ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

Everyday life changes being on the EcoQuest campus

   1. Most important meal of the day. 

I eat breakfast every day, which is a big change from school where I basically never had anything besides coffee before my first class and then lunch immediately afterwards. The coffee here is hit or miss, depending on who attempts to work the giant, intimidating, touchy monstrosity of a machine we have, but my coffee consumption is way up compared to home because there is a hot pot on at all hours of the day. As for breakfast, I cycle through the same two things throughout the week: a bowl of cereal with cut up banana or toast with peanut butter and an apple. I keep waiting for them to get old, but so far so good. I think I'm gonna keep up with this breakfast thing when I go back too, it's kind of nice.

   2. The early bird gets the worm.

We have class or a trip every day at 8:30 or 9 am every day, and you have to be done with your dishes by 8:00 so the kitchen crew can wash them. If you can't tell where this is going, the girl who previously never started homework before 11 pm and never scheduled classes before 11 am now gets up at 7:40 am every day and is usually in bed before midnight. This is not a routine I plan on bringing back with me, I don't like being up that early. A) I'm tired, which sucks. B) It's COLD out early in the morning, and I think that when you're in weather that hits 70 degrees by 9:30 am, there is absolutely no reason to spend any part of your day cold. C) The grass is all dewy and gets my socks wet on the way to eat breakfast, and I'm only wearing the socks in the first place because it's freaking cold . . .  honestly I am just not a fan of mornings I think

   3. New uses for sun

If you click on this picture to see the bigger version, you can make out my yellow steelers t-shirt (next to my hot pink shorts) on the line.

   4. Reading

Even though I was big into reading in high school, I don't usually have a book going at Michigan, there just isn't time (but it could definitely be argued that I use that time for other, less literary activities). I'm currently reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith--it was my airplane book--and I have a few others with me that I've been meaning to read for a while. I've set a goal for myself to get through at least 3 while I'm here. Having a book to read is actually great; while I really like spending so much time with the group, it sometimes feels hard to find time totally by yourself, so going off and reading for a little bit each day is a nice break.

   5. Music

There is ALWAYS music playing, wherever you are on campus. It's always hooked up to someone's computer when we're studying, it plays very loudly in the kitchen whenever anyone is cooking or watching dishes (it's what makes kitchen duty fun: you may be cleaning 25 dirty plates, but it's usually a dance party as well), if you walk back to your cabin in the afternoon you will probably hear Jon B or Natalie on the guitar on their deck. It has been cool to listen to the different music of 25 people. I have added so much new stuff to my library since I've been here, I don't even know what to do with my overwhelmed little iPod

   6. Feet 

It's a Maori thing to take your shoes off before you enter a room, so we don't wear shoes in class, and we're usually barefoot outside too

  7. Buggin out

Giant bugs, and a zillion million flies. There really aren't that many mosquitos, there are definitely more   mosquitos on the porch at night in Michigan than there are here, but there are so many flies and crickets, especially once it gets dark. The crickets reach absolutely gargantuan sizes, some are as long as my middle finger, and they make really loud noises to go with their really big legs (I'll try to get a picture). My roommate, Kayla, is not a bug person. She FREAKS OUT when she finds them in our room, and her personality means she is very very loud and hilarious about it (the whole process involves a lot of eye-closing and swearing). It's a good thing they don't bother me that much, or we would have an obnoxious little cabin on our hands where no one ever slept.

   8. Stars

You can see all of them

Academia

I've realized lately that the way I've described this semester has sort of made it sound like I do nothing academic. Here are some of the so far un-blogworthy details of my school life, to give you a better picture. Each week, students give a 5 minute solo oral presentation (mine last week was on flax. And they tell you to "try and spice things up"... an impossible assignment when your subject matter is as boring as flax) and we're in groups of 6 every week to give 10 min presentations which happen on Fridays. We have to write a scientific paper on each week's theme or big assignment, and we have to write a personal journal entry for each week (<for anyone who has taken Spanish at U-M, this assignment is reminiscent of the journals, except instead of bullshitting in Spanish, I am bullshitting in English, and the entries contain a little more than variations of "yo soy de Pittsburgh," and "me gusta nadar").
Also, I still have to go to lecture--some days we have as much as 5 hours of lecture in one day--but it's not like I have a class schedule or that you can be guaranteed to have class indoors any day of the week. We sort of get the run down of what we're doing 2 or 3 days at a time, and we don't usually have lecture more than 2 days in a row. I'd say we have 4 sit down in a classroom type lectures per week, on average.
For example, on Sunday of this week, Monday's schedule was written on the board:

"9-11 gardening with Ria, 12 lunch, 1:30 climate change lecture with Chris and roundtable discussion" 

so we got out of class at about 3:30 and have the rest of the day free. For meals, we're all signed up to be on kitchen duty 10 days of the semester in teams of 4, which means you do dishes at 8am, 1pm, and after dinner, which the 4 of you are responsible for cooking. A lot of the time staff members hang around to eat dinner with us, but for the most part, we're the only ones on campus after classes end. We were talking about this the other day: in a lot of ways, school here is like regressing to preschool:

• all of our classes are in the same room
• we call our teachers by their first names
• we have breaks for snacks
• we each have a cubby with our name on it
• after class, we play games in the grass (frisbee, soccer, volleyball)

But for the most part, learning is multimodal. We take a lot of trips during the week; yesterday we went to the Miranda shorebird center to observe the roosting grounds and make notes

This picture is not as cool as I wanted it to be, but that gray line in the middle is all feeding shorebirds, and it went on forever (I have wished so many times on this trip that my camera had a panorama feature)

And this trip ties into our theme of the week, which is shorebirds in the Hauraki Gulf.

Booty booty booty booty rockin everywhere

***First of all, the program director asked us today to please inform our friends and family that we are not in an area affected by the scary earthquake in New Zealand, just so that no one worries if you read it in the paper back home. Christchurch is a large city on a fault in the South Island. We're safely tucked away by Auckland on the North Island until March, and will no longer be studying in Christchurch***

Next week we're snorkeling in Poor Knights, and today we got measured for our wetsuits. Amusingly, the only measurements they asked for were height and butt.
     Yours truly is holding down the title of Tiniest Booty on Campus (although we can't find Lucy for her measurements, and hopefully her flat, soccer team butt will beat mine out). A funny thing is that, even though no one here is overweight at all, (and I say that not just in the don't-want-to-hurt-feelings kind of way, because honestly, everyone's in pretty good shape) but BUTT sizes were all over the map! We ranged from 90cm - 113cm! (they want us to think in metric units, when we turn in data and assignments, they won't accept it if there's any mention of inches, ft, or miles). So there you have my deep, New Zealand thought for today: butts!

The princess and the bug

Mosquito netting is the canopy bed I never had

"On the wrong side of the road!... again!"

Back to campus and my computer!!! Have been on the east coast for the past week, spending the school week in a youth hostel in Opoutere (on the Coromandel peninsula) working in the estuary next door. 

THE HOSTEL

Was awesome, I only have one other hostel experience to compare it to, and that was in Chicago and it was full of loud, drunk Swedish guys on a backpacking trip. This was totally different, we still slept in bunk beds, but they were in separate buildings all over this little plot of land by the water. Most girls slept in the main room, which used to be an old school house, and is now a sunny bunk room. There was a reading room with a fireplace, a patio with wicker furniture and couches, and picnic tables all over the lawn. We saw the owner a lot, he was very friendly, called everyone "brothah" and had an old dog named Fritz that followed him around everywhere and slept in his room. It cost $22 NZ each night to stay there, and it didn't have wifi or cell phone service, but was really nice and had amazing views.

THE ACADEMICS

This is Chris my lab partner for the week (the 25 of us pair up randomly by number for each week's projects, but he actually goes to U-M) and we're working on shellfish monitoring here. Scoop up some sand, dump it in the sieve, wash out the dirt and measure all the living things left in there. As you can see, we had a lovely rainy day to do this the first day

Our homework for the week is to map out the region, we hiked up one of the mountains and did some drawings, and the next day we kayaked through the estuary and did some measuring and ground-level drawings (we have water-proof notebooks, they're awesome! You can drop them right in the ocean if you want, and they will be a-ok). Here are two contrasting views from the mountain we hiked up for a vantage point (called the pa site)

nice and natural 

Not so natural. Pine forests are planted all over NZ and then cut down when they mature (in ~20-30 years) and then replanted. There are ugly, man-made tree forests like this all over the place, either packed with tall pines, or dotted with newly-planted saplings

THE WEEKEND

Here's the good bit, because this weekend was crazy. We had no concrete plans whatsoever for the weekend, every decision on this trip was made on the fly, which is the way I like to travel, though I'm pretty sure it drove some people crazy. It should also be noted that we were set on not spending money on places to sleep. More on this later. We rented some cars, and assigned some very confident drivers to each vehicle for the whole weekend. They had to get used to driving on the left side of the road, shifting with their left hands, and giving way to the people turning RIGHT (counterintuitive, this driving rule apparently changes frequently). I was dreading having to drive (for those who don't know, I am not the best driver on the RIGHT side of the road) but other kids were really pumped and fought over who would GET to drive. Crazies.

I ended up in an all-girls car with my favorite people on this trip so far: Morgan, Kayla, Kathryn, and Annalea. These are my kind of people, seriously no drama, they don't stress over stupid shit, and are really funny: a necessary trait when you're stuck in an old hatchback for hours with a radio that only picks up one strange reggae station every once and a while. 

Friday night, we ended up sleeping on a big tarp on a beach called Octopus Bay (camping on beaches is not actually legal, but you can sneak on the more secluded places like this one). We had to kind of hike down a mountain to get to it, all of us in jangles (remember your kiwi vocab! jangles = flip flops!) but once we got there, it was like our own private cove to party on at night, and swim around the next morning. Gorgeous, with surf-worthy waves. 

The tarp. Josh is underneath, pulling out rocks and driftwood so we sleep like babies on the sand

I took this on the hike back to the cars in the morning. Look to the right, see that sand? That's where we slept Friday night! Surrounded by cliff faces and pohutakawa trees

We spent Saturday on various different beaches on the Coromandel peninsula, tanning and snorkeling and walking through the beach towns. 

Kayla and me. I <3 my roommate! 

Sibley is very excited about snorkeling

Morgan on the swings in Coromandel town. When's the last time you swang (<made up verb?)? Because it is seriously fun, and not limited to children

Saturday night, we were in a bar in Whangamata (pronounced: "fung-a-mah-tah") and it started raining. It was then we realized we hadn't made any plans for sleeping in this kind of weather, but luckily had about 8 tents among us. We ended up in a random New Zealand field (that looked like it didn't have any sheep in it), pitched the tents in the rain all facing each other, and had a rainy wine party. Overall, a weekend I will never forget.

When we got back to campus on Sunday, it was Natalie's 21st birthday (we are about evenly split between 20-21 year olds) which is slightly anti-climactic considering the drinking age at bars here is 18. Instead of going out, we threw a party here because we had the campus to ourselves, staff have Sunday off. We ganged up together to make a great dinner, baked her a cake, and had champagne with dessert, then had a party in this small house on campus that is just for students (one of the teachers used to live there, but now it's just a place for EcoQuest students to throw parties). It reminded me of summer parties at Michigan. 

Cake for Natalie!

Beach week?

Just to keep you updated, as of tomorrow morning, we're spending the week in Opoutere, a coastal town on the east, doing a marine/estuary unit. It's work in the field every day, testing the water and shellfish life around one of the firths, and presenting our findings on Friday. We're staying in a youth hostel with 2 field leaders for the next 4 nights (no internet) and then we have the weekend free: 5 rented cars, 25 American students who've never driven on the left side of the road before, and the freedom to camp out on any beach we can find at night. Should be a crazy week, and I'll have internet access again on Sunday (Saturday in the states!)

Valentines Day, under control

On the EcoQuest campus, they really want us to be self-sufficient; students run a bunch of different committees, weekend committee, garden committee, meal-planning committee, t-shirt design committee, etc. So, among other things, I am head of the holiday planning committee (a committee deemed necessary and created by yours truly) and organized a valentines day event for today. I know it's an overly-mushy, created-by-hallmark holiday that causes boyfriends to stress over dinner reservations and girlfriends to jump into projects they would never normally be interested in (two dozen pink cupcakes, decoupaged picture frame, mix cd that reminds me of that time we did that thing) but honestly, who doesn't like GETTING a valentine? So everyone picked a name out of a hat and had to perform a v-day act of kindness for their secret valentine. Everyone participated, in big ways, it made me really really happy--we're turning into a little community here.

My valentine made this for me and left it on my deck! Other gifts included breakfast in bed, bouquets of flowers, and friendship bracelets. Very "valentines on a budget." I recited a poem to my valentine. Other poems/performances included a rap that rhymed "Francis" to "praying mantis," and a song accompanied by the ukulele entitled "If you were a boy."

I also got a valentine in the mail today (from family in California, not a love note! Don't get yourselves all worked up!) haha, but it was FANTASTIC to get a letter! I freak out when I get letters in Ann Arbor, (Lisa, one of my best friends from hs is my penpal. We're pretty good about it) getting one in NZ was very unexpected and awesome. I have all my valentines at home in my head today! Have a wonderful February 14!