On classes, earthquakes, and chocolate….

I have finished my first week of classes at Otago. I think, if anything, I have culture shock from being at a large university rather than from being in a different country –although the fact that the entire university student population is of legal drinking age certainly affects the creation of norms and traditions. (I don’t think my kiwihost can conceive of what it would be like to go to college without copious amounts of beer on hand.)

Classes are much, much larger than I am used to. Rather than cut off enrollment, they just move the lecture to a bigger room and add more tutorial sections. Needless to say the classroom dynamic is rather different when there are more people in the auditorium than in your entire college graduating class (In one of my classes, there is something like 470 students!) Lectures aren’t run on a MWF or TTh cycle and are almost certainly held in different locations throughout the week - something which seriously trips me up. I may have definitely had to get up and leave a class after the professor showed up and I realized I hadn’t checked to see if the location had changed. My favorite academic jargon for the week: ‘the tuts are fortnightly’ (small group discussions meet every other week)

I switched classes because the assessment in Human Geography would have been frustratingly easy. There are several hundred people in that class so I figure that if I continue attending the lectures they won’t notice. At any rate, It will be good motivation to drag myself from under my warm covers in the morning. I am now taking Anthropology of Contemporary Issues – a course about globalization – instead.

I am excited to get back into the academic swing of things – the first reading for Geography of the S. Pacific, about how photography changed the way people thought about travel, was wonderfully full of new ideas about space and time and history. The first substantive Environmental Politics lecture involved a description of the 70s survivalists (using exponential population theories to predict catastrophic resource disasters), the Promethean response (the view that technology could handle the environmental crisis) and discussion about how the same division informs current arguments about the environment.

And I am back to being overwhelmed at how incredibly lucky I am to have the luxury of sitting around thinking big thoughts. God, I hope someday I can give back to world enough to even slightly deserve this.


Since last writing I:
1) visited Larnach Castle - the only castle in NZ (and contemporaneous to the Alexander Ramsey House)


2) explored around Dunedin (the farmer’s market, First Church of Otago, the Octagon, the Botanical Garden)
3) explored the university (trying to figure out where my classes were - OUSA, Castle Lecture Theatre, the Archway, the Quad)
4) joined the Tramping Club and Campus Greens
5) didn’t feel the 7.8 earthquake centered only 300 km from Dunedin :(
6) toured a chocolate factory and watched 30,000 Jaffa chocolate balls getting thrown down the steepest road in the world




7) had the rugby match between Australia and New Zealand interrupted by seven guys tied to a keg of beer
8) went tramping on Flagstaff