Just another week at university

Since classes have started I haven't had much time for big adventures, but I have managed to do quite a few fun things around all my very strenuous schoolwork (ha).
We had another WU dinner at Stas' house last weekend for which I made dessert. It was chocolate peanut butter cheesecake which was a completely new recipe for me, which always complicates things, but it was made even more difficult because it was an American recipe and I'm in NZ. They don't have graham crackers here (which I wanted for the crust) and their cream is in a totally different container than we have. So grocery shopping took a really really long time. But the dinner and dessert were delicious, so it was worth it.
I discovered that my flatmates Jenny and Elizabeth like playing badminton, and I'm always down for a good game, so we went to UniPol (the gym) to play and we ended up staying for a few hours. It was really fun, especially because we were playing with no rules. Jenny was especially funny, when she would miss hitting the birdie she would throw her hands up in the air in disgust and surprise.
The next day there was an international barbeque for the students living in my part of town. So I got to meet a bunch of new people (mostly Americans) as I tried to eat my not-really-delicious-veggie sausage. I even met some Idahoans when we were playing grass volleyball.
I had my second massage course- we learned a legs and feet massage. I got to be the example so I had a great massage from the instructor followed by an unsatisfactory massage from another student. I think I'm going to try not to pair up with him again. For the most part everyone is really cool and mature about the massage thing, but I think he is not used to it and I was kind of creeped out. Especially at the end when, after we had been talking about good places to run around town, he very excitedly invited me to go running with him and then, and I quote, "we can massage each other afterwards". Yeah, that's not happening.
I finally got to meet the local student who is supposed to be my mentor during my time here. She's really nice, lives out on the peninsula with her family, and is a theatre major. So we went to the lunchtime theatre performance together (every Thursday and Friday there are hour long performances in the theatre). It was a really strange performance about two teenagers who had been born in a bomb shelter and whose parents had been killed and eaten down there by their crazy cook. The cook then kept the children imprisoned so they had never been above ground. It was very well-written, not allowing you to realize where they are or what exactly is happening until the very end, but it was still slightly disturbing and extremely dysfunctional.
I went to my first movie here on Friday night- Alice in Wonderland in 3D! It was exactly like going to the movies in the States. And it was a great film. I was supposed to be taking my surfing class this weekend, but a huge storm rolled in towards the end of the week and stuck around all weekend so it didn't end up happening. There's nothing to slow down the wind as it blows up from Antartica so by the time it hits New Zealand it's pretty rough. It was so strong that I was actually trying not to go outside because if a big gust came up I would get blown around. It made walking to class a bit difficult. On Saturday I went to a party at our friends' house that was all non-American international students (except for me and one of the flatmates)- it was really fun. People were mostly speaking in English, but sometimes small groups of people would form speaking their own languages or people would shout across the room to their countrypeople in foreign languages.
My flatmates and I have been going to yoga every Monday and Thursday night. It's getting pretty difficult sometimes, but it's still really fun. It's a good flat-bonding thing also...especially when something funny happens. Like last night when we were doing the cat pose (where you kneel on hands and knees and raise your sacrum and head to the ceiling while dropping your spine towards the floor) and the instructor told us quite seriously that if we work hard we could eventually touch the back of our head to our sacrum. Elizabeth and I immediately looked at each other in complete disbelief and had to work really hard to not laugh too loudly.
Yesterday morning I went to volunteer at an animal shelter that is just a few blocks north of the botanical gardens. It was really nice to finally be around animals even though it was depressing to see all the animals in their cages. I loved being able to play with the kittens. The only really difficult part was during my training when the woman who was showing me around kept on telling me where normal things were but since she was using Kiwi-words for them, I had no idea what she was talking about. I think she thought I was a little slow because I kept on having to ask her to repeat things or show me where they were because I couldn't understand what she was trying to say. Like when she told me to put the trash in the 'spat', which is the very obvious dumpster outside one of the buildings, and she ended up having to show me what she was talking about because I couldn't figure out what she meant.