Hello everyone!  I’ve had a really busy week and I’m tired of doing homework tonight, so I thought I’d update my blog!

I’ve had a pretty eventful week since my last update.  Last week I did a few things including:

  • Watching a free concert at the San Francisco Bath House.  One of the bands was called Die! Die! Die!  and the lead singer kept jumping into the audience, right where Rachel and I were standing.
  • Watched The Navigators, an acrobatic/ trapeze performance put on by the Festival of Circus.  It was really awesome, they were doing amazing tricks and flips.  I kept thinking they were going to fall!  Unfortunately, I forgot to put my CF card in my camera before I left.  I was only taking a short walk, I went down to the waterfront where I could see a pretty across the harbor over Lower Hutt.  Then I kept hearing someone announcing that a show was about to start and walked over to Waitangi park to watch acrobats!  You never really know what you’re going to find in this town.
  • Went salsa dancing at Shooters.  Salsa dancing every other Friday night!  Yay!
  • I explored the Te Papa Museum, the National Museum of New Zealand.  There are many interesting exhibits inside on the native animals and plants of New Zealand, as well as history of human settlement in the country, and a Maori Marae.

    Entrance to the Te Papa Museum

  • Sunday was our trip for international students to the Wairapa Valley, where there is an abundance of wineries.  We visited two wineries for wine tasting, and stopped in a little town called Greytown in between tasting for lunch.

Scenic views on the drive up to Wairapa

The cute little cafe we had lunch in at Greytown

Wine at the Alana Estate, the second winery we visited

This 11-year old girl was pouring wine for everyone, and she was really funny! I doubt that that would happen in the USA!

Our group!

  • Monday I have the entire day off since I don’t have classes, so I walked to the Cable Car station off of Lambton Quay downtown and took the Cable Car up the hill to the Botantical Gardens.  The cable car has been around since the early 1900’s… about 100 years old!  There is an interesting cable car museum at the top of the track showing the history of the train with the original train inside.

    The cable car I took!

    After looking through the museum, I took a nice walk through the botanical gardens.  The gardens were really beautiful.  They had a rose garden, the Lady Norwood Rose Garden, and the roses are in full bloom this time of year.

There are also some interesting sculptures around the place!

  • After walking around the gardens for a couple hours, I rode the cable car back downtown and searched for the Revolt of the Mannequins.  The mannequins are part of the International Art Festival in Wellington and came all the way from France!  They invaded a bunch of shop fronts downtown and are on display all week long.  Apparently the mannequins move every day to tell a story, I’ll have to come back another time to check it out.

    The Positive Test

    The Angelus; By Millet

    The Comic Fire Brigade

  • After finding all of the mannequins, I walked down to Civic Square since I haven’t taken a proper photograph of it yet, and wound up in the City Art Gallery.

    Civic Square. The City Gallery is the big building with the polka dots on the left.

    There was a really cool exhibit going on, showcasing Janet Cardiff’s The Forty-Part Motet.  Instead of a piece of art, a circle of forty speakers were set up in the gallery space.  Each speaker played one voice in the forty-person choir singing a re-working of Thomas Tallis’ Spem in allum numquan habui.  For fourteen minutes, you could sit and listen to an ultimate surround sound of the recording.  You can walk from speaker to speaker and hear each individual singer, instead of hearing them all at once.  I thought it was a very different way to present a choral work, and a very beautiful song.  Click below to give a version of the original 1573 composition a listen!

Spem in allum nunquam habui by Thomas Tallis

  • Then, on Tuesday, Freya, Emily and I checked out a wildlife reserve close by called Zealandia.  It was really pretty there, the plants here kind of reminded us of Jurassic Park because of all the huge fern-looking plants.  We saw a lot of birds, including a lot of ducks.  We also got to see a tui bird up close.  It sat and sang on a branch for 5 or 6 minutes right in front of us and wasn’t scared a bit!  I didn’t get too great of a photo of it, since I had my wide angle on, but here’s the best shot I got:

    (Click to make photo bigger)

    Click here to hear what a tui bird sounds like!

    There was also a big dam in between two lakes in the reserve as well as an observation tower that we climbed up to view the park.  We only got to stay for 2 hours because the park closed earlier than we expected it to, but it was fun!  We also got in for free because we got free tickets from the international office!  Awesome!

The lake at the entrance to Zealandia

As for my classes, they are going all right.  Most of my teachers seem pretty knowledgable.  My advertising class is pretty interesting, we learned about how shopping markets set up their stores to get customers to buy tons of stuff.  My consumer behavior class is pretty boring, however.  We had a substitute last week and she actually stopped reading power point slides because they were “self-explanatory” and told us to sit and read them for a couple minutes in total silence.  If I wanted to read the power point slides, I could have just read them off the class website myself and not bothered going to class… oh well.  The regular teacher for the course isn’t too much better, but at least he doesn’t stop lecturing for minutes at a time.

Well, that’s my last week in a nutshell… This weekend I’m going to the South Island!!! The international student group is taking a ferry across Cook Strait to the South Island to see Queen Charlotte Sounds.  We are going to go kayaking and dolphin swimming, so I’m really excited!