Kiwis Nest and Flat-Hunting

Never have I eaten so many peanut butter-banana sandwiches. And yet, they never get old. Interestingly, peanut butter-cucumber works pretty well too. Adds a nice crunch.

So anyway, the first week I was here I spent at the Kiwi's Nest backpacker's hostel, where everybody was really nice. There were a bunch of other students looking for places to live and a few tourists just checking out Dunedin (which is a great city by the way). I actually found another American who brought a bike over, so we had a bike-building party in the hallway where we shared tools and tried to figure out how to get our bikes back together. Amazingly, my bike still works! I barely believe it myself.

Apparently the way housing here works is that a few days before classes start the entire university population descends upon the city and then begins to search for places to live ("flats" in local terms). A rather stressful process if you ask me. I (along with about 5 million of my co-patriots) applied for housing in the University owned flats, which are supposed to group internationals with Kiwis and make the whole process much simpler, but was put on the "wait list" (read: "Snowball's chance in hell" list). This is apparently because the university gave a bunch of its flats to first-year residential colleges while at the same time accepting about the population of India as American study-abroad students. This left me searching desperately for a place to live, preferably not too far, not too loud, and with some chill Kiwis. Unfortunately, nobody wants to give people a single-semester lease which made it pretty much impossible to find a place. Finally I ended up in a modest flat with 3 girls from Bryn Mawr (sorority in Northeast somewhere) whose school agreed to replace them for next semester.

I had met one of the girls in the LA airport, and she seemed really cool. The other two are also really cool, but unfortunately when you put them all together they get a bit too "WOOOO!! GIRLS LOOSE IN A FOREIGN LAND, AND LOOK, THERE'S MALES!!" for my liking. But that's ok, they're not too bad. The flat is not much to look at from the outside, but the inside is newly redone and it came with beds and all new whiteware (stove, microwave, fridge/freezer, washer/dryer, dishwasher which we have yet to use). We have some pretty nice neighbors who come over to visit and invite us places too, which is cool. Not lifelong friend types, but cool to know.

And that's how we all became the Brady Bunch.