End to the Blogging Hiatus

Three posts in the month of Feb is totally mediocre. The weather has been entirely too awesome to sit around blogging about how fab the weather is. I've been spending the sunny hours out and about with my housemates, playing tennis, shopping, attempting to reclaim our tiny "backyard" from the overgrowth of clover and a rusted clothes hanger so we can sit out in the sun with a cold one. Typical evenings have everyone gravitating from the lounge to the kitchen and back again while we bake cookies, make dinner, have a 3rd consecutive mug of English breakfast tea, and get wrapped up in our latest movie rental. Now that class has started everyone is a bit busier, but not so much that we don't reconnect on the evenings and weekends. The last few weeks have been full of activities around town, especially with the beginning of Orientation week at the uni. My other female flatmate and I went to see the Royal New Zealand Ballet perform at the Regent theatre in the main part of town called the Octagon and were totally blown away! I've never seen ballet up close like that; the intricacy of their movements and costumes...it was amazing. A lot of bands have been doing shows as part of Orientation ("O") week, so my flatmate Chris and I went and saw the Mint Chicks play on campus, along with another friend's band Thundercub. It was SO nice to be back in the presence of live music, though I forgot my earplugs as usual, clearly the sound techs miscalculated the loud factor, and some freshie nearly vommed on us. I really miss going to KNC functions in Raleigh and hope to catch a few something-somethings when I come home. Dunedin has a bit of a cultural, alternative art/fashion scene going on and last week was the annual iD Fashion week. iD consists of various fashion events around the city, ie late night shopping, designer talks & meet/greets, and of course, fashion shows. It is becoming more renown around New Zealand, though I believe this might have only been it's 5th or 6th year. Since my flatmate is in the fashion design school at the Polytech here in Dunedin, we snagged student discounted tickets to the Emerging designer fashion show, complete with awesome goodie bag and the chance to ogle the brainchilds of young designers from Australasia and Europe. The main event is the iD fashion show, which is held at the Dunedin train station. The runway is set up along the breezeway with seats set up over the rails and even in train cars. The cheapest ticket was $45, and student tickets were all sold out, so I decided I'd stick to Emerging for now. The set up is such a cool concept, although the weather notoriously turns sour, with this year being no exception, causing everyone to be furiously gripping hot drinks. Only in Dunedin will it be 9 degrees at night and nearly 22 when you wake up in the morning. Either way, it was a great excuse to get dressed up and go out :)

The Regent Theatre; Me and the Runway; being silly after the show; iD Emerging Designers website

I've only two months left in this part of the world, which means that I suddenly will be having tons more to blog about. Ironic, perhaps, but this will be because I finally will be getting to travel around again! My job ends in about 3 weeks and then I'll be off and running to experience as much as I can before leaving. Next weekend I am hoping to do a part of this biking track called the Rail Trail with a coworker from the Uni. The trail runs where old train tracks used to be through Central Otago. It goes for at least 100 km, so we are only doing a small part, but the scenery, accommodation, cafes, and various artifacts from the railway system, ie tunnels and cool stuff like that, are supposed to make the experience awesome. I'm really looking forward to it!

The following weekend my housemates and I are heading out to Wanaka, the warmer, central town where most people in Dunedin retreat to during the summer, for our 10k & Half marathon races, respectively. I was aiming to do the half when I first arrived, but have since formally committed to the 10k, since I rely so heavily on walking as my main form of transportation. My calf muscles have been giving me trouble with all the uphill climbs I do on a daily basis just to get home and the additional strain of training makes healing tricky. I do want to walk off the plane when I arrive home, so I figured it was wise to ease off with the running and not get too carried away. My training runs have been going well and I'm feeling psyched to complete another race & to check out the popular holiday refuge for Dunedin residents. Oh, did I mention I was driving everyone there? That in itself should be a story.

I've been developing some pretty awesome ideas for my trip to Wellington, Nelson, Blenheim, and Christchurch coming up the second week of April, as well as my weeks in Melbourne and Sydney at the end of April. That is a major post in itself so I'll drag it out to a new one, if only so I can have two posts for March :)