It's finally snowing!

Solstice was survived ok and the days are now getting longer. Yeah! Since I forgot to take my camera to the festivities I will go on to more interesting things. Like the toilet. This is a picture of a NZ toilet tank:
The left button empties only half of the tank and the right one empties the whole tank. Kind of like the yellow-mellow idea without having to let anything mellow. Nice. Now if the water keeps gushing out into the bowl and doesn't want to stop, the lid needs to be removed:
WHERE IS THE CHAIN? The chain that gets tangled up and needs to be untangled? How can there not be a chain? How am I going to fix this without having a chain in this tank? After the initial shock about the missing chain wore off I decided to poke and squeeze all the random parts in there and after a little while the water actually stopped. Phew.

On a more positive note we finally got snow! And since I know some of you might not believe this I took a picture (the white stuff in there is the snow):
Luckily, a lot more snow fell in the mountains on the other side of the island and so I am in the process of getting my snowboard assembled for next weekend.

Meanwhile, a little update on office stuff (since that is what I came here for). First and foremost: our office has a window! With a nice view:
And here is the actual office with a computer called ICECREAM (brilliant Chris!)
And this is my adviser Pat Langhorne with outgoing grad student Daisuke:
My absolutely favorite thing though is the bike parking in the basement:
And my landlady is teaching me Enzed pronunciation: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." "Brown" and "lazy" are not going so well yet. "Over" isn't either. But I am working on it.

Dunedin Street Gig

Dunedin Street Gig was put on by Volunteer Otago last night and I went there and sold cookies and chocolate and ran the EFTPOS machine (the customers had to explain that word to me :) Lani got a bunch of young kids to organized the event and they did an excellent job. There were bands playing (one that played 80's music!), fire jugglers (and eaters!), a graffiti competition, a guitar hero competition, and face painting! It was held at Sammy's which is a pretty old theater kind of place. Looks like it was built in 1911 - haven't been able to get more info on it yet. But I took some pictures of the stage and the ceiling. Pretty impressive!
Happy Summer Solstice everybody! I am going to enjoy the winter solstice here at a big outdoor party tonight and will post something about that later.

Arrival in the land of sheep .... and the giant bath tub

Nobody seemed to care much about my overweight luggage and so here it is in another car on the other side of the world (only difference is this one is quite big compared to Ben's tiny BMW, that and of course I boarded the car on the wrong side and was very surprised to find a steering wheel there):I am currently staying in a house with a ginormous bathtub:

and no heat - as common in NZ. I was told that is the reason for lots of parties at people's houses all the time: to warm the place up!

And of course here is the obligatory sheep picture (taken 5 minutes after my arrival from the car):
All the white dots are sheep. But the sheep aren't really as numerous as the possums: while there are 15 sheep per person in NZ there are 20 possums per person! They have really soft fur and I am considering buying a handbag as a pet in lieu of having Kirikiri and Punipuni to keep me warm.

The best thing by far though is:
I almost bought a whole Apfelstruddel there upon my arrival. Decided against it since they might withdraw my visa if I gain too much weight :)

via the place with the really tiny shadows

San Francisco - the land of the mighty sunburn. We must have stuck out like sore thumbs with our Alaskan tan. Should have bought suntan lotion - oh well, I won't be getting another sunburn anytime soon I guess.

Off to a "heavy" start

The car is loaded - here I go! At least to the airport. Will see what happens there. The bike box is overweight for sure!