I am so incredibly hardcore

So for the second weekend since I left the good ol United States, I have stayed in one place and had adventures at home and not gone somewhere exotic. Since last week was a short week and since this weekend snuck up on us and since the weather was supposed to be rainy and windy, we stuck around Dunedin and it was quite fun.

I finally finished all my homework (two papers and a test in three days? it felt like Oxy again!) and had all of Friday to play and start my weekend. I made banana chocolate chip pancakes (don't worry, Jack Johnson got slipped in there while baking) and felt very domestic. We went to the Speight's brewery tour, which is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Dunedin. Speight's is the "Pride of the South," and is an extremely recognizable beer down here. They give you a tour of the brewery, give you a history of beer and of Speights, and at the end they give you 20 minutes to taste all their different types of beer. I liked the summer harvest, or the apricot one, the best. I've yet to acquire a taste for dark beer, and the apricot one was really fruity and delicious tasting. It was fun to finally go do the tour and to check that off the list of things we need to do in Dunedin.

Saturday was spent lounging around and watching Lord of the Rings and pointing out all the scenes where we thought we recognized parts. Sadly, all we had was the extended version of all the movies, and the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring is like 4 hours, so I insisted we take a coffee break, a lunch break, and a Tim Tams break (Tim Tams = my favorite cookie EVER). We watched one of the special features that tells you where they filmed certain scenes, and a lot of my guesses were right (unfortunately, lots were wrong too). It was still really cool to watch it knowing that it was filmed where I'm living, and it's a quality movie anyways. We started #2 last night, but I fell asleep an hour into it so we'll finish the marathon tonight.

Today Dan and I hiked up to Mt. Cargill, the highest point in Dunedin. It would have been a lot cooler if we hadn't been hiking into a cloud cover that blocked the view, but we've gotten really lucky with our weather so I can't complain too much. It was so sunny at the bottom too! It was decently cool to hike into the clouds and look down onto cloud from the top, but I hear the view is gorgeous, so I guess we'll have to go back. I've been hiking far too long without any incident, so it was bound to happen, and I slipped hardcore on the way down. The bleeding got so bad that I had to rip up my shirt and tie it around my knee and limp down the mountain. I spent about an hour cleaning out the wound and digging pieces of gravel out from underneath the skin on my knee, and now it's wrapped in a layer of gauze and I'm comfortably drugged up on the maximum amount of Panadol I can take without exceeding their maximum limit. It hurt more than any other scrape I've had, and the disinfectant was absolutely murder. Either way, it was bound to happen, and at least it wasn't when I was in the middle of Oz without anybody else.

Tomorrow both my classes got cancelled, one class got cancelled on Tuesday, and another class got cancelled on Wednesday (school here is so cool!), so I can focus all my energy into getting excited to see THE PARENTAL UNIT who's coming out sometime this week. I'm ridiculously excited to see them and to show them around NZ and show them what's captured my heart and somehow try to see if they can get a taste of what makes me so happy.

Since I'm discussing how hardcore I am in terms of surviving major injuries, I should mention that I have over 22 sandfly bites dotting my legs and feet and that each one itches more than a combination of forty mosquito bites together. Also, I think I just found a new one when I was removing large pieces of rock from my knee. Sandflies are probably the worst thing about NZ.

Hope all is well, lovelovelove!