Pop Pop!

Well it has been quite the wonderful week since I last wrote to you all. I suppose I'll start off from last Friday. For the most part my days/afternoons have taken on a similar eat-run errands-dance-eat pattern that I am particularly loving. Last Friday was no different, but that night was even better, because I went out with about 8 people who I've met over the past couple of weeks here who do varying forms of break dancing, popping, tricking etc. Basically all very cool forms of dance.
We started off with some drinks at my friend Tali's house (a fellow female dancer). I only had one drink, ensuring that I would be functional and aware for the remainder of the evening. The entire night was basically a dance party everywhere we went. We started off at a club called 'Boston' which was really great, because at the beginning we had the entire dance floor to ourselves, but then other people started invading the floor, and so we left. We walked down Courtenay Place (which is basically the bar/club hub in Wellington) and started dancing outside this bar that had really great music, but not so much floor room inside. The employees at the bar (called "Betty's") actually cleared away some tables and chairs and such for us to come inside, and gave our group 2 complimentary pitchers of beer- very generous. We stayed there for a while, because it wasn't too crowded. The remainder of the night we stopped by for a very short time at a Karaoke bar (awful, apparently the music between the drunk singers is supposed to be good, but it wasn't that night) and at the Big Kumara- again, didn't stay too long there, because it's definitely not that great a place to be. After that we all went our separate ways for the night. I was pretty shy about dancing around all of the amazing dancers that were there, but I started opening up a bit, so hopefully when we go out this weekend, I'll be a bit more ambitious.

Saturday was super rainy and windy and miserable out, so a few of us ventured into town for a walk for a bit, but most of the day was spent doing absolutely nothing and hanging out with people on my floor. We watched 'Big Mama 2" on tv that night and also "American Beauty" on someone's laptop. It was a big pillow and blanket fest in the common room- very cozy.

Sunday I got to skype with my beautiful family- Mom, Dad and Nan. It was very nice to see their faces! I had dance practice that afternoon, but the rest of the day was pretty uneventful.

Monday was technically the official start of classes, but I've organized my schedule so that I have Mondays off (score!), so I spent the morning buying my text books, getting my student ID card, doing laundry etc. Then I went to a film set I was invited to (by the director- I met him at a cafe on my first day in Wellington), and it was super neat to see them doing some scenes and such for their short film. I helped them clean up after and talked to some of the cast. I got one of the main actor's numbers for a friend of mine- first time playing matchmaker, and it was kinda fun. Then, you guessed it, danceeeeeeee practice (when in doubt, that's probably where I am). This is also wherethe title of the post comes in- one of the b-boys from Japan (Nan mie) was doing some popping, but instead of calling it 'popping', he called it 'pop pop'. It resulted in a great deal of teasing afterwards, and he hasn't been able to live it down since. I had a quick dinner when I got back to res, and then went for a walk with some people from my floor and the one above. We walked down to the harbour, went to the grocery store (I spent about ten minutes deliberating over the gluten free cookies before deciding that they all looked wretched and bought some coconut chocolate and mints instead).

This is our lovely group at the harbour.

And on to Tuesday...
My first day of classes (I only had one) went just as I expected- intro to the course, this is what you will be learning, blah blah blah. I stopped by the film set again yesterday but didn't do much. I ended up talking to the producer, who was interested in having me come help them out more in the future, which I thought was pretty cool. I had dance as well, and Tali and I worked on our break routine (very short, meant to help us get ready for this Saturday when we all go out again). I did some reading for my classes today, but just took it pretty easy for the rest of the night.

.... TODAY:
I was, I'm happy to say, quite productive today. I got up at a reasonable time (8ish) and did some reading before class. I had my 'Religion and Spirituality in New Zealand Literature and Creative Arts' class today (quite the mouthful, isn't it?). It seems like it's going to be a pretty good class, and despite my ignorance of NZ literature and artwork, I think I'll be able to make do. My Maori studies class was right afterwards, and that was really good- the lecturer was very knowledgeable about the topic and he didn't just read off of his slides either. He basically just used a map for the majority of the lecture, and talked about the migration patterns. Lunch, and then a significant amount of reading before dance today. Practice was kinda cool today because a photographer came near the end of practice and took some shots of us- I'll post some when I get an e-mail from him! It started raining, so we cut the jam short. Tonight I re-typed all of my lecture notes from today, and we had a fire drill- woot woot. A note to anyone from New Zealand reading this- your weather here is really not that bad- or cold- I would dearly like to take some of you to Winnipeg in the middle of February and see how things turn out. I mean this in the nicest way possible, as I love you Kiwis dearly, but when it comes to weather, you guys have it quite well off. And that, mes amis, is my synopsis.

Kiwi slang: "That's so mean!"
Translation: "That's so great!"

Yeah, I had to ask about that one...