There ARE Penguins in New Zealand

Hola mi familia y amigos,

So, guess what I did this weekend?! I went and successfully completed my main goal of coming here; I went and saw the PENGUINS!!!!!!!! Ahhhhhh!!!!!!! Seriously, soooooooooo awesome. Awesome.

And, I took my first trip completely by myself. I knew absolutely no one in the city I was going to, had absolutely no idea where I was going when I got there, and had absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I got there (except see the penguins of course). And it was a blast! I didn't have an agenda, didn't have to worry about where other people wanted to go, and was able to just go wherever I wanted to. Super cool.

I left Thursday 19th after classes and flew from Wellington to Christchurch and spent the night there. Friday morning I took a bus from Christchurch to Dunedin and wandered around the city for the rest of the day. Dunedin is a very old city with a lot of Scottish heritage, so there are a lot of old, cool looking buildings.

The "First Church", not sure if that means it was the first church in Dunedin, or something else. Whatever, I thought it looked neat.

On Saturday, I took a tour of the Otago Peninsula (where the penguins live). The tour I took was relatively small; it was more of a conservation/research/education foundation that gives tours to educate people on how to help protect the animals and their habitat. We drove around the Otago Peninsula, saw a Royal Albatross colony, a colony of fur seals, and the beach where the yellow-eyed penguins make their nests. The yellow-eyed penguins are endangered and are a very unusual penguin and instead of me blabbing on about them, you can read all about them here.  :)

A light house, just for you mom

Well isn't he cute

So, there was a lone penguin lost among the fur seals. The guide said he'd never seen this before. The seals walked up to the penguin to check him out, but then they just turned around and left him alone, which is a good thing, because if I would have seen a penguin get eaten, I would have passed out and wouldn't have been able to finish any of my classes for the rest of the year.

The beach where the penguins live!

There he is!

The penguins coming back from the ocean for the night.

Hooray!

Penguins and the sheep chillin' together

The Dunedin Railway Station; it's supposedly the most photographed building in New Zealand

Then, on Sunday, I got back on a bus and headed back for Christchurch, stayed the night there again, and flew back to Wellington on Monday morning. An overall successful vacation!

A cool fountain thingy in Christchurch; also, notice the gondola in the background

It's a flower bed, and a clock, and it's genius

The Marlborough Sounds from a plane, rather than ferry, as shown earlier

(And once again, it's automatically underlining itself, whatever)

PEACE!

A Month Already...

Hello hello friends, family, and....others, I guess!  :)

I have officially been in New Zealand for a month now, and I honestly can't believe it. Some days it feels like I've been here forever and others it's like I got here yesterday. And then I realize I'm now down to only 3 and 1/2 more months here, and it's going to go by way to fast!

Classes are ok; it's only the third week of classes now so it's a little to early to tell. Out of 3 courses total, I'm only taking one science class that will actually count towards my major, so it's definitely a lighter load than what I've gotten used to over the last 3 years. During the week there are times when I don't know what to do with myself because I've never had this much time on my hands before. We only get, like, 5 channels on the TV, and New Zealand television shows are TERRIBLE, so that crosses out TV to pass the time, we don't have any video games, and I've already read the book that I brought with, plus one of Hanah's...I don't know what to do! I think I'm going to go down to the public library this week and see if I can get a library card so I can read or something to keep myself occupied...haha!

This last weekend 3 girls (all AustraLearners that I met at our orientation in Rotorua) and I went to the town of Paraparaumu which is about a 45 minute train ride north of Wellington right on the ocean. We left Friday after our classes, stayed the night in a hostel, and came back around 6 pm on Saturday. It was a nice little trip to get out of the city for a while. When we got there on Friday around 6-ish, the sun was on it's down, so we took advantage of that opportunity to take A LOT of pictures....they all just turned out soooooooo cool!

In the background of these pictures is Kapiti Island, which has a bird sanctuary on it where apparently, since the birds are raised without predators, they aren't afraid of people so they'll just walk right up to you

Cartwheel-ing

Jumping

'Hooray, I'm just so excited to be here...!'

Ooooooo....

Ahhh....

Also, I'm a huge dork and wrote this in the sand, so they insisted on taking my picture with it

The hostel we stayed at; The Barnacle

On Saturday afternoon we were walking along the beach again and came across this little creature, and as you can see, he was alive and kickin' but quite a long way from home. We decided to leave him be and let nature be nature and kept walking. About a minute later I turned around and looked back, and a seagull had already gotten him....oops...!

(Also, I don't know why this part of the text is underlined, but I can't figure out how to 

un-underline it, and I'm too lazy to look any further, so you're just going to have to deal with it)

Ok, so that's it for now; have to get up bright and early for class. Keep enjoying the Minnesota snow, and remember PEACE.