First Week In Christchurch

New Zealand is chill.

I've been in Christchurch for over a week now with no courses or many responsibilities besides familiarizing and feeding myself.  This in and of itself is quite the task!  

First there is the slang.  Kiwis apparently like to keep things simple and call things how they see them.  A couple of my favorites are:

Fizzy Drink - Soda

Foot Path - Sidewalk

There are also a few others that take some getting used to:

Knackered - Tired (but sounds suspiciously like 'Naked', which makes for some funny situations)

Pissed - Drunk (also very confusing)

Rubbage - Garbage

Ta - Thanks

Lolly - Candy

Petrol - Gas

Tea - Dinner (Weird)

Their vowels are a little skewed as well, so that Tommy sounds like 'Tummy', Beach sounds like 'Bitch', Like sounds like 'lock', Well sounds like 'Wheel', so on and so forth.  It takes some time to adjust, but at least it's still english! 

Overall, Kiwis are very friendly.  I've had multiple times where people would just come up to me and strike a conversation with me just for the heck of it!  This may just be a beginning-of-the-year trait, a time when people like to meet new people, but either way it is a very friendly atmosphere not present in the states.  Even when checking out at the grocery store, the clerks will ask how your day is going, or where you're from, or what you're making for dinner.  A majority of the Kiwis I have come in contact with, coincidentally, have been younger female ones, so maybe my sense of the social atmosphere is a little warped, due to the fact that Kiwi women enjoy the company of American men...

This past week I have already had fantastic opportunities to explore the unique countryside.  It's not very difficult to find someone with similar interests and prospects of wanting to do as much as possible in the short available time we have in this beautiful country.  A few friends and I met up with another group who had a van, and after a few minutes of conversation decided to go on a bouldering (climbing) adventure to Castle Hill - a geologic wonder.  The weather was unbeatable, and we ended up spending the night somewhere at the end of a long dirt road down a steep grassy hill in a small flat valley by a rocky creek.  Here are a couple pictures of our first drive out of Christchurch and our climbing experience:

I seem to be having a bit of trouble uploading pictures into Blogger, so if you're really interested you can check out http://s430.photobucket.com/albums/qq26/Tommygood where i've been dumping pictures off my camera.