Exploring, Touring and Learning

My fifth week of classes was fairly busy as I had my first three assignments of the trimester due! It felt kinda strange not having turned anything in until now but I’m not complaining!

Here is a drawing I made as a concept piece for my Visual Narrative children’s book! During class, we presented our project plans which included a storyboard of our books. Now we have the rest of the trimester to actually make it. I also have to give a presentation on a graphic novel by a Wellington cartoonist right after my break.

In food related news, I finally bought eggs here and discovered they are REALLY good! They come from barns and are so natural, there was a feather stuck to one! I also went to my hall’s weekly “Cook with the RAs” and we made Kumera (sweet potato) soup. I learned in a moment of embarrassment that I had never cut an onion before and wasn’t sure how to Someone kindly showed me. While the soup was cooking, a few of us watched a movie in the lounge.

On Friday night, I went with my friends Skye and Rebekah to a New Zealand Comedy School Alumni show at a local bar. Basically, we got to watch these new comedians do their acts. They were hilarious! I had always wanted to go to bar comedy like this.

There was a lot of rain this week. My friends and I were going to go to a seal colony but the weather didn’t look great so I was gonna participate in a New Zealand game called Ki O’rahi with my hall but it also was cancelled. I ended up trying to do some homework, went food shopping, found my first geocache in New Zealand and also cooked rice for this week.

Sunday I met up with my Arcadia program at the campus bus stop to go to Miramar for a Weta Workshop tour! Weta Workshop is a special effects and prop company that has worked on numerous films. The most notable being the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We went to a cafe and got milkshakes since we were early but when our leader went to check us in for the tour, we learned that we had been rescheduled for Monday! We were all pretty disappointed.

A couple of us decided not to let the day be a waste and we arranged to go on an impromptu trip to a regional park in Upper Hutt where Rivendell scenes from Lord of the Rings were filmed. We took the train to Upper Hutt and then got to the regional park via uber/taxi.

The area was gorgeous! It was a fun little adventure and definitely made the day much more of a success.

Then my sixth week of classes began. The last week before break!

I woke up at 6 in the morning on Monday to attend my grandmother Marian’s poetry reading on Zoom . It was neat that I could do that even from across the world.

On Wednesday, for Passover, I took a bus to Hataitai, a suburb of Wellington where I met a family that my third cousin Josh met when he studied here back in 2003. When he and his parents heard I would be going to Wellington, they connected me with the family. I talked to the couple while they got ready for the seder and then many of the family’s relatives began arriving. It was a lot to keep track of all of their relations but I tried the best I could. I hadn’t participated in a Passover Seder in many years but they were very helpful and I figured it out. They had many courses to the dinner ending with a delicious fruit salad and ice cream. The whole seder concluded with a Passover rap performed by some of the younger generation of this family who now have babies of their own.

I was given a ride home by a couple at the end which I greatly appreciated.

On Thursday, half our Arcadia group went back to Weta Workshop for our rescheduled tour. And this time, it actually worked!

We weren’t allowed to take photographs for most of the tour but it was a fascinating tour.

We got to see how they make face molds, the work that goes into creating a sword and the amount of time and manual labor required to construct models like the statues of soldiers I saw in the Te Papa Gallipoli exhibit I mentioned in an earlier blog. Every hair on each person’s face in the exhibit had to be hand punched in. An eyebrow could be whole day’s work.

Our tour guide was incredibly knowledgeable. He had an answer to every question, including if you asked about Weta Workshop’s involvement in a random movie you saw floating across the screen of movies displayed on the tour. It turns out he is in my Visual Narratives Class! I only realized this at the end when I was talking to him.

I got dinner back in town with a couple of the folks in my program and then I did some grocery shopping for my parents who were then flying over the Pacific Ocean to visit me for my two week break! I dropped the food off at the Air BNB we will be staying at in town.

It’s crazy to think that my parents will be here so soon! As I am writing this, they are in Auckland soon to be flying to Wellington! Tune into my next blog post to see what we get up to!