18 May 2010

Our Apartment

Ok! some of you wanted to see our apartment. Here are pictures of the living room/kitchen, which is one room. We also have a bedroom and a bathroom, but they were dirty so I didn't take a photo.

The living room section.

You may be thrown by the stick on the wall. Yeah its a stick on the wall. We spray painted it gold and hung it up there. You may also notice the weird fireplace-ish looking thing under the light. That is the heater. Its a glorified space heater and its the only heat we have in our apartment, not because it doesn't get cold, thats just how the heating works. A lot of people still use wood stoves as the only source of heating (I really romanticize with this, and wish we had a wood stove). It gets crazier. In the supermarket you can also buy a 20kg bag of coal, yes COAL, for heating. Yes and they are still pioneering this advanced technology as there are ads in the papers and stuff about "new coal technology." To be fair, it's not really that weird as there are coal mines on the South Island, it is cheap and still widely used everywhere to create electricity. Even in my beloved hippie/greenie Madison I still managed to live 5 blocks from a coal power plant. But using it to heat a home, just seems archaic for some reason.

I digress. TO THE KITCHEN!

No sticks or weird stuff in here. Just a tiny fridge.

10 May 2010

Jealous Yet?

Due to lack of internet (who's still bitter? no, not me!) we didnt really get to post a whole lot of weekend trips we did when in our first few months here. So let's do a brief recap.

In March we went on a trip with the Otago University Tramping Club (OUTC) to a place called "Paradise." I think the photo justifies the name...

Then we took a quick walk out to Tunnel Beach, this is 15 minutes from out house....

Also right around Dunedin is the small town of Palmerston. It is near a large hill with a nice (although very steep) hike to the top.

The big trip over Easter weekend was to Mt Cook. Apparently it is rare to get a good glimpse of it because it is usually covered in cloud, but we were lucky and got to see it. Here it is as the clouds began to part.


Jealous yet?