Dunedin

    During the few days in Queenstown before heading to Dunedin, I found an excellent little coffee shop (Vudu Café) with a great nook for reading in.  It had great coffee too, but the music… oh the music.  I felt like I was in a circus, or at least a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  I literally almost offered to make a playlist on my iPod for them, but decided to just use my headphones. 

    There was a flyer around town that said, “Ultimate Frisbee, Thursdays at 7 PM, at the fields.”  I’ve been dying to play, so I headed to what I thought to be “the fields” (a vague description by the way).  Only 5 or 6 people showed up and the advertiser didn’t even show, but we threw the disc around anyways.  The Austrian girl I had played with before showed up, as well as a girl from Chicago who played club, a local bro,  and some foreign guy who insisted on only throwing no looks.  The grass and weather was perfect, the snowcapped mountains loomed to the East and the setting sun to the West.  I didn’t have my camera, but it was a joke it was so nice.

    I had to catch a 6:55 AM bus to Invercargill, an intermediary town to get to Dunedin.  I almost missed my transfer bus because I was asleep, which would have sent my backpack to Dunedin and me back to Queenstown.  Thankfully, I got to Invercargill with all my stuff and waited for the next bus.  On this bus, we made a stop to pick up a few people and I got off with another guy to go to the restroom, with me going in second.  I came out just in time to see my bus about 3 blocks down the road, leaving me stranded in a town I didn’t know existed until that moment.  Thankfully, it braked, turned, and made a loop around to pick me up.  The driver said something and I couldn’t quite tell if he was trying to make me feel stupid or trying to make himself not feel stupid, but either way I thought he was the stupid one. 

    The hostel that I had booked online for Dunedin was full – so full that my online booking didn’t go through and they didn’t decide to tell me until I got there.  The receptionist said I was the 40th person looking for a room because of the rugby game.  He made a last ditch call to another hostel that had just freed up one space, and I got it.  When I got to the hostel, there were a few guys in front of me looking for one room, and all of them got turned away.  I had gotten super lucky – and this hostel had free wifi too, which I haven’t even seen yet!

 Local train station - not my hostel

    I made my way over to the brand new rugby stadium, built for the Rugby World Cup a few months earlier.  I guess it was big, a quaint 30,000 person stadium, but once you’ve seen Jerry Jones’ Death Star in Arlington, “big” becomes pretty damn small by comparison.  Let’s just say it was big for a sport that nobody in the USA has ever thought twice about.  People would say, “the USA did well in the World Cup,” and I would say, “we have a rugby team?” or “there’s a rugby World Cup?”  I had pretty bomb seats, and sat next to two local women in their 30s.  I knew from the get go that they would be worthless at helping me understand the game – they sat there with a glazed look and clapped when either team made a big play or try (touchdown).  But even they knew that this was a big game: first home game of the season, against bitter rivals, and in a brand new stadium.  I had picked a good one.  The home team, the Otago Highlanders, won by a narrow margin, even though the scoreboard clock was off by 5 minutes and almost cost them the game. 

    The next day, I slept in, went to a coffee shop, read for a while, then did a tour of the Speight’s beer brewery, “The Pride of the South.”  It’s a pretty unique place in a couple of ways: it’s a gravity brewery (raw ingredients go to the roof, are processed on each floor, then beer comes out the bottom floor) and sits on its own fresh water aquifer.  Super neat.

    I went back to the hostel last night, and this was what I saw in the bed across the room from mine.  The German guy staying in the room baked some bread apparently.  I don't know why it's in his bed.  Bread bed.  Also, I found out yesterday morning that somebody stole a few of my sausages and one of my premade grilled cheese sandwiches from the hostel fridge.  They even put the rest of my stuff back in the wrong fridge.  Whatever.