Well…This was an interesting week. I got over my tonsillitis and managed to get out of bed and make it to class. One thing the school forgot to tell me was that my lecture room had changed from room 1 to room 11. Because of this, I went into room 1 thinking it was my classroom, sat down, got ready to take notes, and then began to realize that the logging practices in the forestry industry in the country of Vanuatu (Which a series of survivor was filmed in, p.s.) really had nothing to do with psychological measurement. Meh, at least I learned something about Vanuatu, the timber industry, and got to see countless slides of various types of trees that come from there. Interesting.
This leads into another interesting night…St. Patrick’s Day. I was invited by my flatmates (and yes we use the word flatmates instead of roommates here) to go out drinking to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, so I figured why not. First off, I have no clue what St. Patrick’s Day celebrates…I’m not Irish and I’m pretty sure most people that celebrate it aren’t Irish and just see it as an excuse to drink beer. Oh well, who would say no to an excuse for beer. That being said, we all went out to a local pub and drank some green beer, except for the girls that decided to drink these Guinness cocktails which were made with Guinness, baileys, some other type of liquor, and served warm….Interesting, but not my personal choice. After a while the bar got boring so we decided to bar hop over to one of the more busier Irish pubs. And this is where the night got more interesting and drunker…..Drinks were better, but more expensive. We somehow managed to squish our way through the crowd and snagged up a booth in the back. I managed to go out to the back patio for a smoke and when I came back there was suddenly a whole bunch of guys taking over the booth all wearing green shirts. Turns out it was the local rugby team, and some of the players from the national team (who must have gotten in trouble for drinking because apparently there was a game on today and none of them ended up playing it because they were all benched). Anyways, I know nothing about rugby and I don’t care, but apparently it’s a HUGE thing here in NZ and having the rugby players drink with you is seen as something amazing. They didn’t seem all that special to me, except for the fact they had about 100 bottles of beer on the table, that they obviously must have got for free, and offered us to help ourselves to beer…..which I most definitely did.
Then I went outside, puked a little in a corner, somehow caught up with my roommate and made it home safely……not sure how but I think we took a cab. At least I made it.
But drinking on a Thursday night is not always a good idea when you need to be up at 7:30 the next day to get to class on time. Surprisingly I somehow managed to wake up early this morning and make it to my class. I’ve been getting up early most days, not sure how as I used to sleep in until 3 PM. Maybe its the air.
At least class was interesting. The teacher spent a great deal of time talking about how experiments on Rhesus Monkeys helped to show the addictive effects of cocaine. The monkeys will keep craving and trying to get their cocaine fix until a point where they actually die. Lots of jokes were made about how the researchers came up with a crazy experiment like that, and that maybe some of them might have been stoned themselves. Well that and the fact that a certain percentage of the cocaine used on the monkeys for the study mysteriously disappeared…hmmmm is that what research does to people?
Here’s an interesting fact you may or may not know. Did you know that the original recipe for Coca-Cola actually included cocaine in its ingredients?
The lecture concluded with a quote of ‘drugs are bad’ from South Park’s Mr. Mackey. Its a good course, but I need to get moving on a paper that’s due next Friday. It sucks being two weeks behind with courses, but I’m catching up ok. Had a test worth almost 18% of my mark in one course and managed to get 72% when the class average was 64% (plus I hadn’t studied much and had only gone to 1 out of 5 lectures).
Anyways, things are going good. I’m getting caught up, experiencing NZ culture, making friends (including my friend from Zimbabwe….I just like saying the word Zimbabwe) and now I’m going to bed. P.S. as much as people say NZ wine is good, their red wine sucks. I’m used to my Chilean Cabernet and that’s next to impossible to get here. Guess it’s another thing to add to my list of things to look forward to when I go back home.
I miss you guys all back home and I’ll be writing on here again soon. Hope you guys are enjoying my interesting stories. I’m sure there will be plenty more to come. I’ll try to get some photos up soon too. You can all get to see my tropical campus
Talk to you all again next time I blog. Bye for now.
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