Life as of now.

Hello all,

First off, this is a picture of the front of the Te Papa museum, the national museum of NZ in Wellington. Up to this point in life, I'm having a blast! New Zealand continues to amaze me. There have been no more trips or pepper spraying so in that sense, things have calmed down. We all know the city a lot better and classes have started. And with the classes, I have found a new love in my life... architecture. I have enough interest in it that a master's in architecture could be a real possibility. I don't know if it is the type of work it is (or lack of work coming from engineering) or its the design/ artistic appeal but I'm having so much fun with it. The only problem is that its expensive from supplies to getting things printed to more supplies. So my two architecture classes are going well, I'm also taking an Economics class and a Maori culture class (the Maori people are the indigenous people of NZ). The econ class is tough because it's all New Zealand econ, so it takes a lot more effort to get to where the other students are. And the Maori class is like a foreign language but I'll get through it. Here are two pictures of my first architecture project; We had to pick a quote about architecture and advertise it and make it into a billboard. So this is a picture I took of one of the buildings here and I printed it on draft paper so light can go through. I then got foam board and carved out the word "Beauty" into it and taped the picture to the board. This is so when the sun shines on it, if it were a billboard, the word would come thru the picture. And when it was dark it would just be architecture. It may help that the quote i picked was "The sun never knew how great is was until it struck the side of a building" by Louis Kahn. The first picture is the picture I took printed on the paper and the second is the project in the sun showing the word. You can see how big the paper is because in the second photo thats my thumb on the bottom.

Nothing too much has been happening beside all these architecture projects. The weather has been all over the place. One day it starts raining the next its 23 degrees Celsius... around 73 or 74 Fahrenheit. They also call Wellington the windy city of New Zealand, we have gusts of up to around 85 mph so it shakes the windows a little. Also, I almost forgot to mention, I made the soccer team here for the university. The tryout went well and the coach liked the way I played so I went to two other tryouts and made the team. Its a competitive team so its not just social play but I'm just really excited to get to play again. The first game is in a couple weeks so I will be sure to tell everyone how it all goes. And as of now, I'm just waiting for our Easter holiday which starts at the end of March. I'm taking a trip to tour the south island for 8 days. The first day we take a bus ride to the Franz Josef glacier. We sleep the night there and wake up to get fitted to our hiking boots and our ice picks. We spend around 6 or 7 hours hiking the glacier exploring ice ravines and caves. AFter we get off the glacier we spend the night in Franz Josef until the next day when we depart for Queenstown and Lake Mathieson. Hopefully we are able to arrive early enough to see the lake in the morning but its all dependent on everyone else. We then see what they call New Zealand's most bizarre attraction, "Puzzling World." The next day we get to go jet boating in the Shotover River. Once we are done, we get off the boat and immediately head up to do our bungee jump. Its 440ft high and its in the home of bungee jumping where it was first started, here in NZ. Then after we jump in 7.5 seconds of freefall, we go to the mountain luge course and do that for a couple hours. The next day is a free day with options like sky diving, canyon swinging, white water rafting, or something else crazy so it will be an exciting two days to say the least. Then we leave Queenstown and the last 2 days are for our own exploring and partying so it will be fun! Thats my trip, and only the first week of my break. We haven't decided what to do for the second week of the holiday but I'm sure we'll land on something.

So with the exception of school work, I still am having the time of my life! I mean we have a lot of European friends and the other night they made us stay out till 6 in the morning! So its a blast. So I will leave you with a couple more pictures of Welly.

-Karl

Also if anyone wants to add to the "Karl Needs Money" fund, just contact me and I can give you further details of the donation process. Thanks you.