Pizza delivery!

This is why I love my roommate...

The Kiwi pronunciation of "Fish" ends up sounding like "fush"... and so naturally, being the old Kiwi English ladies we are, we talk about it to no end.

This is when we were delivering the pizza to the beater car winners (see previous post).

Sorry the video is shaky; I was laughing too hard...

The kiwi life...

So we have been in Invercargill the last three weeks (less a day trip to Queenstown and a 3 day tramp to Borland)...

Needless to say, it has been pure Neverland bliss.... here is what you can find us doing around town...

Riding our bikes to the beach...

and just when you thought the beach couldn't get any better...an ice cream truck pulls up... gild that lily!

After day 1 of school classes. Rough life, I know.

Queens Park: our default meeting/play place in the center of town. We spend a lot of time here and it is glorious.


Riding bikes through Queen's Park.

Queen's Park even has a reindeer, llamas, and an ostrich whom we named Ozzy, naturally. Everytime we ride past him Christina and I chortle like old British ladies. Actually, we talk like that regardless of Ozzy's presence...


Slacklining near the kiddie playground in Queens.


Come home from the park to the kiddies jumping on the trampoline with a sprinkler.
Go to the Sport Southland complex for some cycling championships...


Play Ultimate Frisbee in Queens Park... can you spot me? Yes, on the ground. I was never really that competitive haha!

And get too lazy to take off our helmets indoors...this is a sign for our school. Best face forward!!


Oh and the blue suit has already made a few appearances...stay tuned...

The Velodrome

Interrupting my stories about the 2-week camping trip to tell you about a little experience we had this morning at The Velodrome...part of a YMCA-on-steroids health club here in Invercargill.

Let me preface by saying I never have very adventurously ambitious ideas for what to do here...when I've traveled with friends, I'm more prone to rallying them to see a museum or monument.

We bike a minimum of an hour a day to get around places, which is usually somewhere where we are going to engage in more activity. So needless to say I’m pretty wiped out at the end of the days here.

This morning I was not planning to go to the Velodrome with my roommate because I wanted to sleep a little longer, but it ended up working out that she was going later.

Mind you, I never really know what I’m getting in for, which is great, because I’m a very cautious person by nature, and I just made a pact that I’d go with the flow more instead of always needing to know everything going on.

So all I’d heard were vague explanations here-and-there like:

“an indoor cycling track…

curved in such a way that it carries you with centripetal force...

and the bikes don’t have brakes.”

The bikes don’t have brakes?! Ok. But…fair enough, I was still game.

What I didn’t know was that

-the indoor cycling track would be curved as steep as 43 degrees!

- not only do the bikes not have brakes, but the pedals are connected to the back wheel, so you CAN’T STOP PEDALING.

-and therefore, to stop you have to keep pedaling (a couple laps depending on how fast you’d been going) until you slow down enough to stop yourself with your hand on a railing.

(What have they gotten me into this time?!)

The lady instructing us throughout gave us a little shpiel at the beginning, with things like “You must get going pretty fast…you must keep up your speed…you must have courage…you must concentrate on the track…and always keep pedaling”

Crazy Kiwis. She also assured us we'd be gracing up high on the track by the end of the hour...psh, yeah right.

But after having a moment of sheer terror, I just kind of closed off my mind to thinking and told myself subconsciously that I could do it…after all, other people were and weren’t getting hurt or falling. There was no room to be cautious: in fact, in this situation it would be the more dangerous mentality to have.

Aaand…

It was actually pretty amazing.

I got up higher than I ever expected...

And the time flew! We were done after an hour, which felt like 10 minutes.

Would have kept going, but we were tired, which wouldn’t be embarrassing save for the fact that:

a) you can visibly tell when people are fatiguing on the track… and

b) the really cute (age 19…but looked about 24) New Zealand world record holder who had just won a gold medal at the world cup in Beijing had just arrived for his workout. “Oh heeey…”

And because lots of my friends are religious…the track is life, on which you must keep pedaling; the centripetal force is God, which keeps you centered and safe so long as you have the concentration to move forward, and the power and courage to move up!