Adventure 4: Penguins and Sea Lions and Albatross, Oh My!

February 16^th- Feb. 18^th

On my first full day in Dunedin, there was a lot of wandering about and trying to figure everything out, a rather large task, as it sounds.  It’s very convenient that our house is right across the street from campus; most of the buildings that I had to go to for international registration and then course approval the next day were very close.  The Physical Education building, which is where two of my classes will be, is only about a minute walk right down the street and it looks like there are some great facilities for fitness testing and other activities for my exercise physiology class.  Many of the buildings here are very old and beautiful brick, with intricate details and clock towers and hidden paths with wrought iron gates.  There are also a fair amount of more modern looking buildings; huge glass structures that look slightly intimidating, but are beautiful and open on the inside.  A small river runs through the middle of campus, and I’ve already seen students reading by its banks during the day…future study spot, perhaps?  Most things on campus are less than a 15 minute walk from where I live so it shouldn’t be too bad getting to class in the morning, especially since my earliest is at 9 and in the Phys Ed building.

Course approval was very different from what I’m used to, and seemed rather old-fashioned and inefficient to Leslie (lives in my flat, from Canada) and I, who were trying to navigate things together as best we could.  Every student has to go visit the professors in their departments to check their prerequisites, and then has to wait in line for a chief course advisor to get their classes approved.  Seems like a lot of extra walking and waiting for something that could all be done online, but it works!  Just rather slowly…I was lucky that I somehow managed to bypass the lines for the course advisor and just talked to a couple of very nice professors, one of whom will be my Psychology of Sport “paper” (what they say instead of “class”) instructor and got my necessary signatures for all of my classes and added a class with relatively little hassle.  I am now signed up for Exercise Physiology, Psychology of Sport, Maori Society, and Medieval to Modern Europe, which will hopefully be a nice mix of difficulty levels and also be very interesting!  I also got my student ID and “diary” (planner/agenda), so I’m an official student, whoo hoo!!

I was also able to get set up with a phone and new prepay plan down here, so now I can really start embracing the student life again J  It’s surprisingly inexpensive to send and receive messages, only $10 for 2000 texts, so hopefully I won’t have to spend a lot of my money on phone bills.  The phone I got was the last of the super-cheap ones that they had in stock (good timing!) and seems like a little brick that would probably survive a tumble down a mountainside, perfect for tramping around and having adventures! 

My first big Dunedin adventure was going to the peninsula, about a 45 minute drive from the University through hills that looked like they were straight out of Lord of the Rings.  There were many fields filled with sheep, of course, and beautiful lakes and inlets along the coast.  The drive was gorgeous, but the most exciting part was when we got to the tip of the peninsula where there was an albatross museum and…sea lions and penguins!  They were so close to us, right on the rocks and we saw a mother penguin and her little babies in a nest in a hole in the hillside, it was amazing!  I went with two of my flatmates, Amanda and Ford, and Pipa, a woman from Australia who is working at a church here and volunteered to drive us out.  Amanda and I were trying to take pictures with the sea lions that were on the rocks, but then they started getting a little too close for comfort so we chickened out and retreated farther back from the water.  We also spotted an albatross flying overhead, which apparently is really rare!  It was really fun to see a bit outside of the city and the wildlife in its native habitat instead of a museum.  I can’t wait to see the different types of penguins and other animals throughout the rest of the country!