My house

These are photos Jaela took at the beginning of the year, so they're not very current (it's a little more decorated now), but you get the idea. 

My room

I made a chair

I started with a blank page in Adobe Illustrator, and ended up with this.  It's really basic and could be better, but I'm still pretty proud.  It was just so satisfying to figure out how to use the program to create something that actually looks like what it was supposed to.  This was for a Graphic Design assignment; we drew illustrations to go along with a poem.  I intend to put the entire finished thing on Facebook, if I can figure out how to convert the file to a format I can upload.

A poem

I'm back at Houghton and recently had two of my poems published in The Candle, a short, monthly publication the current editors of The Lanthorn have started.  I thought I'd share one of them...

Geological Thoughts

When I decided that my thoughts were a braided stream,

flowing in a network of interconnected rivulets

around numerous bars,

I immediately realized

I’d been studying geology too long.

In NZ

So, my laptop has died (just the computer and not the hard drive, fortunately), and with it all my plans of uploading photos, catching up on blogging, and getting homework done.  Right now Nora is kindly letting me use her computer, but I feel bad taking it from her to often, so I probably won't be getting nearly as much done as I intended.  On the plus side, I won't be staying up late online, either.  Anyway, all that to say that my posting schedule is not going to be as promised the other day.  Maybe I'll write some retrospective posts once I'm home, if anyone's interested in that?  (If you are, let me know...)

But for now, here's a little more on where I am now and what's been going on: Nora and I are staying with a family who live in a suburb of Auckland.  The dad is from New Zealand and the mom is American (from Michigan); she moved here with him after they got married less than 10 years ago.  They have three children, ages 2, 4, and 6.  The kids are all quite high-energy, and the youngest, especially, has been playing with us a lot.  She likes to make me pretend to go to sleep and then sing, yell, or hit me with a pillow to wake me up.  She's super cute; they all are.  We've been eating great home-cooked meals with them and we watched NCIS (an American crime show that I'd never heard of before we came here) with the mom the other night.  So it's been fun so far.

For the past two weeks we've had Gary Baxter, a Houghton art professor, with us to teach the Art and Film courses.  So for the past three days our classes have consisted of watching New Zealand films, which is fun.  The movies are, in case anyone's curious, Once Were Warriors, Whale Rider, and Boy.  All quite good, all dealing with some hard issues--Once Were Warriors is especially dark, very disturbing.  Boy had a good amount of humor in it, so that balance was good.

Today we visited a super nice public school and heard about it from one of the teachers and chatted with some of the students and then had a wonderful afternoon tea there (here and in AU they eat so many times in one day; breakfast, then morning tea, then lunch, then afternoon tea, then dinner [which they call tea--so many teas!  But it never means just tea, there's always food too], and sometimes supper, which is a light snack before bed).  Tomorrow we have a guest lecturer in the morning, and then we have a free afternoon.  Not sure what I'll do; maybe try to get into the city by ferry if it's not too expensive and if I can figure out the bus system to get there.

So yeah, I guess that's a pretty good overview of things right now.  Not sure when I'll post again, but I'll try to at least once or twice before I come back on the 18th!

A post!

Wow, my last post was September 9th--I lost my momentum early!  But here's a quick update on what's going on with me now (I just copied and pasted from an email... :P).  I definitely have more free time this week than I've had for ages, so there will be more posts--both on NZ and the past weeks in AU--soon!

NZ feels very different from AU.  Much quieter and less busy--you can tell the population is smaller.  We were in Auckland yesterday and today, and the city just feels so empty compared to Australian cities.  The countryside, what we've seen of it, is beautiful--the shoreline is cliffs, and there are lots of rivers and sand flats.  So it's a nice place, and I hope we get to see more of it.  The area where we've mainly been--we have classes at the church where most of the host families go--is kind of ugly, all developed with stores everywhere.  And the suburb where I'm staying is just packed with houses; you look out the window and just see tons of them, as if they're piled on top of each other (it's really hilly here, so it's kind of a funny perspective.  Driving in Auckland was scary because the hills were so steep).

We went to the Auckland Art Gallery on Monday and the Natural History Museum today.  Who knows what we'll do tomorrow!

The past week

This week we’ve gone into the city (Brisbane) every day for “classes” with Peter Breen, a former pastor who now runs Jugglers Art Space.  According to the website, "Jugglers Art Space Inc. is an Artist Run Initiative that is committed to supporting emerging artists across a broad range of genres. It was founded in 2002 to address the critical shortage of exhibition and studio spaces available in Brisbane." PB wanted graffiti artists, especially kids, to have a place where they could do their art legally.  Now artists have shows there, and Jugglers has rented property from Queensland rail which they in turn rent to artists to use as studios.

So anyway, we’ve been going in and basically chatting with Peter Breen.  He’s talked about the church and art and about loving and serving people.  Monday we just stayed at Jugglers and talked.  Tuesday we visited two of the studios Jugglers rents out and the artists talked to us about their work.  One man was part Aborigine, and he makes and plays dijeridoos.  (He played one for us, and it was amazing.  Then some of us tried, and it wasn’t so amazing.  You have to do this weird circular breathing thing, which takes a while to learn.)  He also paints, and his work is inspired by Aboriginal stories.  You can see some of his paintings here: http://www.artbyanthonywalker.com/  Then we went and talked to Nic Plowman, who also paints.  His most recent work, some of which he showed us, has been inspired by his recovery from a bad fall.  It was really interesting to talk to both of these men and hear the stories behind their art.

On Wednesday we talked with Peter Breen more and also Terry Fitzpatrick, someone Peter knows (I forget exactly how…).  He and Peter both have some ideas about God and Christianity that are very different from everything I’ve heard before, such as, in Peter's words, that "love is an end in itself"--you don't necessarily have to evangelize to people; it's okay just to love them.  It’s been great to hear a completely different perspective, especially when I agree with a lot of it.

Yesterday, Thursday, we went to the Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art.  We didn’t have any instructions or assignments, we just got to wander through the Australian art area at the QAG and the surrealism exhibit at GOMA.  Surrealism can be pretty disturbing, especially when you’re seeing so much of it at once.  But it was really interesting, and it was nice to just be able to go through at our own pace.

~An interjection--I wrote this post yesterday, so we've been to Jugglers and back today, but I'm really tired, so for now I'll leave the paragraph that I wrote yesterday about today as it is, and write about today another time.~

Tomorrow there’s a new art show opening, so we’re going to help with that if our help is needed and also just participate in it (we’re going to be throwing paint balloons at the currently white tunnel walls).  It’s been a good week; it’s been nice to get out of the NTC and see a little more of the city and hear from a cool Australian guy.  And not having traditional classes is really nice.  There’s also not really been any homework; we do have to write two papers, though, one four-page one having something to do with this past week and one one-page reflection on the sculpture we’re building.  Oh, yeah, another part of this week is that we have to build a sculpture out of objects we’ve found.  It’s kind of hard for 12 people to build one sculpture, though, so it seems like a few people have been doing most of it.  So it’ll be interesting writing a reflection on it…

We don’t have to be at Jugglers till 2 tomorrow; we’ve been getting there at 8:30, meaning I’ve had to get up at 7 (although twice I slept through my alarm and my roommates had to wake me up), so it’s going to be really, really nice to sleep in.

My flying horse

Earlier this week I had a dream that I flew to America to visit for the weekend on a flying horse.  It was really quick and easy.  I stopped at Houghton and then I went home, where I asked Mom, “Want to know how I got here?” because I was really excited to tell her I flew in on a flying horse.  But she never answered me, and I was disappointed.  Then I was thinking about how it wasn’t possible for me to actually have gotten there on a flying horse, so I decided I must just be imagining that I was there, but it felt so real.  Then I thought I would just imagine myself flying back to Australia, and I knew that would feel real too, but then I thought how everything that happened in Australia after that would only be in my imagination, and that I would eventually wake up and have to live all that time over again.

Photos

A few photos are on Facebook, for anyone who hasn't found them yet: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2285409341911.2132604.1449219994&l=792464d5b9&type=1

Classes, church, bus fail, food

Well, classes have started...  9am every day this week we have Music with a professor from Houghton who lectures via Skype.  So far it's been about music in general rather than Australian music in particular, which I think is a little weird since it's only a week-long class.  But it's been pretty interesting.  Some of it just goes over my head, and sometimes there's this horrible echo on Skype so you can't really understand anything, but there have been a lot of YouTube clips of different types of music from around the world, so that's been cool.  In the afternoons we have another class, Engaging Australia Culture (I think...), but we don't really know what we're doing for that one yet.  Yesterday we talked about different stages of adjusting to a new culture and intro stuff like that.

Let's see... on Sunday we went to church, not the one where we had youth group but a different one, Southgate Wesleyan Methodist, I believe.  It was kind of in the middle of nowhere and was a big square building, not particularly church-like.  There was a peacock in the front when we pulled up--they're wild here.  The service was pretty normal; we sang some familiar songs and some new ones, Prof. Kettelkamp preached, and that was about it.  Afterward we had snacks and tea and chatted with the Australian people.  An older man told me about his grandsons and how to make pumpkin soup.

Back here that afternoon, we didn't have anything to do and wanted to do something exciting, so we decided to try taking a bus for the first time.  We walked to the bus stop and waited 10 minutes or so for the bus to Victoria Point, where we'd gone shopping the first day.  When the bus was in sight, we all watched and waited expectantly for it to pull up and stop.  But, as we all stood there, waiting and watching, the bus drove right by us.

Of course we were all like, "What?  What was that?" especially because the next bus wasn't for another hour (they run the least on Sundays).  Then we saw that on the sign for the bus stop, beneath a picture of someone waving to the bus, it said "Hail driver."  So, realizing our mistake, we headed back the way we'd come to the other close bus stop, deciding to take a bus in the other direction, where there's another shopping center.  When that bus came into view we all waved frantically, and were very relieved when it pulled over and stop.

But then, after talking to the driver for a minute, we realized that that bus wasn't going where we wanted to go; the bus we wanted didn't run on Sundays.  So we finally gave up and headed back to the college.  It was pretty sad.

But after a little while of sitting around in the lounge area, some people got a ride to Victoria Point with one of the Australian students here, and Adam, Nora, Bekah and I ended up biking there, led by the only American student here, who's really into biking and was happy to show us the way.  It was a nice ride there, all downhill.  We bought a few groceries--everything was closed but the grocery stores and Kmart; things shut down around 5 here, it seems like--and then we had to bike back.  All uphill, this time, with our groceries.  It was exhausting, but we made it (walking up the last hill helped).  And we'd had our adventure for the day.

Yesterday Prof. Kettelkamp drove us to Victoria Point--he'll be doing that every Monday and Thursday, which is nice because I was expecting to have to pay for the bus every time we wanted groceries--so Nora, Adam and I went and got even more food.  The three of us have decided to cook together, and now we should be set for a while with food.  There was a community dinner last night for everyone at the college, and we ate burgers with fried egg and beetroot.  It was different, but good.

Class time... more soon.