Its remarkable to me that I've almost been here for a month, let alone only having 3.25 months left. TIME FLIES when you are constantly on the move. Welcome to my life. I am about halfway done with a pair of 3,000 word essays for my 300 (400 in America) levels. One is on Perestroika and how the economic, social, and political reconstructions completely dismantled the USSR. The other is about "New" Social Movements like environmentalism, feminism, peace movement, anti/pro abortions, etc. Almost all new movements come from the left wing, which is a good sign for the future of humanity. With a few exceptions of course.

I officially have all five of my flatmates addicted to Entourage, I know it was a good idea to bring my external hard drive. I have such a bad eating disorder: I have already consumed about $500US of food...I don't know what to do because if I am hungry I am going to eat. I am even buying by far the cheapest foods, not buying alcohol, and only going out to eat if the meal is >5$. There is really no alternative when your playing ball, lifting weights, running, or hiking 7 days a week. Also, with no car, I am walking about 5 miles daily just to get from place to place. It feels good to not be contributing AS much carbon footprint as I do in the states. A nice 4.5 month break from driving and drying clothes.

In contrast to the last statement, I learned on my flatmate Abbeys car how to drive in NZ yesterday. The steering wheel is on the right side of the car, and they drive on the left side of the road. The blinker is on the right too; several times I turned on the windshield wipers. I actually did a fairly good job driving. I don't think I broke any laws at all. The weirdest law they have is if someone wants to turn right across traffic, they have the right away. Not me. In America, imagine not being able to turn right on red, or even green for that matter, because the person across the street turning right across traffic has the right of way. SO DUMB! New Zealand is the only country on the planet with this law, and they are altering it within the next year or so. I drove to the grocery store and Baldwin St. (The steepest street in the entire world, I think Lombard in they Bay is 2nd).

My Polish roommate Matthew is never home, he is always out and about or adventuring somewhere on the island. He came home last night so I got to hang out with him for a while. I really love when he is around because I usually live with four girls and need some testosterone around. Although Paige is kind of like a guy anyways with a trucker's mouth and the best beer pong player that I've seen here. Matthew taught me some cool things in Polish. He is fluent in English, German, and Polish, while currently learning Spanish and French. That would be the greatest benefit of living in the EU with basically a transnational government and no trade/travel barriers. They have 7 different noun forms. Imagine that. Not only trying to learn a bunch of verb forms, but SEVEN different noun forms. For example, Kevin, Kevina, Kevineam, Kevinowi all mean my name but in different scenarios. Polish has 9 additional letters in their alphabet and they drop our X. Zobaczytem Jak Kevin Gra W Koszykowke means I saw Kevin play basketball (note that that is not spelled correctly because I had to insert our letters for some of theirs). This one KILLS me: beaobachtungspanzerwagen. That means military car. One word? Are you kidding me?

As a flat we watched the film "Out of the Blue" that was about a schizophrenic guy that lived in a town of 50, and murdered 13 of the residents in 1990. As you all know, I hate movies like that and was hiding behind my Macbook for most of it. It reminded me SO much of the Kip Kinkel shooting at Thurston when I was a kid. "Out of the Blue" occurred only like fifteen minutes from where I live, so tonight we are driving the the EXACT shooting area. It creeps me out that people live there now.

I got to get to class, but I'll let you know what happens over the weekend. I really want to go to Milford Sound which is where a lot of Lord of the Rings and Avatar were filmed. I think we're gonna have to postpone that trip though because it is more than a two night kind of trip.