wednesday nights there is karaoke at shadows (the campus bar) and the kayaking club goes after their canoe polo practice, so i got ej and sophie to go and some guys sophie knows came too, and we watched other people sing only they were pretty good so we couldn't make fun. a couple people i knew from aucc were there but i was not brave and didn't go say hi or anything.
i e-mailed one of the microbiology profs (his name is silas villas-boas) a little while ago about volunteering in his lab, and then i went to see him last week and he said i'm welcome to come help if i want, although what he does is mostly biochem and not genetics, which scared me a little, but i figured hey why not. so thursday was my first day. i got there at 9:30 (and their lab building is SO much more secure than hutch is - at home you can just walk into any lab you want, everything is open during the week. here you have to have a swipe card to get past the reception area, and every time i go i have to call silas in his office and he has to physically come down and let me in.)
but anyways he came and took me upstairs and gave me a brief tour of the lab and the surrounding micro labs where we can borrow stuff from. they have a communal kitchen area, where you send all your dirty glassware and get clean, which is nice in that they don't need a dishwasher in each lab, but it's kind of a pain to have to walk down the hall every time you need a flask or something. he gave me a text book (which i later saw he wrote) to read a little background, and a protocol from online, which i copied into step-by-step instructions for what i would be doing, and a paper to read later about what i'm going to be doing.
then he showed me where the samples (ground up plant leaves) i would be extracting were, and left me to it. i was basically adding different chemicals (including chloroform) and vortexing and centrifuging stuff and it was not the most exciting thing ever. the people were nice enough, but i miss the sia lab SO much. and i'm not gonna lie lidza's anal organizing and labelling of everything would have been nice, because i had to keep asking where stuff was every time i needed something and i'm sure that got pretty annoying. i was doing that all day until i had to leave at 4:30 (still not done), and i said i'd be back friday morning to finish, since i don't have class till 2.
then i went to my first computer science lab, which initially had to be completed in the allotted 2 hour time slot which would not have been good for me since i am bad with time limits and not as good at programming as most of the class. then he changed it so we could hand it in within 48 hours for 80% credit, and then at the end of the 2 hours he said there would be no penalty for finishing within 48 hours so that was good. we had 3 problems to do, using dynamic programming (which is basically recursion only you store the answers to each thing you solve so you don't do the same calculations multiple times). to submit we had to use this program they use for cs programming competitions and as more and more people submitted it got slower and slower responding which was kind of annoying. anyway i wasn't done by 7 so i left.
on my way out of the cs building this lost looking asian man (who was probably 30) came up to me and was asking random questions about the cs labs and my major and stuff, and eventually i was like, um i have to go i'm going to miss dinner (i had already missed dinner, but sophie made me a pbj) and left, and i was going to take a shortcut and cut thru the science building to symonds st, and there was a security guy holding the door and when i went in he was like 'you have a swipe card right?' and i said yea because i thought he meant id card, and he was like 'ok just dont get locked in' so i went across the lobby and tried to open the other side, and they were all locked, apparently after 7 you need a special card to get in and out, so then i had to go find the security guard to let me out again.
so as i'm going around the outside of the building (probably only about 30 seconds extra walking), i see the lost asian man again! and i smile and keep walking and he's like 'do you play tennis' (to be fair we were outside the gym) and i said 'no, sorry' and kept walking and he said 'wait, do you want to keep in touch' and like, went to get his phone out, and i was like ummm i am really running late sorry and ran away. it was the strangest thing ever.
so friday i went back to the lab, although i was dreading it a little, but it was much better. it was someones birthday, so everyone went down to the lounge and had chocolate cake (although the girl whos birthday it was was sick and went home instead). and i met the other prof who shares the lab and i think his work is more what i want to do than silas's, but oh well. i guess silas has only been here like 6 months, and he has 2 or 3 grad students, a girl (undergrad) who worked with him over the summer and came for the cake, but i don't know how much she'll be around. then the other prof has a lab tec, and at least 4 phd students. they seemed surprised i do research at home as an undergrad. they only take 3 years for their phd here, but they have to get their masters first (i think thats 2 years), whereas we go longer for phd and just get a masters in the process.
after the lab i went back to the cs lab to work on that, went to class, worked more on the cs lab, went to another class, and then went to see the prof (not alexei, the cool one, right now we have this large american man, but he's nice) and he basically told me how to solve the third problem which turned out to be really easy and i'm retarded for spending so long on it (he did not tell me i'm retarded). there was another girl there with the same problem and we discussed how we couldn't think about anything else in class till we figured this out, and she also has not had as much comp sci as most of the guys in the class. so then i stopped freaking out about the lab after that and went to step class, then back to ih for dinner, and then back to campus to submit my lab. only it still didn't work. so i emailed the prof and left, only to discover he had responded while i was walking back, so i should have just stayed at the lab a little longer. oh well.
friday night this girl sophie knows (i think from tramping club) named sandra, who we went to a fitness class and stuff, was having an 80's party at her flat, which is down the street from ih (before the giant hill!), and kendall and i wanted to get dressed up all silly for it. sophie and her friend who was visiting from australia wanted to go to the bars after so they wouldn't get dressed funny, but we got ej to, although i ended up looking the most ridiculous since i was not planning on going anywhere after. we went to the party for awhile and it was fun, and we were standing in this doorway and some guy (wearing eyeliner - meaning he was either emo or gay) came up behind ej, and like, needed to get thru, and he like went to put his hand on her side to move her over and then somehow his hand was on her boob instead and we were like whattt just happened...so then later when we were leaving to go back to ih he was sitting outside as we left and went up to ej and was like 'hey baby' really creepy...and then as we were walking kendall was explaining to alex (a guy from france who lives in ih) that even if the guy was gay it's like a girl doing it, and it's still not ok, and proceeded to grab ej's boob herself, to demonstrate and we were like kendall what are you doing?! and she was like 'i'm just proving my point' and alex was like 'can i prove my point?' and it was really funny.
so then the rest of them went out to the bars and i found the usual ih guys (barret, brian, who we went north with, and cameron, ace and ollie, who are all 1st year kiwis) and they were going to watch 'once were warriors' which i had heard a lot about, it's about a modern inner city maori family in south auckland and so i got my pjs on and then we all watched that in cameron's room and it was extremely depressing, but really good, and it made me cry.
saturday was my second kitesurfing lesson, and i had to take the train because the wind and tides were right to go to andrew's place south of auckland on manukau harbour. the lesson was at 1, so i took the train that arrived at 12:30, which left at 11:40 from britomart in auckland. i went early and stopped at campus to submit my lab (it finally worked!). the train station is really pretty, it's in this old post office building and looks all old and fancy on the outside, and the inside is really light and modern looking. i got the student 10-ride pass which has a 40% discount, so it costs the same as 6 rides, which is 3 round trips, which i will probably use going to kitesurfing lessons. my contacts had been being weird that morning, and i stupidly took one out after putting lotion on, which really messed them up, so i bought a bottle of contact soln before getting on the train which was a rip off, but it made them a little better.
i called andrew a little before arriving at papakura, and he said he'd come get me and to look for a brown and grey 4wd vehicle. when i got off the train, there were parking lots on both sides of the tracks and a big bridge over the top, so i just wandered around, but then a security guard asked me if i was ok and i said i was waiting for my ride, and after a little bit andrew pulled in and honked.
his house/farm/beach was like a 15 min ride, and when we got there most of the other people for the lessons had arrived. there was a lady about 30 who had had 2 lessons, and a girl who had had 1, a guy who had had a lot, and 2 guys who were complete beginners. Everyone was significantly older than me except the girl, who i thought looked about my age, but then i was talking to her and she said she had moved here 7 years ago from england with an ex-boyfriend and ended up just staying, so she must have been a bit older than i thought.
we all got wetsuits and harnesses and lifejackets and booties, and andrew packed all the equipment into his jeep thing, and then 4 of us rode and the 2 guys hung on thru the windows on the outside, and we drove thru the pastures down to the beach (andrew said he usually makes people walk but he had something wrong with his foot so he didn't want to. it would have been a long walk so that was lucky.) as it was we still had to walk a ways over some squishy sand/mud to get to the edge of the water. each kite is in a backpack sort of bag, and then you strap a board on the back so you can carry it all.
andrew left the 4 of us who had been before to set up kites on our own (and had us pick what size we thought we should use. the other girls had 8m ones but there were only 2 so i took a 6m). after getting everything set up he sat us down and talked for a really long time about how to do stuff that i was fairly sure i would not get to the point of needing, and then told us to go body drag for a bit and then we would come back and get boards. i had a lot of trouble keeping my kite in the air, i think it was less windy than orewa so i should have had a larger kite. it was nice not having huge waves everywhere though, and no pro kite surfers to worry about running into. after a bit andrew came and showed me how to relaunch my kite more easily, and gave me some tips and i played for a long time. the guy who had been a bunch of times just started on a board, but the 3 of us girls ended up not getting to try on the board all day, i'm not sure why.
as it started getting dusky andrew told us to bring in the kites, and i think the tide had gone out because it was LONG walk back to the bags and stuff. i somehow injured my foot the first day i had gone, like pulled something or something, and by the end of that walk it was not feeling great. then we rode back up and everyone else left and andrew said i could come in the house for a minute before he took me back to the train, and i met his wife who is french and was really sweet, and she looked up the train timetable for me on her computer because i hadn't planned on staying that late (it was like 7:40 by that time).
after a little bit andrew took me back to the train station and he told me about how the farm he grew up on (closer to manukau city, which was once a separate city but is now basically an auckland suburb due to urban sprawl, and is part of the dodgy south auckland area where there are tons of samoans and maori and lots of crime) anyway he said there were wild dogs that would attack their sheep so his dad would send him out with a gun in the dark to shoot the dogs and it sounded very dangerous. and he said some school had a hunting competition fundraiser where the kids would bring in various dead animals. sounds kinda like honeoye :P
apparently it only takes 25 min to drive to the city from there, but the train back was almost an hour, so i had obviously missed dinner and was starving, so i stopped at subway on the way back (and broke my not eating at american chains rule) and got a sandwich, and eventually got back to ih and just went to bed.
today i went to step class which i do not think helped my foot any, it is now a little swollen, and then worked on my linguistics paper all day. see, i do do homework! (i just don't write about every chapter i read, bc it's not super exciting). actually one fun linguistics story, so i may have mentioned this before, but here 'wh' is pronounced 'f' because of the original maori sounds, and in class on friday we talked about this billboard that was somehow making a pun on that, listing a bunch of place names beginning with 'whaka' which sounds something like 'fucker', but they took it down when people complained it was offensive. clever. ok back to work.
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