I'm going to the mattresses

Very exciting news: I BOUGHT MY FIRST CAR! Who would have ever guessed that my first car would have the driver's seat on the right side? My car is older than I am, and it's really not so much of a car as a land yacht. It's chunky, loud, it croaks and grumbles when I start it, the glove box is duct taped shut, the backseat right window doesn't roll down all the way, and the headlights sometimes get stuck on, but it's mine to drive all over the South Island, and it's wonderful. It's a 1984 BMW (I bought a BMW! So cool!), and I'm sharing it with three other people. We even have insurance! If we hit anything/anybody/anywhere, we have to pay the first $800 and then they pay the rest, up to $1 million. All for $40 apiece! It doesn't cover damage to our own car, but that's not a huge loss, considering it would probably cost more to repair it than we actually paid for it.

We christened it by driving out to Long Beach, about a 40 minute drive from Dunedin. Once you get there, you hike about a mile out to these caves along the beach, and we camped out there. It's the most gorgeous view ever...the beach is underneath these giant, towering cliffs with trees lined up along the horizon, and there are tons of craggy, edgy rocks that the water crashes against. The caves were big enough to sleep in, which was nice because it was raining the next morning. It was all the perks of camping, without having to set up a tent! We just laid our sleeping bags on the sand. We decided to mix it up and have both NZ-style food (sausages wrapped in bread, for some reason hot dog buns haven't hit down under yet) and American-style food (we tried to make smores, but we couldn't find graham crackers or marshmallows so we had to improvise with cookies and these bubblegum flavored Peeps-ish things). We bought veg sausages for me, which were the most amazing veg sausages I've found yet: red onion and parmesan. Mmm. We built a lovely fire and went swimming despite the freezing water, and tried climbing the cliffs a bit. I woke up at 3 AM and couldn't sleep, so I wandered out of the cave and looked up, and the stars were the clearest I've ever seen them in my entire life, even better than out on the Galapagos. You could see the Milky Way, it was that clear. I saw seven shooting stars in less than ten minutes! It was one of the coolest places I've been in New Zealand, which says a lot because it doesn't get much better than parachuting over Lake Tekapo in Queenstown. We finished off our car's christening process by having to wander around this tiny beach town asking people if they had jumper cables because the dash lights got left on and our battery flat-out died. This was actually the least-friendly town I've been in in all of NZ, and it took about twenty minutes to find somebody willing to jump us. After that minor mishap, the car made it back to Dunedin just fine and dandy.

Yesterday I spent all day either watching movies or cooking food, it was kind of a sad existence. Still, I saw some really good movies: I finally saw The Godfather and understand all the references in You've Got Mail, and I finally saw Saving Private Ryan. It was incredibly well done, and I'm glad I got around to seeing it at last. Plus, who doesn't love Tom Hanks? Still, it was a cinematically heavy day, so I had to end the day with some Seinfeld, most notably the hilarious one where Jerry finds out he has fleas.

Now I'm doing some reading (see, sometimes I have academic things to do), and researching for a paper I'm writing. I'm so productive. I have pumpkin ravioli soup in a can, and while it sounds slightly dodgy, the picture makes it look amazingly good. I'm kind of anxious to see how it turns out, if it's totally disgusting or delicioso. We'll see. Lots of love to everybody!

Pictures:
1. My friend Dave has the most incredible camera ever and takes the most gorgeous photos I've ever seen, he just got a $600 grant from National Geographic to take photos down here. Anyways, I stole a picture that he took of the stars from Long Beach so that everybody could see how incredible it is. It's not touched up at all! WHOA!
2. I went to the rugby on Friday night, and the pre-game show was these 2 ridiculous 16-year-old guys doing tricks on these motorcycles, flipping around and jumping off giant ramps. The crowd went nuts, and these kids were totally insane, but it was awesomely fun to watch. The rugby was kind of boring though, they just piled around on each other and yelled a lot and dropped the ball. Still, the Highlanders are a pretty big deal in Dunedin, and it was cool to get in on the experience. If anybody's interested, go to http://www.hahn-online.info/de/Neuseeland/Rugby/RugbyFiles/rugbyfiles.html and check out the files of the rugby team yelling the haka song (the Maori war dance) and singing the Highlanders song, but be prepared for that song to be stuck in your head for days. Imagine the entire stadium and rugby team singing this at the top of their lungs. Username and password is RugbyNZ, use the correct capitalization.
3. Our cave! So cool.
4. Us in front of the car, I think I'm simultaneously calling shotgun and trying to block the dent from view. I'm finally at the point where I'm completely comfortable driving on the left side of the road, but I still forget which side to get in the car a lot, it's borderline embarrassing.

More pictures of Long Beach to come, Caitlin and Patrick took the most pictures so I still have to grab them from them.