The weather plays games with me.

Poured buckets of rain this morning, hardest it's rained since I've been here, it was absolutely crazy. I swear those water droplets were going over terminal velocity, it was just a dull roar inside the buildings, you could barely hear the teacher.
As such I figure, I'll bring my raincoat, won't bother going climbing today either. Well despite the formation of a minor lake in our sports field, the rain did decide to stop just long enough for me to get from the bus to school, and since there's almost always a way to get from one end of the campus to the other with minimal exposure to outdoor elements, no matter how round about, I managed to do pretty well without the rain coat.
And by the end of the day every single cloud had gone off to OZ, so I could have gone climbing too.
*sigh*

Here it is

This is the post you've all undoubtedly been looking forward to. I was just waiting until we got the pictures back from the photographers that were there (god knows I didn't take any). Anyway getting on with it.
The first picture is of the exceedingly awkward gauntlet of teachers that we had to shake hands with upon entering the ball. I'm somewhere close by in that picture, just out of sight.
The second picture is of the set up. See those precariously perched
plastic stars in between the candles? Those became issues later on when it was discovered (the hard way) that they were extremely flammable. I happened to be sitting nearby when ours caught so I managed to blow it out. Another table was less fortunate and had to drop theirs in a water jug.
The third picture is a lovely little gathering of all my friends, except for the guy with the red arrow, I have no idea who he is, though I'm sure someone knows him.
The fourth picture is me and my ball-date Amy.
The fifth is me and my friend Brooke (who wasn't in pic 3)
The sixth is a long exposure picture (I can only assume they did that because a flash would look like shit on a dance floor) of a congo line that formed briefly. The awkwardly angled young lad who you can actually see the face of is named Lucas.

STATUS REPORT

OVERALL:
Not much

SPECIFIC EVENTS:
We went on a night hike to butterfly creek state park. It was a large event/kind of race. You had to be paired up with someone else and finish together. Neville and I ended up coming in second for men's pairs. Sian and her partner came in last, like out of 400 people spanning at least three different events and various category's, dead last.

PICTURE STATUS:
-None- it was the same hike I did earlier (April 12, 2009) on when I first got here. If you look back a few posts, save the pictures from the previous hike, then add a blue tint and a grey to black radial gradient overlay at around 50% alpha value, you should get something similar to what I was seeing.

UPCOMING EVENTS:
School ball this Saturday.

Rainbow Connection

Why is it that the when the buses don't stop at a bus stop, its when it's raining? I had to race another bus in the pissing rain to Queen'sgate (the mall) from school. Two bus stops away at full sprint. What pisses me off more is that by the time I get on the bus, I'm too out of breath to tell the bus driver off for not looking at the stops.
But good things do come of rain. On the way up to the brewery last Saturday I snapped a bunch of pictures of a few different rainbows. Some of them were really brilliant, good solid half-arcs.

Tui Brewery

AFS ran a trip to Tui Brewery. The brewery only operates on Friday's, so it was pretty empty. You got a ticket for lunch, three beers, and a complementary glass tankard for $15, not a bad deal if you ask me. The actual production line has a small assortment of vehicles on one side. They have their own firetruck, I wonder what that says about the saftey of the working environment, is it good because they have one, or bad because they need one? On the other side they had a large advertisment with all the "Tui Girls" (attractive women employed with what amounts to a cerimonial position) in a lake. The tour guide has a fun little competition to see who can find the yellow fish, cheerfully pointing out that it's almost always a woman who finds it. Sure enough the first person to call it out was a woman, but here's my theory. The fish looks nothing like a fish from the distance we were at. It isn't bright yellow, it's more of a pale butter colour. It was also the first thing my eyes snapped to when she said "find a yellow fish". Heres the thing, it doesn't look like a fish, it looks like a tear in the paper. Now if a guy say's "is that it?" and he's wrong, its "obviously" because he was too -distracted-. If a womans wrong, it's just, whoops, no, try again. So you understand us males hesitating to call out our find, and the spoils went to the women... again. I just dont think it's a fair test is all, the pressures on the men, and soaked women in skin tight clothes have nothing to do with it.
All in all the tour was boring, the beer mediocre, and the food far below par (though all still at a good price). The highlight of the trip was two rounds of pool while a second group finished their tour. Tui's colours are orange, white, and black, so naturally all the pool balls were either 5's (solid orange) or 13's (orange stripe). Teams of three, boys against girls, boys won both games. Now we're even.

For Any Nightlife Travelers

Here's another thing to note if you ever come to New Zealand, this is at least the impression I got.
New Zealand goes to bed at 9:00 sharp. That means most day's everything but night clubs and bars closes at 9:00 at the latest. Most close at 6:00, the mall starts to close at 5:00 except for the cinema which runs until 9:00.
Night life is from 10:00 - midnight. After that the buses stop running and you're stranded unless you have a car. Since most people don't bother with cars if they live anywhere near a bus stop, this means that most people leave anything at 11:30. They do have late night buses on Saturday, because apparently people never do anything on Friday night. If you're found existing past 1:00 am, you're probably going to get some questions asked by cops. Conveniently for me as I was on my way home last night, there was a very loud, very drunk man pissing on a bakery to keep them occupied.