WIldfoods Festival

Hi!
Sorry to anyone who’s been reading for not updating in awhile! Just a little from the week…

-On Monday I tried going to a yoga and meditation class and decided that is the last one of those I’m ever going to. Meditation is not for me.
-On Tuesday I had my first field lab for my Plant Ecology class. I had been pretty excited for field labs….but this was a completely miserable experience. It was raining, windy, and freezing. My feet and hands were numb for literally the whole four hours. Every lab you work with a partner and do a different project, and I worked with a Kiwi guy named Daniel and our project was about relative abundances of different plant life. So we had to gather life biomass samples…aka pulling out grass and weeds and sorting them which is really hard when you can’t feel your hands! I still have trouble with the Kiwi accent sometimes…pretty much the only words I could understand Daniel say were repetitions of “it’s f***ing freezing” and “plants and s**t.”
-Wednesday evening I went with Spencer and my flat mate Ann to the movie theatre to see the movie The Watchmen…which was really graphic but also awesome.
-Thursday marked the beginning of the weekend for both Sean and Felicia’s birthdays (both friends from my program) so there was a party at Felicia’s house. It was really fun and I met a lot of really nice people…and was completely shocked to see Sean do the NZ 21-year-old birthday ritual called a yardie…which basically drinking this huge container of 7 beers all at once. Don’t worry family…I will NOT be doing that on my birthday.

Friday morning was beautiful….perfect weather for a roadtrip! I set out with my friends Andee, Hillary, and Andrew in a crappy red rental car we termed “the Demon.” I conveniently forgot my license in another purse, so I have yet to try driving on the left side of the road. We were heading to the west coast of New Zealand, an 8 hour drive, for the annual Wildfoods Festival, a really fun festival where everyone eats tons of crazy food and that is just generally hilarious. We stopped along the way to make lunch on the beach, and at a Salvation Army to get some costumes. Hillary and Andee got jean short overalls, I got neon purple elbowpads and kneepads, and Andrew got a pastel jacket and hat. We also got a hilarious 3 dollar 2003 hip-hop CD, which saved us on our drive. Our drive took us through Arthur’s Pass, a series of mountains in the middle of the country. It was easily the most beautiful drive I’ve ever taken. We arrived at Greymouth around 8 and checked into our hostle, which was wicked nice and really cool. The decorations and theme were from Africa. We then quickly left to catch sunset at the “pancake rocks”, these really cool rock formations on the ocean. I can’t explain how beautiful it was…and I forgot my camera at the hostle! So I’ll have to steal pictures from my friends. Anyway, we headed out to dinner at an Indian food restaurant (Andrew and I both ordered our dishes “hot” and were literally crying”) and then went back to bed.

Saturday morning we got up pretty early and went for a bike ride (the hostel had free bike and kayak rentals). I went off on my own and explored Greymouth and went to the beach. It was really cool; instead of sand the coast was all rocks. The waves would come towards shore, but also go both ways sideways, and would hit the rocks and then come back and collide into each other. We got back, and while making breakfast met a guy from Colorado named Jessie who was taking a couple of years off before going to college and had been working in New Zealand and hitchhiking around. We invited him to come along with us, and he ended up staying with us the whole day and night. He was really nice and what he was doing was really cool and brave…but there were times when we could tell he was really lonely. When we made dinner late that night, he commented that it was the first sit-down dinner with people he’d had in months, which I can’t even imagine.

Anyway, we headed off to the festival in the Demon. And it was HILARIOUS. The atmosphere was completely crazy, which was fitting for the kind of mood you had to be in to eat what you did. I was a pretty awful vegetarian for the day…all in all we tried grubs, shark, rose wine, testicles, heart…and waffles and corn on the cob. We ran into some of our other friends from Dunedin and just generally hung out for the day. Around 7 we headed back to the hostel, made dinner, and went to bed exhausted.

This morning we woke up and hit the road. We stopped in Arthur’s Pass for a quick 2 hour hike, jumped a fence of a sheep farm and ran around in the fields, and in SPRINGFIELD, NZ for some ice cream. All in all, it was a really fun weekend!