You can take the girl out of the library, but you can't take the library out of the girl

Thursday, July 15, 2010
This is going to be a bit of a random conglomerated post. But it’s all good stuff, I promise!


First is an adventure in the world of fruit. As an avid kiwi fruit lover, I am beyond thrilled to be able to eat them so cheaply here- in two forms! Golden Kiwi’s are the much sweeter version of the green kiwi that we typically see in the states. Rachel also introduced me to the fijawa fruit. Fijawa’s are a sweet/tangy green fruit- but you don’t eat the skin, just the fleshy inside. Apparently they’re one of those foods that people either love or they hate- and I love them! It's a really interesting fruit; when you scoop out the middle to eat, half of is is textured like a banana, and the other half like a kiwi.


Along with finding all of my classes this week, I also explored the library! The library at Canterbury is 12 stories tall, and towers over all of the other buildings around here! I quite agree that the most massive building on campus (possibly even in Christchurch?) should be filled to the brim with books. However, when I sat down to read my chapters for psychology, I found an interesting problem. Because it is so tall the view is absolutely gorgeous! You can see across Christchurch, and all the way out to the foot hills. This awesome view is EXTREMELY distracting when trying to study!





Tonight my flatmate, Ruth, convinced me to go to a Ucandance night. She said they do lessons for like Salsa, Merengue, and Modern Jive, it’s a great group of people and she promised it would be fun. Missing my old, St. Kate’s roommates and our adventures swing dancing last semester, I agreed to go. What fun! We danced the Modern Jive (MJ) first; MJ turned out to be a lot like the style of swing dancing that I’m used to. There were some moves that I wasn’t familiar with- thank goodness I’m a girl, and therefore I don’t have to lead! There were some excellent dancers there, and it was super nice to be able to convert my small swing knowledge to something else- and not look like a total fool! The Merenegue was also a lot of fun. It felt like I was tossed from one great dancer to the next, which meant lots of twirling, spinning, and general fun making! I love being able to dance with partners that actually know what they’re doing, it makes dancing so effortless and so much more enjoyable! My last dance of the evening turned in to three, one of which he started teaching me how to salsa! I was a disaster; it’s going to take a lot more practice to figure this dance out. I’m hoping to make it to Ucandance twice a week, so maybe by the end of this I will be able to salsa and not look so silly.