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.