Back to what I came here for...study

 It feels like months since my last blog post; I've met so many new people been to so many cafes!
Everyone has now arrived and today I had my first lecture in exactly four months; I have been doing some work this past week as I started the research and literature essay for my dissertation, ready for going back to Lancaster. 
Most of the week however has been spent meeting up with various groups for coffees, cooking and baking or free food. 

Whilst eating the free food I met many new people from across the world at the international orientation, the international buddy meet up and the exchange breakfast. I invited some of these people along to a picnic in the botanical gardens; there ended up being around 25 people, most of which are pictured above, meaning there was loads of food as everybody brought a dish. I've discovered that my new cleaning job is right next to Moore Wilson's, a really nice supermarket which sells food from around the world; so after running out of time, I bought a pizza base and toppings from here to take along to the picnic. I had to wait until the next day to make my cheese scones. We also had a few welcome events in the evenings so I saw some more of the night life in Wellington. On Friday night, after moving Maxence to his new house, a group of us went to the night market where there's a range of food stalls; I had dumplings in miso soup.
Most of these stalls, plus about 30 others and loads of craft ones were then out in the sun at the Newtown festival on Sunday where our friend was playing the guitar. Newtown is about 20 mins from Wellington on the bus and once a year holds this big festival with music and food. There was a lovely atmosphere but it was very busy, I had the potato twist shown to the left.

That evening Liam kindly invited me to a Spanish opera with him. Someone at the Spanish embassy, where he works, had given him the tickets to thank him for his work. When we got there we found ourselves sat two seats along from the Spanish ambassador and behind the Argentinian ambassador in pretty much the best seats in the house; I barely dared to move throughout the entire performance! It was a wonderful evening; I really enjoyed the opera, despite not being entirely sure what was going on some of the time and the music was incredible, if very short at just one and a half hours.

I can't quite believe that all the new internationals have just arrived when I now have under a third of my time left here. I'll have to make sure I make the most of it and grab any experiences I can.