Classes, Cooking, Caves, Coasts, and Cuba Dupa

Hey everyone! Welcome back to the blog!

The trimester is speeding along, faster than I’d like. This week was busy! I had my first three projects looming so I had to whip myself into shape.

Classes:

This week I was hard at work on my Artificial Intelligence assignment in which we were implementing Machine Learning algorithms to complete some predictions based on data. For instance we had to classify types of wine based on previous wine data. I had to learn to make decision trees and a perceptron (one node of a neural network). I went to many help desks where you can go and talk to a tutor who can answer questions. I made a lot of progress!

For Media of New Zealand class, I was working hard on my report about the NZ On Air government program. I even went to my tutor’s office hours on Tuesday to have him look over my report and he said it was in good shape which was quite a relief.

For my Visual Narrative class, I continued planning out my children’s book and practiced some drawings. Everyone in that class is super supportive and the class has a nice energy!

I also met up for pizza with a friend from the US and a Kiwi who are making a film and they wanted me to act in it so I’ll hopefully be working on that with them after our Fall Break.

Cooking:

After kinda coasting for a bit, I decided it was time for me to try cooking something new. So, I went shopping and I made vegetarian chili! It was surprising easy to make! And I used spices which is a foreign notion to me! I was proud lol.

Before moving over to my chili I also got pizza from a highly regarded pizza place here called Hell Pizza. I ordered the Purgatory. It was pretty fire!

Caves:

On Thursday, I went on the tramping club’s weekly weeknight walkie. As always, it was hectic to get there and the bus system continued its tradition of being hopelessly confusing. But we made it! The walk included gorgeous views and ended with a walk into a cave.

In the cave, there were Wetas EVERYWHERE. I stupidly was one of the first people into the cave so I was kind of trapped in there with Wetas crawling around over my head and I had to practice being calm.

But it was so a super cool experience and the Wetas are harmless which was comforting to know when they were scampering above my head.

Cuba Dupa:

Every year Cuba Street in Wellington holds the Cuba Dupa festival where over 100 artists (musicians, dancers, acrobats, etc) take over the street and show off their talents! I went with Skye, Rebekah and Lauren. We saw a lot of interesting shows!

We also ran into our friend Utsav who I first met on the tramping trip. We invited him on our hike tomorrow. And that’s a good segue into our next section…

Coasts:

On Sunday, my friends and I organized our own little hike on the coast. We walked the Escarpment trail from Paekākāriki to Pukerua. It was about 7 miles. We invited the people in the International Group Chat, Utsav and I also invited my flatmates. Most people couldn’t make it but we did get a couple of takers. We ended up with 11 people! A few of us met at campus to take the bus to the train but we had some troubles getting on the right bus so we had to take a slightly later train but we joined up eventually!

At first we were mainly strangers to each other but by the end, we had bonded! And the views… well, see for yourself!

We took the train back to Wellington, stopped for ice cream, watched some more Cuba Dupa performances before heading back our separate ways.

Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. See you next time!