Final Frontier

On Friday, I took my first final exam for the semester, for my Metamorphism class - although I suppose it could have been my second, since I took the lab practical exam for the same class just a week before that. Anyway, I'm pleased to say that it went pretty damn well - they have a great system here where they (meaning every class at the University) provides at least the previous final exam for the course, if not several. Knowing the format and style of an exam ahead of time makes studying so much better, especially when you get four of the previous exams, like my Metamorphism one.

Anyway, I came away from the exam and the week or so of studying previous to that realizing that, yeah, I've actually learned a lot from that class. I guess it's a little surprising, given how little I thought I had done here, but both and Andrew and I were pretty happy with the outcome.

For now, I'm going back to my typical study routine - watching the Sox clamber back into their series and listening to Car Talk podcasts - until my Human Geography final Tuesday. After that, I have two and a half weeks until I get to take my last final for Māori Society, which means lots of backpacking for me. More on that in days to come...

Our Spastic Weather

I'm not totally sure if I've ever really conveyed how ridiculous the weather can be here, but man, it can be really crazy - especially in the spring, like it is now. Take last Wednesday as a pretty good example.

The morning starts off chilly and gray, and soon enough, it's raining as I head off for my 8 a.m. class. Lovely, really. The weather clears up while I'm in class, and by the time I'm out of geography just before 10 a.m., it's only cloudy. No less than 45 minutes later, we hear the sound of banging on the roof, but much louder than rain, and it turns out it's hailing out - a lot. Incredibly, I leave for my 12 noon class, and it's sunny and beautiful out, almost as sunny as you'll see in Dunedin. Of course, I got too excited about this, and once I got back to my flat in between class and lab at 2 p.m., we got even more hail. Top it off later that evening with rain, and you'll have a complete day of weather in Dunedin. Nice.

Also, I've gotten some feedback about my post, 'Geology Escapades,' about my field trip down to Nugget Point, and apparently the geo may have been a little much. No worries, though! This isn't a geology blog - I just wanted to give a little taste of what I was learning, particularly for those who have a geo background. I have given a lot of thought to maybe writing a geology blog next semester, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Anyway, back to hoping for the wretched high winds that've moved in to blow away to sea.

Geology Escapades

Last week, I took my only geology field trip of the semester. That's pretty sad for me, because I haven't taken less than three geology field trips in a semester since I've been in college. In fact, by my count, I've been on 14 field trips in just four semesters at Pomona, including 7 overnight trips. That's pretty damn good, especially for such a small department, but that makes just one day trip in a semester a little disappointing.

Of course, I did really enjoy this particular trip, for my 'Metamorphics' class. It's about metamorphic petrology, which is basically looking at rocks which have been deformed over time, and how they became deformed. What's nice is by now, I've taken basically the equivalent of a full semester of metamorphic petrology, including about a half semester back at Pomona, and just over a half semester here at Otago.

For the trip, we drove south from Dunedin as far as Nugget Point, which is at the northern end of the Catlins, a beautiful stretch of coast on the south end of the South Island. You can see why this would be a geologist's paradise: So yeah, that would be layers of rock, but turned so they are completely vertical. Crazy, huh? In fact, they're quite popular among different types of geologists, even. For the paleontologist, there are Jurassic-age bivalve (think clams or scallops) fossils. For the structural geologist, analyzing how this block was rotated is the thing to do. For the metamorphic petrologist, however, this represents the beginning of a type locality for burial metamorphism - a type of metamorphism that often involves only the low pressure and temperatures associated with thick piles of sediments or other rocks. This is something you may see in huge river deltas (think Ganges or Amazon), for instance.

For the slightly more geology-inclined, what we saw at Nugget Point specifically was the very start of metamorphism. Light enough to preserve fossils, but just enough to begin the process of zeolitization - the transition from diagenesis (cementing of sedimentary rocks) to the zeolite facies. The rocks - in this case composed of volcanigenic sediments - appear essentially unchanged; we even found some of those fossils in it. As the day moved on, we moved 'up sequence,' with metamorphic grade increasing more and more, until at our last stop we reached greenschist facies (intermediate grade) rock. I've highlighted the rough temperature-pressure conditions that we saw on the trip on the facies diagram above. What made this interesting, besides the pretty consistent increase in grade, was that all of these rocks all had the same mineralogical parent - that is to say, if you melted all of these rocks and analyzed each melt's composition, it would be the same for all the rocks. Pretty cool.

Since (I) Been Gone

I know, I know, I've done a sort of poor job posting for the last week, so I trying to make up for it now by annoyingly posting a couple times in a row. Ryan's a bad blogger.

First things first, I wrote my first essay this week. It was for my Human Geography class - a class I actually enjoy, but apparently not enough to actually begin work on my paper much ahead of time. It actually came out pretty well; the title of it was The effects of development and marketisation on the subsistence-driven culture of rural, mainland Southeast Asia. Makes me sound smart, eh? Essentially, I wrote that the culture of mainland rural SE Asia - one in which families practice slash-and-burn farming and use the nearby forests as a food resource - is actually being degraded by attempts at development, in which families are relocated from the mountainous interior to low-lying regions. In fact, the rural way of life appears sustainable, even with the slash-and-burn farming (swidden agriculture). It seems to me like the best parts of sociology and economics combined.

In other, more fun news, yesterday Annie, Laura, KC, Page, Andrew and I went to the Cadbury Chocolate Factory for a tour of Cadbury World. The factory is only a ten minute walk from my flat - on the same street no less! - but I never noticed until yesterday that as you walk by on the sidewalk, you can smell the chocolate in the air...I felt like I was going for a tour of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

The moment I stepped in the door, that feeling was more reinforced. In fact, I felt like I was in that happiest place on earth. This was only added to as we were given hairnets and snoods (to cover beards, clearly not a problem I have) to wear on our way through the factory. Normally, I would have taken a ton of photos, but like other factory tours (Ben & Jerry's comes to mind) we weren't allowed to. Regardless, the tour was great - we saw the process of making chocolate, and even better, got tons of candy for free! Among others, I got a couple Moro Bars, Dairy Milk, and Crunchie Bars. Naturally, not many will know what these delicacies are, so basically it's like Milky Way, Hershey's Chocolate, and Butterfinger (but way more rich and not sticky), respectively. Not only that, but after the tour I bought about $15 worth of chocolate, including kiwifruit-filled, three layer (milk, white and dark all together), and blackberry-filled. Oh, and a bunch of creme eggs. It's lasted 24 hours so far, and if I care about my health, I'll make that 2 kilos last at least a week. We'll see.

Today, Annie, KC, Laura, Andrew and I went down to St. Clair and St. Kilda beaches, ironically, to go ice skating. That was fun, you know, except for how I suck at skating, and all of the stupid little kids zooming past me (or across me) made me want to smack them...I'm really grown up, obviously. Anyway, tomorrow Butler is taking us on the Taieri Gorge Railway, which goes into Central Otago. Some curling will be in order, and beyond that, I'm not sure. Free dinner though! Well, that probably covers everything...cheers!

1st Week of Class = Done

So I've just begun my second week of classes at Otago, and I'm still getting used to some of the differences. The classes I'm taking are Maori Society, Human Geography (both are intro level) and Metamorphism, which is an intermediate course.

Among the differences:

• You only take 3 classes per semester - and university is only 3 years here! In fact, I've heard one kiwi girl comment about how she's jealous of the American system, with its breadth of study requirements, because you're forced to focus almost immediately upon getting to university here.
• A class is actually called a paper, and a course is known here as your major.
• Classes don't meet as often - only one of my classes has 3 hours of lecture per week (which is the norm in the States).
• My two intro-level classes have 200+ students each in lecture, so to get more 'small-class interaction,' they each have tutorials, which are 15 or fewer students from the class who usually meet once a week with a tutorial leader (a grad student) to go over class material.
• Grading is COMPLETELY different. Final exams make up from 50% to 70% of your grade. Holy crap. I feel lucky that I have two that are only 50%, with essays and tutorial participation making up the rest of the grade.
• Kiwis are apparently really anal about citing your sources and how you make your bibliography - every department has its own style guide for how you have to cite material in papers, and you get heavily penalized if you don't follow it.

That said, I say that in a few weeks I'll be into the swing of things - although it remains to be seen how I'll do when I have to write essays again; I haven't really had to write an expository essay since freshman year. Yipes. The classes themselves are pretty good. Geography's a lot like a mix of sociology and economics, and right now we're learning about development in Southeast Asia, just to give you an idea of what we've been learning so far. Maori Society is interesting so far (we're learning about creation) and finally, my metamorphism class looks like it will be a lot like the petrology course I took last semester - and it uses the same book! Glad I lugged that stupid thing over with me, since it actually paid off.

Anyway, the weekend was pretty good. It started off with an all-day Harry Potter movie marathon - we watched all four movies on DVD. On Saturday, me and some other Butler kids went for a hike up Mt. Cargill, which is the tallest hill near Dunedin. For some reason we thought it would be a good idea to walk all the way there and (pretty much) all the way back, which ended up being around 12 km (7.5 miles for you Yankees). It was a fun walk though, except for the part where it was raining on the trail and the top was shrouded in cloud. Obviously the pictures weren't too spectacular... That night was the All Blacks rugby game, against the South Africa Springboks. We got to The Cook with the game tied 6-all, then the All Blacks proceeded to beat up the bloody Springboks, winning 33-6. Then on Sunday we went and saw the new Harry Potter movie. What could be better?