Who Knew How to Reference Harvard Style? Unfortunately, no one from my group.

Hello friends! It has been a while, I know, although you can't say that I didn't warn you (just wait until September when I have two major assignments due every week). Academics have begun getting in the way of my blogging, an event we all knew would happen eventually. However, at this particular moment, I am attempting to avoid tackling the sum of work that is piling up via blogging. You should encourage me to procrastinate more often!

Even though it has been a while since my last post, not much has really happened. I suppose pictures will best liven up the nothingness of the past few weeks so, here you go:



Me cutting apple pie/ enthusiastically greeting you!








After the Humanities Quiz Night last Friday, we took pictures of the campus at night. Not that you can really infer this from the picture, but this is Otago's clock tower at night.










Just in case you wanted to know how far London or Sydney is from St. Clair's.














View of the Octagon (center of town)













St. Clair's Beach













St. Clair's Beach













Half way through the field trip from hell ( it's comforting to know that the view from hell is pretty spectacular).










Chloe cutting the "A" shaped, scrumptious pie we made in honor of Andrew's birthday.














Me (badly) participating in SingStar karaoke during Andrew's birthday celebration.











I might as well start with the pictures at the bottom. A few days after my last post, our flat had a small birthday celebration for one of our flatmates complete with delicious homemade apple pie (featured above), pizza, Miley Cyrus themed gifts, and singing (see picture above). It was a fun filled night all in all.

Then came the trip that spoiled the cheerful memory I once had of field trips. That Saturday, I awoke at 7AM in order to attend the first of two mandatory Plant Ecology field trips. I was dreading the event to begin with as I was expecting to suffer through instructors becoming overly excited about parallel veins and hairy stems. However, when we arrived at the venue for the trip, my negative feelings increased exponentially. As I stared up at the mountain I was apparently about to climb, I found myself thankful that, at the last minute, I switched my Birkenstocks for sneakers (which are now caked in mud). After abandoning the path, we gradually ventured up the steep mountain, breaking at six sites so that we could identify plants. As I have no interest and/or knowledge of plants, I floundered and as I failed to identify a single plant on my own, I often slowed our group down. When we reached the top, my Key to NZ Ferns bore various war wounds in the form of mud (when I almost fell) and my own blood. By the end, I merited special attention from the TA (whom I now affectionately refer to as "My TA") began hovering over my shoulder, secretly acknowledging my hopelessness in the art of plant identification. Four and a half hours later, we returned to the university. I keep trying to forget about the fact that I have to sacrifice another Saturday in September for this internal torture. They did not even inform us of the field trip's intensity and just expected that kind of physical endurance from everyone. What happened to the good old days when field trips served as a fun excuse to get out of school early?

What's worse is that I couldn't leave Plant Ecology behind once I stepped off the bus. As I walked home, I began collecting plants for this horrible, humongous plant identification project due in a few weeks. So, I awkwardly stopped along the way home, fighting with shrubs as I attempted to detach a small sample. Everywhere I walk, I am constantly stopping at plants, determining whether I possess the skills to identify them. I am fairly sure that by the end of this project, I will both be known as that weird plant girl and will have a strong desire to burn down all NZ plants.

Shortly after I returned home from my hellish trip, I accompanied Andrew, Liz, and Chloe to St. Clair's, a local beach about 15 minutes away via bus. As the weather conditions were not ideal, we did not spend too much time there (although, just enough time for me to scour the beach vegetation). See pictures above.

As an extremely academic person, I have been struggling with temporarily abandoning my ways in favor of exploration so, I have devoted the past few weeks mostly to school work (and procrastination of course). This past weekend was spent on my first Maori paper and animal biology group project which were both due this Monday. Although I reverted back to my old academic roots, I still managed to experience some unwelcome scholarly culture shock when completing the biology project. Before we began the project, I found it a little odd that the instructors kept reemphasizing the importance of referencing but, I just assumed that the university had a merciless plagiarism policy. However, it was not until I was sent the "final" version of our project that I realized what the instructors were getting at. My group was going to send in a paper that, on top of all of its many grammar mistakes and inaccurate answers, had a reference list that included only hyperlinks to websites, references to journal articles without all of the authors, and a slew of other obvious formatting errors. It looked as if these students had never done a bibliography before in their lives which, apparently was the case. After talking to my kiwi host, I learned that NZ students do not write papers and thus do not complete reference lists throughout all of their primary and secondary education. Talk about culture shock! Teachers have been forcing MLA formatting on me since middle school! It was weird and extremely challenging to work with this group of very nice and for the most part, fairly intelligent students who just did not understand what they were doing wrong. After spending the entire day Saturday editing and re-referencing the bulk of the project and sending it to the group multiple times, my group members still kept sending me the original version with an even worse reference list. At one point, a disgruntled group member sent me an e-mail with the phrase "fuck off" in every sentence (and to clarify, fuck off is not some cheerful kiwi term) although he later admitted to composing the e-mail while drunk. Still have not decided how I am going to factor that into his group evaluation. Eventually, I think I convinced one girl to use my copy although I am still not entirely sure what she handed in which is sort of unnerving. We still have the group presentation (which I made the power point for...yay!) so, we'll we how that goes.

That pretty much covers the major points. Other minor events include Team Epic winning a $50 bar tab at quiz night two times since I last blogged, our flat representing the Maori department for Otago's humanities quiz night, checking out a bit of the very cool Otago Museum yesterday for animal biology lab (that's what a field trip is supposed to be), finding out that my Classics professor did his pHD in Texas, Chloe and I discovering a tasty pizza shell brand which we have been using to make several delicious pizzas, me binging on dark chocolate Tim-Tams, and eating a Starburst devil-baby shaped candy unique to NZ. Some how, the last bit of that run-on sentence became extremely food oriented so, let me continue on that path. Since my first food shopping adventure, I have been searching for risotto as it is one of my favorite dishes and fairly easy, yet time consuming, to make. As it turns out, New Zealanders seem to refer to rice in general as risotto and until Wednesday, I believed that they had never heard of, or at least never sold risotto. Yet, during my latest food shopping venture, I came across one lone box of the real deal risotto which I cooked last night. After 45 minutes of slowly adding chicken stock and enduring taunts by Andrew who did not respect the risotto making process, I sat down for a delicious risotto dinner.

Today (or yesterday I suppose accidentally fell asleep while writing this post last night), I received a lovely package from my Aunt and Uncle and an e-mail from my friend in India. These two events coupled together acted as the motivation for my blog post as I figured, if people are going through the trouble of finding an internet source abroad and sending snail mail to contact me, I can at least update my blog. Moral of the story, you too should send me mail or e-mail to help inspire more blog posts like this one!

On Friday morning, Chloe, Liz and I are heading off to Queenstown for a three day weekend full of skiing (see, I'm living on the edge...I'm missing three classes for this trip)! Unfortunately, we found out that it's supposed to rain on all three of those days so please do an anti-rain dance for us (although, from what it sounds like back home, you probably have already been doing them). Whatever you do, do not stick out your tongue if you are a woman since in Maori culture, it represents a sex organ you do not possess (but my bedroom wall does). Anyway, as this is the only weekend trip it looks like I'll be taking until October, I am extremely stoked and hoping it will be successful despite the rain. Don't worry, I will eventually post how the trip turns out. Until then...

Massive hug and a shoulder shrug from New Zealand!