Friends, Parties, and Long Classes

If we go in chronological order, the first main thing that has happened is that Wellington has been invaded by a bunch of crazy kids from Georgia Tech.  They arrived a week ago, all 43 of them.  Georgia Tech has a really popular study abroad program that comes to Wellington for six weeks, followed by three weeks in Sydney and three weeks in Brisbane.  Since I have been away from home for more than six months, it is very weird to be around so many Americans that I know, to run into them around town, but I am really enjoying it.  Because I have lived here for so long, I don’t feel like a tourist any more.  I don’t necessarily find out about free concerts on Tuesdays or go out to The Brewery on the waterfront just because it is a nice evening.  These kids do.  They only have six weeks in New Zealand, and their weekends are spent travelling around the country, so they have to enjoy Wellington while they are here.  It is very nice to be able to hang out with people who are exploring the city for the first time.  It also doesn’t hurt that Patrick, my boyfriend, is with the group.  I missed him a lot, so it is nice to be able to be in Wellington with him (basically, be in the same hemisphere, country, city, etc).

Next, Meredith came home!  She has been on a cruise with her parents since about the 18th of December, but she is finally home!  It’s nice to have her back again.  It’s been just me and Nina since she left, so now the flat is filling up once more.  Claudia stopped in for a few hours to refuel and do some laundry before continuing her journey up the north island (she’s been travelling around the south island since mid-December).  She should be home early next week, and then the flatmates will finally be together again!  We’re currently planning on having a “Girl’s Night In” sometime right after Claudia gets back to catch up on all of our adventures during the time we have spent apart, and I can’t wait.  I love living in this flat, and I couldn’t ask for better flatmates.  I really am going to miss living here when I have to go back stateside.

I’ve had a couple of parties to go to this week.  One of them was for my friend Dave who has decided to move to Melbourne.  He only knows one person there and has never been out of New Zealand before (not even to the south island), but he has decided that it is time for him to explore, and that means moving to Melbourne.  He currently plans to stay there for roundabout 18 months or so and then perhaps move on to Europe.  This was very weird for me to hear about because Dave was one of my first friends in New Zealand.  I met him very early on, and he has been a good friend to me while I have been here.  I couldn’t really contemplate the fact that someone I met from Wellington is actually moving to another country.  I am very excited for him, but it took some getting used to that people I know in Wellington don’t always stay in Wellington.

The other party was for my flatmate Nina’s birthday.  She turned 23 on Friday, so we had a little party to celebrate.  Meredith, Nina, and I, along with several of her university friends, went out to a big Chinese dinner.  Nina is enrolled in an English-as-a-second-language summer course to help her prepare for class work in English, so all of her friends from this class are not native English speakers.  This made for quite the multi-cultural dinner!  We had Swiss, American, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian, if I remember correctly.  Sometimes it was a strain to understand what the other person was saying, but after trying to interpret “Kiwi English” for six months, it wasn’t too hard.  It was most interesting toward the end of the meal because we got into more cultural discussions, such as how different cultures still approach marriage and romance (and particularly the difference between Asian and Western societies).  Also, this meal was HUGE.  One of the girls has a Chinese boyfriend, so she knew all the best things to order, and we just split everything.  We even had a whole fish that Nina almost couldn’t look at.  My big accomplishment for the evening was eating my entire meal, rice and all, with chopsticks.  It has been a goal of mine since I got here to learn to eat with chopsticks (especially since I am spending 10 weeks in Asia this coming summer), so I felt really good about this.  I won’t starve in Asia!  After the meal, Nina, Meredith, Ara (from Korea), and I saw Just Like Heaven (a complete chick flick) and then went out for kiwifruit martinis at a cool little bar just off of the main district.  All in all, it was an excellent evening and a good birthday for Nina.

Now, I would be travelling with the Georgia Tech kids right now except that I have class all weekend.  I don’t feel I can complain too much since I haven’t had class in over a month and tomorrow is my last day.  After tomorrow, I just need to write one essay and then study for my final (which is two days before I leave for Oz).  We went over the outline for the essay today in tutorial, and I was once again struck by how different it is studying here compared to the United States.  In Georgia, I used the same referencing and citation format from 6th grade straight through university (although it got more complicated along the way).  Here, it is not only a completely different style; it is different in each department.  The History department requires a different style than the Politics department, and these are both different then the Language department.  When you take classes in four different departments, it becomes quite difficult to keep track of which kind of essay you are expected to write.  Do you need footnotes or headers, a bibliography or a works cited list, a clear cut outline or a regular essay, etc.  It turns my mind in circles!  Looking on the bright side of having to leave Wellington, I won’t be sorry to only have to deal with one main style guide when I return home.