And the Recaps Begin - February

As I've said, the first few posts will attempt to provide you, the intrepid reader, with a summary of what's been going on in the first few months of my New Zealand adventure. February is the first month to get the summary treatment.


I arrived in New Zealand sometime on February 1st. I say sometime because I'm not entirely sure what  time it actually was, due to the fact I had been on a plane/in airports for the better part of 48 hours, despite having left home three days prior (thanks to the International Date Line for throwing a wrench in my previous mastery of being able to follow a calendar). Touching down in Auckland, my first impressions were: it is warmer here (not hard seeing as I left behind temperatures of -10 Celsius), it smells like flowers (!) and it's dark (very observant). Soon I was boarding connecting flight to Dunedin, the city I would be calling home for the next 10 months.


As the plane landed at the generously named International Airport, I caught a glimpse of a field full of cows. Not the most exciting introduction to the city, and to be honest I was expecting sheep. Turns out cows are every bit as common as sheep in NZ's South Island, which is to say, about 10 times more common than people. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only human being on the whole island, responsible for the education of future entrants into Bovine University. Also, it was raining. An ominous sign of things to come.

The Octagon on the sunny day in February. The only one.

Beyond arriving, not much exciting happened in the first few weeks in Dunedin. I set up a bank account (responsibility!), managed to acquire a functioning cell phone (kudos to Bell Canada for making that task infinitely more difficult than necessary) and did other adult-type things, like grocery shopping and laundry. I also started Teacher's College, ostensibly the reason why I'm here in the first place, but that's not particularly relevant.

Dunedin Botanic Gardens - taking pictures of flowers proves
I have the makings of an excellent photographer

At this point, I imagine you're wondering to yourself "Why am I still reading this? This asshole hasn't DONE ANYTHING." Well, you're pretty much right. Dunedin is a student town, and there is no school in February, so things were pretty quiet for the first few weeks. However, things did pick up in the last week as the Scarfies started rolling into town. "Scarfy" is the slang term for students at the University of Otago, whose origins come from somewhere I'm sure (possibly an old old wooden ship). Scarfies are pretty standard university students, drinking and shouting all the time and living in what a university official described to me, rather accurately, as "dungeons." Seriously, the student houses (known as flats) here are essentially tin sheds, so it's small wonder students resort to burning couches - it's sometimes the only way to stay warm. (Side note: my flat is AWESOME. I have a balcony and an en suite bathroom. If everyone else is living in dungeons, I live in the Castle Tower).

View of Dunedin, aka Scarfyville, aka The City Where No One
Sleeps (with me) from the top of Mt. Cargill

But, as I said, once the students came back for a new school year, things livened up a bit. I'm not going to regale you with tales of my adventures in the Octagon, Dunedin's downtown bar scene (mostly because I don't remember, and not just because it was 4 months ago) beyond saying Scarfies know how to jam. I did, however, do some wandering around the city, taking in the Dunedin's wonderful Botanic Gardens and climbing to the top of Mt. Cargill, allowing me to survey the bustling metropolis from above. All in all, February was a rather quiet month, as settling down into a new city and school routine was top priority. March, however, things picked up a little bit, and I'll cover that in my next post.


Dave