New Adventures

Sorry this email has been so long coming but with school and travel I have been swamped. Anyway, enough of the excuses and on to the actual information...
New Zealand is amazing! I love it here so much, and I can see myself returning to Wellington again to live. Wellington is much like a mix of Vancouver, BC, Portland, OR, and Bellingham, with lots of artistic people all over the city playing music and painting (gratify is all over, but it isn't associated with gangs, just really neat art). School is similar to back home; however, it is simultaneously harder and easier. The grading scale sets and A at anything above about an 85%, but they are much stricter about grades so hardly anyone gets an A, and a B is very very good. Thus far almost all of my assignments have received marks of around the A-B cut off point (even though it's an 80%) so I guess I''m doing alright. Another interesting thing is that there are tonnes of international students here, almost all of my friends thus far are American (and two Canadians), and most of my professors are not Kiwis as well. I have a British, American, Irish, and Kiwi professor, and have talked to a few others from around the world.
In one of my classes we have to make a poster for a conference on campus in two weeks time (similar to the poster I had to make in Pat Buckley's Borderlands class). Our poster is on the toxin 1080 which is used in New Zealand to kill possums, which are a major problem here. It should be interesting when it's finished. My class about Antarctica is going really well, and I've learned a lot about the continent and climate change, and almost all of my past Huxley classes have helped me understand what the professor is teaching us. I'm also in a class about globalisation which is very interesting, especially learning about it from a non-US perspective. It's rather refreshing actually. My final class is a basic GIS class, and I just made my first map yesterday. The class is very interesting, but quite difficult so far. Once I understand the computer system more it should get easier though.
Now on to travel...
We just finished up our mid-semester break where I traveled around the North Island for two weeks with some North American friends. We saw almost all of the island, and I took heaps of pretty pictures. It was a great time, but we all got a little annoyed at each other after being cooped up in a small car with the same people for the two weeks. I posted a bunch of the pictures I took on a flickr account, the URL is http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianfaulds/ . We rented a car for the time, and I drove a fair amount (it's on the left side of the road here) and now it feels natural it have the driver sitting and driving on the "wrong" side. Also there aren't many stop signs here, they are all "Give Way" or yield signs and round abouts so you never really have to stop. It's great!
Finally, the Rugby World Cup starts this Friday so the entire country will go crazy shortly. I'm going to go to the US-Australia game on September 23rd. Hopefully we won't get annihilated, but it looks like we will. It should still be fun though.
Well I guess that's about it for now, but I will hopefully have a bunch more to talk about shortly.