lectures start 10 minutes early. Those who walk in late are scorned and get the nosebleed seats in the back of the hall. My average class size here is about 100-200 students (compared to 20-25 max at Wooster). But the professors are really engaging and all seem to have the dry Kiwi sense of humor. I've never laughed so much during a lecture than I have this week when my English professor said the word "penis" 8 times in reference to an Old English poem. There are about 3 hours of lectures every week and a small tutorial group that meets for an hour once a week. The only people who speak in tutorials are loud American girls. The bookstore is quite adorable and posh-looking, but the books generally cost about a trillion dollars a copy. There also a cafe on campus that opens at 9:00 every morning with beer on tap all day long. Only in New Zealand.

I'm also in a Maori language class, muddling my way through simple pronouns and a couple slippery nouns that I can't quite remember yet. And then I've got a class in Children's Literature, where we get to read Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter. Magnificent.

Figuring out my schedule's been a little hectic so far. I've made a bunch of stupid freshman mistakes, like wandering through the wrong building and trying to go in the out doors. But I think I'm done getting lost by now.

It was clubs week, so I signed up for five or six clubs that lured me in with free candy. I only actually intend to join up with the tramping club to get some slammin discounts on hiking trips and a rental tent so I don't have to freeze in my hammock alone anymore.

Speaking of tramping, my friend Lauren and I almost have our Easter break plans all set up. More on that later. I've got to go fill my heafod with knowledge and meet up with the ladies' mountain bike group after class.

orientation, shepherds, bars, and backpacks

If you're not my friend on facebook, you probably think my plane to Auckland crashed in the Pacific. It did not. I'm just a negligent blog-updater. Since my last post, I've been in New Zealand. It's a delightful place where the favorite word for cool is "sweet as" with no more words after, you get food "take away" instead of "to go," and sheep really are everywhere.

For the first week, our lovely program coordinators from Arcadia University held our hands as we struggled past our jet lag and took us on a whirlwind tour of Auckland and Rotorua. We saw lots of rain clouds, sheep, a traditional Maori village, a geyser, some kiwi birds, and rocky holes that spewed sulfurous steam. We drove through Hobbiton, watched a show about sheep, and rolled down a hill in a giant rubber ball. I ate my first-ever slice of the traditional Kiwi dessert called pavlova, which is a giant merengue topped with cream and fruit. Plus it's gluten-free. I nearly died of delightedness. I also discovered New Zealand-style coffee. It's always made with love and might be the most wonderful thing since pavlova. Other students worry about spending all their money on alcohol. I'm more concerned about spending mine on lattes and cake.

Real Kiwis are too shy to be photographed, so the conservatory supplied a fake one.

Pavlova, you own my heart...

so do you, flat white.

Suddenly orientation was over, we were on a plane to Wellington, and we weren't American tourists anymore. We were foreign students in a foreign country. We had a school to go to and groceries to buy. That was a little scary. Then I remembered that I was in New Zealand and I got over it.

I've spent the past few days wandering around Wellington, running up its steep windy streets, and nearly getting blown off my bike by the wind. It's an enchanting little city packed with artsy cafés, bars with nightly live music, and a few classy theaters that college students can't actually afford to visit. Plus Wellington has about five bike shops within 2 miles of each other, and it's only a 4-5 hour drive away from some amazing national parks. You really can't beat that kind of city.

The view from my street.

 architecture downtown.

This weekend seven of us Americans decided to get out of the Wellington bubble. We booked some bus tickets on the fly, stuffed some trail mix into our geeky hiking packs, and went on a New Zealand "tramp" (which is what they call hiking, since they're in the habit of using silly words for things). We'd be doing the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, rated one of the best day hikes in the world. The weather was supposed to be less than ideal, but a little wind couldn't hurt, right? Besides, we're Americans.

The universe laughed in our faces by pummeling our 6-hour hike with "alpiney conditions," as our shuttle driver euphemistically put it. Some parts of the track were so clouded over that we couldn't see more than 100 feet in any direction. Most of the famous landmarks (including LOTR's "Mount Doom") were totally invisible.

It should've looked something like this:

Instead it was like this:

There was a lot of fog, and I nearly got blown off the side of the moutain. I was too scared to take pictures at that point. But it was still worth the awesome experience and the views on the other side of the pass.

Then it was time for some much-deserved sleep in a makeshift camp shelter when our tents got blown over by the wind.

As my new Kiwi mate put it: welcome to NZ, we hope you enjoy your stay.