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We're here! (and we've been here three months...)
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Hi! I had the best intentions for this website and keeping you all up to date with pictures of New Zealand and Antarctica....but I had no idea how busy the first few months were going to be! We have happily settled in to a cool art deco apartment in downtown Christchurch, across the street from the art gallery and the arts centre and a block away from Hagley Park. Hagley Park is the world's second-largest urban park, after New York's Central Park. we stroll around in the botanical gardens there, and John runs there, and I intend to run there but somehow never manage to. The Arts Centre is the old University of Canterbury and now houses artists' studios and shops, and every weekend there is a market, with vegetables, crafts, food, street performers, music, etc.
I take the bus up to the University of Canterbury almost every day. Since we arrived, I've been participating in GCAS--Gateway Antarctica's Graduate Certificate in Antarctic Studies. It's been a terrific way to start my research; I had 8 hours of lectures a day, five days a week. The people lecturing are Antarctic scientists, bureaucrats, NGO workers, tour operators, and so on...I've gotten to meet a lot of people through this program and now have so much to follow up on. The part of my year ends February 11--I'm just finishing up some papers now and conducting some interviews.
On Feburary 12, John and I are driving to the North Island for a week-long Fulbright orientation. We'll then be hiking for a couple week with my cousin Marc and hopefully my Antarctica friend Nadine from Banana, Australia. Then I'll be back at UC and continuing my work. The O'Reilly family will be coming over for a couple weeks in March, so we're looking forward to showing them around. I went to Scott Base, Antarctica in December as part of GCAS. I'm not really sure what to say about it yet. It wasn't really that cold--it was as warm as 4 degrees Celsius and as cold as -22 C with windchill. We camped in tents, except for a couple nights on base and one night I slept in a hole in the snow as part of my Antarctic Field Training. We got to travel quite a bit more than most people coming to the Antarctic get to, and we conducted four scientific projects while we were down there. I was in camp for Christmas; luckily, we all had our 1980s prom dresses and suits with us, so we looked pretty good.
While I was south, our friend Nicky from CA by way of Milledgeville, Georgia, was here and she and John did some travelling around for three weeks or so. John has been working as a porter at the hotel by the International Antarctic Centre, so he spends lots of time with pilots and scientists. The highlight, I think, was when he got "the dude nod" from John McCain when the senator was heading down to Antarctica as part of the VIP contingent. He also works at our "local"--the vegetarian restaurant and brewery called the Dux de Lux--a couple days a week. I'm going to quit typing for now and try to figure out how to put pictures on here. Hopefully this will be updated again in less than 3 months! We would love to hear from you! J & J
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