Midge bytes

Over Easter I went for a three day tramp with the Alpine club, around Cass Hill near Arthur’s Pass.  It rained the first day and was foggy throughout the six hour hike, so it was a lovely surprise when the second day dawned sunny and blue skies.  It turned out that we were staying in a beautiful twenty person hut surrounded by mountains (Hamilton Hut).  We took it fairly easy the second day, only hiked for about an hour, then spent the afternoon swimming in a river (snow fed, brrr) and relaxing.  The second nights hut was hand built in 1975 and quite shack like, but it was fun for a night!  I do like the huts, it’s really nice to know you can find shelter for a night.  However we were a long way from the pub lunches I take for granted in England, being in a beautiful, unspoilt, remote mountain region has its’ downsides! 

The scenery was really lovely <http://flickr.com/photos/smidgley> and the company was fun, the Alpine club are a nice bunch.  My hiking muscles were surprised to be used again after about a year off from serious walking, but I think a few more long walks and they’ll be back up to full speed…I hope so anyway! 

I have been given several bottles of wine for helping out in wineries   I’m storing it under my bed, for a little while at least! 

I spent ten hours helping press Chardonnay for sparkling wine at the uni winery on Friday afternoon and evening.  It was a fun, messy job!   Very sticky.  My new gum boots (people laugh when I call them wellies) have been well and truly christened.

Apart from that…I went to a farmers market in Lincoln this morning, and bought lots of mushrooms, which I straganoffed for dinner.  It was yummy, I used some red wine vinegar and veggie stock in addition to lots of mushrooms, onions and garlic and paprika.  I also bought strawberries and a pineapple, which are lovely, despite the absence of clotted cream.

This cooking is prevarication from essay writing, which is a slow and painful process.  I’m very glad I had fun in the winery, because it renewed my sense of why I’m here, the academic part will hopefully slot into place, but at least I’m gaining a good understanding of the job I want to do! 

My first couple of weeks have gone well and amazingly fast!  I have my own row of Pinot Gris to tend, with a partner…who happens to come from Somerset, which I found quite amusing.  So far we have leaf plucked (to expose the grapes to sunshine to aid ripening) and calculated possible yield (about half a tonne or 500kg if you prefer).  This is a huge crop for a single row of 72 vines, so we weren’t too irritated by a wax-eye (small hungry bird) which we had to chase out from under our bird net yesterday.  We only need about 85kg for our micro-vin project (making wine out of same grapes).  I’m really enjoying having lectures and popping up to the vineyard for some viticulture in between (or herbology as I’m thinking of it!)  I definitely feel like I’m at Hogwarts!

Winemaking and viticulture aside, the course is pretty fast paced science so my brain is definitely getting a work out, they are making me study economics and engineering, neither of which actually work very well in my head…I may have to pay someone to do those bits in future!  Hopefully I will be able to get the hang of them though!

We’ve been on three field trips to five different wineries so far, which have been informative and fun (we did get to try some wine).  I’ve also had a play up in the university winery today helping two former students bottle some 2006 Chardonnay.  I got to do the screw capping, quite a satisfying machine!  They kindly gave me a bottle, which I shall comment on in a month or so, as they suggested I left it in bottle for at least a month.

I actually left Canterbury for the first time last weekend and traversed the country all the way to the West coast, to Hokitika, where there was a Wildfoods festival.  Wild is definitely the right word as they were serving grubs and grasshoppers and mountain oysters amongst many other scary things.  I tried the mountain oysters, which is a euphemism for something not very nice at all, definitely involving tubes!  Luckily it was barbequed and surrounded by bread and onions so mostly disguised!  The festival was only a small part of the weekend, the main focus for Kiwis being drinking, which they do abundently and messily.  I enjoyed the scenery and tried to avoid being vomited on.  We made friends with lots of people, mostly from the Christchurch area, it seems that there was a mass exodus to the other side of the country!  The drive over was gorgeous, we crossed the Southern Alps at Arthurs Pass, going past all the closest skiing areas…very pretty!  It took about five hours to get to the other coast.
 
We camped in the garden of a backpackers hostel…was quite glad not to be inside as the owner had taken out all the beds for the weekend and just laid wall to wall mattresses down…which looked a trifle too cosy with strangers for my liking!  However the tent did get washed away by rain so not much sleep happened in any case.  We spent Saturday night by a bonfire on the beach, there were fires right the way along the beach, which was very pretty, despite the occasional rain shower.

I got a job today, in the university bar ‘Mrs O’s’, which I start tomorrow!  I’m very pleased about that, they seem like nice people to work for, at the ‘interview’ this evening I was fed and they will pay me for it   Which was a nice surprise! 

I think that about sums it up for the moment, we’re having a party on Friday, to which we invited some of the people we met at the festival and I have a huge and slightly alarming amount of reading and writing to do…all about wine though, which seems to help!

More photos are on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/smidgley

I’ve arrived in New Zealand!  Got here on Monday night, to find by bedroom already occupied by two French backpackers, which alarmed me a little…they were friends of my new flatmate Amandas’ though so all was fine.  Have settled into my flat, it’s a nice little log cabin affair, just like a ski chalet, although a trifle mouldier and more beaten up than any chalet I’ve stayed in.  There is a visiting cat and a possum, who I haven’t seen yet but have heard clog dancing on the roof.  I have three flatmates, two Kiwis and one Californian, all girls.

My time so far has mostly been occupied with registering and going to on campus orientation talks and parties, quite fun but rather full of drunk freshers.  I have taken the bus into Christchurch, which is about thirty minutes drive away and seems a lot like Exeter so far…more on that when I’ve explored further.  Lincoln is a nice little township, there is one very scary pub, which is fun but I’ve decided not to work at as the blood and alcohol were mixing in the wrong place.  It is definitely a "bring your own wellies" place!

The Uni is on the Canterbury Plains, which are very flat (big surprise!)  The Southern Alps are beautiful in the distance and I’m really looking forward to playing in them!  I’m going to borrow a bike from a very kind person who has given up cycling, so I should be able to whizz around campus and into Christchurch on days off.  Campus is very nice, with lots of good lawns for sitting on and looking contemplative and some nice eat and drinkeries.  They are very proud of the library (which I shall take a photo of soon) it’s a pretty building with arches and twiddly bits, not many like that round here, they are mostly very functional with corrigated iron roofs (that word looks wrong somehow).

Australia was a good break, Louisa and Mikes’ house is lovely, the veranda around the house is up in the tree canopy so I spent a lot of time birdwatching on their swing seats.  The pool was fun too!  Did a lot of beach and rainforest walks and revisited Corrumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, which was worth a second look.  High points were seeing a Tawny Frogmouth night jar sitting on my bedroom windowsill in the afternoon, watching a strange gig by a performer called ‘That one guy’ who played a synthesizer made out of a bent drainpipe and also a saw and a boot!  Sitting in the pool watching rainbow lorikeets fly overhead was really nice too and going riding with Louisa was good fun.  She nearly bought the horse she rode as he was a nice baby (three year old).  I made myself a bit useful by lining some curtains for Lou and Mikes bedroom, which actually look rather good

More soon when the real term begins, brain coming out of mothballs!