School, Rugby, Food, and Life

So in the last few weeks I have been concentrating on getting all the details of my spring break up on the blog. Those two weeks were sort of a highlight of my life so I felt like the detail was necessary so could look back on each day and be able to remember all the amazing things I saw and did. Since then I have been up to some more adventures too. I’ll spare you the minute details of the weeks, as I sit and write this I probably can’t remember most of them anyway.  So there is really probably one word that could describe most of the excitement for the past few weeks, rugby. The rugby world cup here is in full swing and it is everywhere! There is all black fever all around. Basically every weekend night you will either find me and my friends in the common room watching the games or when we are feeling more social, going into to town to watch them. But it has been blast! It is amazing how far I have come in understanding the game. I remember when I went to see the All Blacks back around when I first moved here, I knew most of the major rules but didn’t understand much of the strategy. Now I am really getting the hang of it. It also helped that last week I went with a one of the local guys here and a bunch of his friends and they taught a few of us international kids how to play touch rugby. Touch is slightly different, but actually being on the field and playing the game helped me understand it enormously. So needless to say, I am really starting to enjoy the sport and beginning to wonder why the US is so obsessed with football, but I’m going to get into that. Although on a quick side note, I did hear that the U crushed a certain team a couple weeks ago. I’m not real in the know about what is happening at the U but a few different people were sure to fill me in on the massive slaughter referred to as the “Holy War”. Nice work Utah.

So I guess I’ll try and fill you in on the past few weeks. When I first got back, it was study time! I had my very first exam (and only mid-semester exam) the Wednesday after I got back for Structural Kinesiology. I studied as much as I could for the 2 days prior but was slightly discouraged when I realized the used book I bought was missing a lot important pages! I checked out and older edition from the library to get the info but it is a bit frustrating and it is a very good reference book so I may end up buying another one if I keep with the exercise stuff.  Oh well, it happens. But the test was online and open book as long as you could finish it in an hour. So with all my reference material tabbed, highlighted, and organized I was able to find all the answers in no time. Although I did miss a few, but it was frustrating because there were some typos and things that didn’t make sense because it was obviously a computer generated test, so I’m having the teacher look mine over and maybe I’ll get a few more points.

The end of that week we did some volleyball and soccer, we won another soccer game whoot whoot! The indoor social league here is really a lot of fun. The on Thursday the majority of my friends that had all gone around the North Island together we getting together to share pictures and make pizza. They invited me over and so we made a whole bunch of variety of pizzas with toppings from all over as we all contributed. It was super tasted and most people love my Mexican chilli beans on the pizza.  Then over the weekend we....watched rugby. But actually on Saturday during the day, Yuko had told me about the cherry blossom festival happening at the neighbouring college, International Pacific College. So I convinced Marian and Josh to walk over to the festival with me. It was fantastic! It was a Japanese festival but had performances, food, and crafts from all the pacific countries. We saw some really great drumming and martial arts demonstrations. I bought some ridiculous stuff and got my name done in calligraphy. It made for a ready nice day.

 The next week was even more chill. I had one assignment due, that as pretty each but I had to write a short essay for it. I did a bunch of research on muscle damage and wrote and ok essay and turned it in, but then it was one of those things were the day after I turned it in, I went to another class where we talked about muscle damage and I realized I missed some major points. I didn’t really know much about the details before but just in the last half of this week I have learned a lot about it, unfortunately it was a few days too late.

This week Franzi (german friends) and I started our “multi-spring sport” training with Ema for her case study. So we are her subjects and she is training us for a month her master program. So Monday we needed to do some baseline testing and it was pouring rain! But with training it is important to be specific to the sport so since we are being classified as recreational soccer players, all the testing and training is done outside. So we did like a vertical leap test, sprints, shuttle springs, and ran as far as we could in 12 minutes. It was quite the workout considering I haven’t really done anything that legitimately needed me to push myself in awhile but I am trying to take this training seriously for Ema’s study but then also because I want to get faster and stronger and having a trainer really helps. So I am pretty stoked about it. We did our first official session of the Friday after and the day was just the opposite. It was the most beautiful day I have had here yet. The sun was out bright and once our training session was over we didn’t want to go inside. We did a variety of dynamic stretches, sprints, and starts. Maybe Ema will do what no soccer coach has been able to do and make me a sprinter, but I’ve learned it is all about muscle adaption, and I have adapted my muscles for distance running. Geez, why can’t I just have my body do everything always when I want to ha ha, guess I’ll be doing some readapting.

After our training and sometime in the gym, it was back to the flat for me to get ready to go to the USA vs. AUS rugby world cup game! I was so excited all week, waiting for Friday to come to go see the USA play. I have my little US flat and I bought blue hair coloring. So before I left Graeme helped me spray my hair blue and then I had cut out little white stars and tapped them to bobby pins to put in my hair. Unfortunately I have a lot of hair and the one spray can wasn’t enough so I had streaky blue hair but it was ok. I rode down to Wellington with my neighbours, Anja and Shobeck. Shobeck lives here and Anja is here for a few years from Germany so they were way cool in letting me ride with them, but I was sitting with some America friends because that is who I got my tickets with. So we got to Wellington a bit early and walked around the fanzone and tried kicking a rugby ball through a hole and some other stuff. It was a fun atmosphere. There were Aussies in yellow everywhere and then everyone else yelling at them. Because when you’re in NZ, basically if the Aussies are playing you always just cheer for the other team no matter who it is. So we had a lot of support for the US. After some hectic running around I finally met up with my American peeps and did some face paint and they had made me a shirt, so we were all matching. We finally made it to the stadium and got settled just as the game got started. It was so fun because about 70% of the stadium was cheering for the US ad we got some roaring cheers going and a super mean wave going all throughout the stadium. It sort of made up for how bad the Aussie’s dominated our boys. Man they were pretty much running circles around us and won 67-5. They even missed a bunch on conversions, but we at least got one try so everyone was super stoked about that.  It was fun to watch and cheer as load as we could. Afterwards we went do to the field to try and get some autographs, it took us awhile to make it through the crowd so we missed most of the players, but I shook one of the Aussies hands and then this American dude came over and he just started talking to me. I was so stoked. He complimented my shirt and was just super sweet in like telling us how excited he was to see Americans here supporting them in New Zealand. He autographed my ticket and even though he has one of the worst mullets and moustaches I have ever seen he made up for in because he seemed super genuine and cared that we came to see him play. His name was Louis Stanfill and he was one of the flankers on the back line. But it was a real fun night and I’m glad I got to experience it, even though I feel like most people back in the states really don’t even know the RWC is going on, I think it is pretty cool now.

Spontaneous Potluck

USA vs AUS Rugby

Wellington Stadium

Homemade Muesli, so GOOD!

Louis from the USA Rugby Team, cool dude!

Plants around campus

More plants around campus!

Spring Training in the rain, me and Franzi

IPC drummers

Stump throne

IPC campus beautiful!

Around Massey Campus

Ok so of course I’ve got to throw down a little on my most recent food creations. I’ve sort of developed a reputation from my friends that I like to blog about my food so I mind as well embrace it. Zaki started teaching me the ropes on how to make good curries. He gave me a good basic outline now I just need to go buy some ingredients. But then I finally got all the ingredients to make homemade toasted muesli. This one is a keep as far as recipes go. Basically it is oats, nuts, almonds, sun flower seeds, pumpkin seeds, coconut and dried fruits all mixed together with a honey sauce of honey, brown sugar, and oil. Then you toast it and let it dry into clusters and enjoy!  Then I had bought a mix to made homemade yogurt because it is cheaper than the real stuff but I didn’t realize you have to have a special appliance to make this particular kind so I tried to mimic what the appliance does using a clean out spaghetti jar, our largest pot, and a bunch of towels and my neck pillow for a little added insulation while the yogurt cultures did there thing. Ya it didn’t really work like at all, so I will try again soon. Last night for dinner a few of us had been talking about doing some sort of potluck but it never got fully put together so Ema and I were just like hey let’s just make some dinner and ask a few neighbours if they want to join. We didn’t expect much so Ema and I just made a stir fry but then Brayden swung over and told us to come over because he and his flatmate had just made a bunch of food and then we got Julianne too and all went over to Brayden’s . We ended up having our rice and vege stir fry with sweet and sour sauce, a vegetarian curry, a chicken dish with green peppers and sauce, and a few other things to made a large feast! We had toasted bread and tortillas to eat it all with and it was so good. We were all bursting by the time we headed over to the common room to watch the rugby. The game was great as the All Blacks really dominated France in what was supposed to be a close game. Then afterwards we watched LOTR, the fellowship of the ring, and wow that movie is long. So in combination with staying up late watching the movie and daylight savings happening it was a bit of a late morning for me. 

Picton to Wellington to Palmy

It was an early 5:45 wake up call to get ready to catch our ferry. We quickly packed our bags and grabbed some breakfast and headed to the ferry port, fortunately only 1 block away. It was kind of fun driving on to the ferry boat with a car. The morning was stomry and raining so we didn’t spend as much time out on the decks as we did on the way there. I only went out to get a few pictures of the south island as we left the Marlborough sounds.  We made some friends on the boat, 3 guys here for the world cup. They were big rubgy players and we hung out a played cards with them for most of the 3 hour ferry ride. There wasn’t much to see or do in the middle of the Tasman sea on a Ferry...I like a cruise boat a little better. Finally we arrived in Wellington. Our next adventure was to find the isite in Wellington. Holy cow, that is the most confusing city to navigate in the world. We didn’t have  a great maps so we mostly just ended up driving around in circle trying to find the isite to tell us where to park and how to get too our tour stop pick up. After we finally did that, we walked a lot the ever bustling Cuba street. There are tons of stores and shops and we grabbed some food and relaxed until our LOTR tour.

We met the tour van driver at the isite and picked up 3 more people. It was a large van equipped with a TV and sound system so he could show us movie clips of the places we were going. First we went to Victoria forest, just outside Wellington. There they shot the very first day of filming with the hobbits in the forests around the shire. Our tour guide would show us clips then we would do the same poses with props in the very same places! It was a lot of fun. We did a few scenes from when Frodo and Sam meet up with Mary and Pippin, and also when they are camping, and the cliff that was used in weather top and in the 3^rd movie when Aragon looks over the armies gathering before the big battle. For all the pictures I was Mary, Marian was Frodo, Josh was Pippin, and Alyssa was Sam.  Alyssa, Josh, and Marian also made the silhouette for the black rider dead king guy where he is looking for the ring in the shire. I thought the pictures turned out really good. We then went to the studios where they did all the inside stuff and made the sets and are making the sets for the hobbits. They don’t really let you in at all but we went to the shop they have a lot of props and things on display from the movie.  It is all done just outside Wellington in Miramar by this company called Weta. It was fun to see. I definitely appreciate all the work that went into filming the movie or any movie really.

Finally after 14 long days it was time to come home to Palmy. I was so ready too. It was a great trip and we had a lot of fun but it can be a little exhausting travelling every single days. We all got a long great but being with the same 3 other people every minute of everyday requires some patience. But I would say we all did very well and worked together to make it a great trip. We shared a lot of fantastic experiences and I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. It was so unreal and a dream come true that I was really able to travel all around the south island of New Zealand.  We did a lot of things in a short amount of time and at times it was a little overwhelming that a lot to take in, I tried to appreciate all of its beauty and all of our activities. There is still a bit of a daunting task ahead of me to go through the nearly one thousand pictures I took. But each picture holds a memory but I’ll do my best to cut it down. I really appreciate my travel mates, Josh, Marian, and Alyssa for helping make my dreams come true. Even though we were all from very different places we all got along great and loved this trip. After a few days of recuperating I think I’ll really miss on long drives together in the car every day and our late nights in the hostel. But for now it is back to school and time to get back settled again in Palmy. 

"HOLLYWOOD" Sign

Josh, Marian, and Alyssa being the dark rider

Weathertop look down 

Last day with our car named Leroy

The path the black rider comes down

Hobbits took a tumble down the hill

As seen in the extended version, I am Frodo and Alyssa is Pippin

While the tree truck is missing this is where the Hobbits hid

My precious

Sunset of our adventure

Nelson to Picton

With our last full day in Nelson, we had no plans. We didn’t quite know for sure where we would be this day so it was a nice day to relax. We got up around 9 and went and walked around town and tried to figure out what we wanted to do. After swinging by the isite we decided to the WOW museum. WOW stands for world of wearable art...so it was quite the show. We saw 30 or so different costumes of art stuff on people. It was really just like weird stuff made into clothes. My favourite was a pair of running shoes made into a bra, it was pretty clever. There were some strange things though, we couldn’t take photos but some of them were very elaborate. There was like a lamp dress, a giant rose dress, a naked dress, some weird alien looking ones. It was pretty fun. Also in the museum they had a classic car collection. They had some pretty sporty old cars, it was fun to see and I took a bunch of pictures. I didn’t know too much about the cars but it was fun to see. We had some more time to kill so of course we went to Hell, I mean if we were going to be murders, killing time and all, we mind as well go straight there. It was a delicious pizzareia, Hell's pizzas. We got a few pizzas and went to have a picnic on the beach. It was a gorgeous day and of course being from Utah, I still love just walking on the beach because it is so rare to me. So we spent some time hanging out and just enjoying the weather before we decided we needed to head to Picton. We took the scenic route through some mountains and valleys until we wrapped back around the Picton harbour to our favourite hostel, Tombstone. We have a little more daylight to burn so we went to the park in the harbour and played around for a bit. Afterwards, we finally made an healthy dinner and did some hot tubbing. It was a nice relaxing evening.

WOW!

Ring off

Ring on

Nelson Beach

Same ferry we took here, coming into Picton Harbour

Picton Harbour

Motueka to Nelson

This day was Alyssa’s turn to do her activity of choice, lucky for her I made a great designated driver because she decided a wine tour was a must do while in New Zealand. Unfortunately with it being early spring, it wasn’t the best time for visiting vineyards but they did have tastings. So along the way as we drove from Motueka to Nelson we stopped at a few different vineyards, what better way to start the day with a 10 am wine tasting, well I mean I can think of a few better ways but I see where they are coming from.  So as we went from vineyard to vineyard the hosts told all about the different wines and how they are made, so I probably know more about wine then most people I know that drink it. It really is quite an interesting process and they do a lot of different things to get the different flavours. So it was a pretty interesting day even while being alcohol free. I did get some pretty tasty grape juice at one stop though. We took a break and went to Mapua, a cute little habourtown. Along the Nelson region, where we were, they are famous for their real fruit ice cream so I got a ice cream cone of it and it was super delicious, although when it comes to ice cream I am not the hardest person to please, but this stuff was good! After a couple more tours we stopped in Richmond at the mall to take a little break and grab some lunch. Josh and I didn’t want to get the fast food at the mall so we went next door and found some pretty tasty looking lunch boxes next door at Pak’n’Save my favourite grocery store. Then it was back to the wineries.  We hit one more before heading to our final town, Nelson. Nelson is a larger city so we spent the evening walking around and checking out the city. My favourite place was a park with a larger cathedral up on top of a hill. It was beautiful. There are really great cathedrals all over this country as missionaries were some of the first people to come to New Zealand to try and settle it so I have really enjoyed seeing the architecture that goes into each of them.

It finally got dark so there wasn’t too much left to see and we decided to go out to dinner as we were in a really city finally and we hadn’t had a chance to eat out in awhile. So we decided on Indian food because it is so good here. I never had a lot back in the states so I really enjoy trying the new things and am learning a lot about the different foods people on this half of the world eat. I got a sort of sampler plate so I could try a few different things and it was pretty tasty.

The weekday nights are pretty low key as could be expected so that evening we decided to finish off our LOTR and watched the Return of the King. We barely made it to the end as that movie is so long and for me personally, I was getting pretty tired with so much travelling. But we watched it and pretty must had to resist pointing at every outdoor scene and saying where we saw that or where it looked like it was filmed compared to where we had been.

Pretending to eat a taco...I miss mexican food!

Lunch boxes!

Vineyard

Nelson Cathedral

Inside cathedral

Crazy as tree!

Wine tour!

Abel Tasmen Sea Kayaking

Ask anyone who has travelled around the South Island of New Zealand and they will tell you seeing Abel Tasmen is a must do. I would know, I asked a ton of people what we should do and Abel Tasmen was always on the list. There is a very popular tramp along the coast with 3 day and 5 day routes along with kayaking and tramping expeditions. We opted to do the sea kayaking because Josh really really wanted to go sea kayaking, and well I can’t say I was too disappointed.

The day got off to a less than perfect start. As tempted as I was to leave this part out because it was a bit embarrassing but I’ll go ahead and tell you anyway. So as previously mentioned, Josh and I spent the night in the car to save some money (now don’t go making an assumptions this is not going in the direction you are thinking of now). Anyway, it was sort of a long night but we stayed warm and got a bit of sleep, not my best night ever though as I still have rather bony hips that appreciate a good soft mattress. But at about 7 am we were woken up to a super obnoxious pounding on the window, that we instantly knew would not have been Marian and Alyssa. So I opened up the door to a rather angry older lady who was the host for the hostel. She was not so happy about us sleeping in her parking lot. Apparently they have a name for this and it is super illegal. It is called “freedom backpackers”, which I thought sounded like a good term being raised in America and all, I love all sorts of freedom, but apparently this was not such a good type of freedom. So she made an agreement with us that she would not call the cops and instead we would just have to pay for the beds we would have slept in for the night. Oh joy, I suffered through sleeping in the back of a Subaru only to pay for it anyway, I guess it only sucks because we got caught, otherwise it wouldn’t have been so bad. They way the lady talked about it, the cops are pretty strict about that stuff and would have fined us a ton of money so I guess we got off easy and she got money for the night as well. So we learned that lesson the hard way. I mean ya, I figured it was illegal but I hoping it was just one of those laws that people don’t really bother enforcing or really care that much about so I guess we won’t be doing that anymore and I don’t think I’ll be doing it for my travels in Australia like I was thinking. But you can stay in campgrounds for pretty cheap, that won’t be so bad when it is warm. So anyway it was a rather bleak start to our sure to be exciting day.

After we got our hostel stuff all sorted out, Josh and I got put in a room with 2 really awkward guys but that wasn’t anything to new to our hostel travel. We finally got packed up and went to get our kayaks. We had just rented a couple 2 person kayaks from a company in Abel Tasmen. They were pretty sweet with all those fancy water tight compartments and spray skirts, river jackets, and life jackets.  Before we hit the water they taught us the basics of rowing and what to do if you get flipped. It was set to be a beautiful day as the sun was really starting to warm up as they took us to the beach to launch us in our kayaks. Josh and I went together and so Marian and Alyssa we in the other kayak. We basically just had about 5 hours to kayak where ever we wanted. We started off heading east along the coast to the split apple rock then back up to Fisherman’s island across from where we launched. The wind and currents made it a little difficult to head up the coast to the west but it would make coming back easier. After a quick stop at Fisherman’s Island we continued another 400m or so to neighbouring Adele Island. We stopped and ate out PB and nutella sandwiches for lunch (always so nutrious on this trip, just kidding) to boast our energy as the rowing was giving us a pretty good work out. There was supposed to be a sea colony on Adele island so after lunch we got back in our kayaks and worked our way around the island and found a whole bunch of baby seals just swimming and playing the water. It was a lot of fun. We didn’t dare get to close but had a good time watching them. At this point it was getting time to head back so we went back across the bay to kayaking along the calmer waters near the coast. While there we could see parts of the Abel Tasman coastal track and I wished that we would have time to do part of it but our tight schedule definitely didn’t give us enough time do it but the kayaking was a worthy substitute. Along the coast there were massive cliffs, beautiful beaches, all sorts of vegetation, and even a few beach homes that I plan on buying when I get rich. Along one part we were enjoying the scenery when a seal came out of nowhere and decided to swim alongside our boat. This little seal was hilarious! He would swim all around and under us and then come up like he was going to touch the boat then suddenly swim away and he was fast! We named him Pancho after Josh’s Spanish name. He would do jumps out of the water and jump up rocks then back in the water. It was super entertaining. He stayed with us for awhile and it was a lot of fun. Finally we met back up with Alyssa and Marian as we had gotten separated by back Adele island. They had managed to get stuck on a sand bar in the bay just outside where we were to return, it was extremely shallow where the tides had come in. We finally decided to call it a day and return to the beach where we were being picked up. It had been a fantastic day with the sun out shining so bright in the afternoon I was so glad I had put on sunscreen. The water was a bit cold but not too bad with the sun to keep you warm. The park was absolutely beautiful and really felt like well preserved wildlife. We felt kind of like Maori travellers looking at the coast of the south island for the first time on a warm sunny day.

                After a long day on the ocean, we were ready for a relaxing evening. We made up a nice dinner that we ate by the fire and hung out in the TV room until it was free for us to jump on and watch the next film in the LOTR saga, the two towers. After rolling their eyes at us for doing the typical thing and watching LOTR a bunch of other people joined us. But wow it really is so incredible to see that movie and realize I have seen those same backdrops and even the same areas. This land really is picture perfect and even better first hand.