So I Lied.

I didn't actually go to the Otago Peninsula on Friday. Sad, I know. I hope you can all forgive me. My flatmate, KC, and I made the easy one block walk (compared to the 10-15 minutes other students had to make from their flats) to the middle of campus where we were supposed to meet to catch the buses, and it turned out the trip was canceled. Why, you might ask? I think that the picture below may explain some things...So yeah, it's goddamn cold here, you may have guessed. I know that most of you are probably in the dark about what the weather is like down here, so briefly I'll let you know that it's about 28 degrees right now (1 a.m.), which is -2 for all you Kiwis out there. I'll get around to a post about my moving into my flat and Dunedin soon-ish, hopefully by Monday, but for now I think a description of my day is sufficient. Hopefully my infamous storytelling will improve.

Anyway, lacking a plan of what to do or a place to go or food to eat (we all thought we would be gone from noon to 7, and get a free BBQ somewhere in between - only a few of us brought sandwiches), some of my friends decided to go on a trek and find their way to the water anyway. Forget the buses, we have feet, right? Well off we went, and before we knew it our group of international students was at least 20 strong, and I'm sure most of them didn't even know us or where we were leading them. Just for the glamor of it, here's the Clocktower Building; it's probably the most iconic part of the Uni. Don't be fooled, though. Luckily there are some cars in this picture for scale, but in almost everything published by Otago, the tower is made out to be 100 feet tall or something, which it clearly is not.

So our little jaunt obviously wasn't planned, meaning we didn't have much of an idea of where to go other than generally southeast. In fact, we went due south, and as you can see if you head south of the campus (basically from the green arrow on the map in a post down below) you'll end up in the lovely industrial section of Dunedin. At one point, a couple of us stopped at a corner store in the shipping yards to ask for directions on how to get to the water, and the woman replied, 'Well it's a good thing you have them long legs, you're sure as hell gonna need them!' There were some other clever Kiwi comments about the apparent busload-size of our group, too.

After about a half-hour of walking from campus (and several a cappella renditions of such classics as 'The Final Countdown,' 'Juke Box Hero' and 'Come Sail Away') we finally saw the water, and my was it beautiful. Of course in the civilized world, you can't just have waterfront that isn't being exploited for tourist dollars, and we found a little walkway with benches and a pub along the waterfront.

We whittled our numbers down to about 7 after hobos and fishermen killed and/or ate the others) and we weren't even that cold since it was the middle of the day and we had been walking so much. It's a great way to keep warm. Anyway, it was actually pretty nice there. Seeing the snow on the surrounding hills was great (bizarre in July though).

On the way back to the campus, we walked by another landmark in Dunedin, the Dunedin Railway Station. It looks like a gingerbread house, of sorts (I'll admit I stole that characterization from the Wikipedia article) and has some great gardens outside. Maybe I'll go in one day...

So I'll probably be checking back in by Monday about my move in and the Kiwi life in general. Definitely some interesting quirks here. And since I can't get the song (or what I associate with the song) out of my head, I have to do this...sweet as, mate.