The Beauty of Student Life

Due to lecturer's being ill and random cancellations I only had a few hours of class this week...so I was able to fully enjoy the start of my second round of non-academic courses and everything else going on this week.

I've started swimming again so Monday morning I swam laps around the old and broken people at the Physiotheraphy pool. I'm always the youngest person when I go there and the pool is so warm, it's great. I went grocery shopping at the organic store with Leslie in the afternoon. On the way we checked out a vegetarian cafe where I had a delicious vege-quiche-thing. That evening I had my first meditation class. I was so excited when I found out that it was taught by my yoga instructor...he's so full of zen, it's great. After spending an hour meditating on my mat in the old activities hall surrounded by other supine people I was very relaxed. We were having a Willamette dinner at Stas's house so I had a good night hanging out with everyone, enjoying the good food (I successfully made a cheesy pasta bake), and playing Bananagrams.

My only class on Wednesday was cancelled so I got to go to the $3 Hare Krshna lunch with a bunch of my girl friends. I hadn't been in a few weeks so I was very excited to nosh on their huge bread roll and chocolate semolina pudding. I'd never had this dessert before, and I don't know if we have it in the States, but I think that we definitely should...it's amazing. After filling my stomach I went to a music performance at Marama Hall by performance students. My favorite was the flutist who played Bach's Hamburg. My first Self Defense class was a success. It's taught by this middle-aged judo master who's hilarious. All of his explanations of techniques and situations are whole-heartedly New Zealander, involving one or more "huge, scary rubgy players". It was also very entertaining to watch some of the girls try to do the moves. They didn't know how to move their bodies to hit something and so would be moving in two different directions at once, barely moving at all, or some other highly entertaining motions. It was one of my friend's 22nd birthday so I spent most of the night at his birthday party at his flat. It was supposed to be a potluck...which meant that Elizabeth and I took real food and everyone else brought chips. Despite the lack of edible food it was still really fun and I got to meet a few new people.

Thursday evening was my first astronomy course and it was amazing. It was held at an observatory on a hillside right above the Octagon. The small building is full of telescopes of all different sizes and its walls are covered with colorful posters of planets, solar systems, and star formations. The sky was pretty overcast but it did clear up enough for us to see Uranus...I could even see it's rings! We got to play with this high-powered laser that our instructor uses to point out the stars in the sky and I got to make the roof of the observatory swivel around. The instructor brought out tons of different models of planets and solar systems to show us things. It was a very successful class.