Politics, Food, and Volleyball

Today I had two more papers. My 11:00 paper was Political Anthropology. My professor is a fellow American. He is this crazy guy who gets very enthusiastic about what he is teaching, which I like. Having a professor who is enthusiastic about what they are teaching makes the class much more enjoyable. He went to Berkeley and did his fieldwork in Northern Ireland, studying the resistance armies and their efforts. It should be an interesting paper!

My next paper for the day was Food and Eating. Yes, that is right! I am taking a class all about food and consumption from an anthropological perspective. The lecture is two hours long, which is quite a long time to be sitting in a classroom talking about food right around the time of lunch. But my professor is this crazy Kiwi woman who talks non stop. She had us break into two groups and put together a sponge cake with cream and jam. I'm not too sure it was necessary to proving her point, but I sure didn't mind eating it! It will be interesting to see how the rest of the semester unfolds in this class. It may change the way I look at food forever.

The rest of my day was pretty dull. I did some reading, took a nap, drank some tea. But then Khali, Alyssa, Anke, and I headed over to The Centre, a lounge run by the Massey Chaplaincy team, for a free pancake dinner. I am certainly never one to turn down free food, let alone pancakes. So off we went, down the treacherous stairs to our pancake dinner. They were large pancakes, that actually looked more like a thick crepe, but they were delicious.

Afterwords, the four of us were sort of hyped up on sugar so we initiated game time. We played ninja and a very short round of tunnel tag (due to the inability to run for long after consuming pancakes). But finally we decided the best game to play was volleyball. So we headed over to the volleyball court on campus with whoever we could round up from the dinner. We played for hours. By the time we left the court it was after dark, but it was so much fun. We even had our RA Wiremu playing. It was really cool because people would walk by and be like "oh cool, can we play?" so we had a lot of people coming through the game. I think I might join the volleyball club.

Tomorrow I have no class because we have what are called tutorials, which are basically where you break the class down into smaller groups and have discussions on a more interactive level, but they do not start until next week. So I only have one tutorial on Wednesdays, which leaves me with a day off tomorrow.

Just some random thoughts:

• The ice cream here is phenomenal! I must say, I think it might beat Ben&Jerry's.
• The guys here wear their shorts awfully short.
• They also tend to sport the always lovely rat tail hairstyle (although it isn't quite as bad as you might think)
• The view from my window is quite unpleasing. I look directly at a large cylindrical water tower and a tall mushroom shaped water tower.
• Hipi means sheep in Maori.
• I have no dryer, so therefore am forced to hang my clothes (personals and all) on the clothes line in front of our flat for all to see and admire!

peace.