Kayaking in Dunedin

I joined the uni kayaking club here because they have lots of river boats and free sessions to teach you to roll a kayak, which is always something I’ve wanted to do. Today was their introductory session, on the ocean, in the pouring rain. About 60 people showed up and they only had 30 boats so we huddled together on the shore awaiting our turns. Then when it finally was our turn after practicing a few strokes in the boats and paddling around we all had to flip and dunk ourselves in the ocean! I’ve ocean kayaked quite a bit before, but river boats are completely different. They’re much more responsive to paddling, which meant that since I’m used to putting a lot of power into strokes to move around in long skinny ocean kayaks I was spinning around a lot and constantly almost flipping myself over in small fat river boats. Not that it mattered much in the end when we all flipped ourselves over. Most of the people at the kayak session were exchange students from around the world, but over half of them were from the states! I was a bit disappointed because I didn’t exactly come to NZ to hang out with Americans. Although one friend in the tramping club told me most of them tend to drop off once they realize it’s cold, wet, and kind of hard work tramping in New Zealand …

Tomorrow is the tramping clubs first hike of the season. Which is more of a 2 hour walk really up a hill above town called Mt. Cargill. My Canadian friend Madelaine and I have planned to wear our harnesses and rope up as if we were doing glacier travel while walking up the hill. If anybody asks us what we’re doing our response will be “safety first of course!”. That is if we can keep a straight face. Either people will think it’s hilarious, or we’ll be “those weird Canadians” for the rest of the year.

Toga parties in Dunedin

This happened in the city I’m living in a few blocks away from my flat … toga party riots

Integrated Genomics Research at the University of Otago

I thought I would write a little bit about the job I got here in Dunedin. If you’re interested in genomics or bio-informatics or are just killing some time read on …

I’m working in a biochemistry lab at the University of Otago doing some bio-informatics related programming for them. For those of you unfamiliar with what bio-informatics is, wikipedia defines it as “the application of information technology to the field of molecular biology”. A simple explanation is that computers are very useful in storing and analyzing the huge amounts of data you acquire when doing any kind of research in molecular biology, whether that be genomics, proteomics or something else.

In my lab they are mainly studying microRNA, particularly the untranslated regions. Right now I am modifying a web application called Galaxy, which allows researchers to do large scale genome analysis. It provides a single place to draw on data from many different sources and use integrated tools to analyse the data. It also provides a simple API for developers to add their own tools. I am currently working on adding tools to the Otago University version of Galaxy that specialise in microRNA analysis.

If none of that made sense to you then just take my word for it, it’s pretty cool stuff!

Learning Python

Warning: This posting contains content that only people with an IT background may find mildly amusing. If you’re not one of those, feel free to stop reading now.

I’ve been teaching myself python at work, since I have no previous experience with it and will need to do some scripting. I typed in the following, which failed miserably:

>>> if !a:
File “”, line 1
if !a:
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

and then thought to myself, “friends have told me python is very easy to code with, maybe I’ll try this”:

>>> if not a:
… print “hello”
…
hello

Which worked beautifully and brought me great joy! Why don’t other languages work so nicely?

Finding work in New Zealand

I won’t be picking fruit! I’ve managed to find myself a job here in Dunedin working for the University of Otago in their bioinformatics department, which I’m pretty excited about. I owe my friend Madelaine a lot of thanks for hooking me up with the job, I was feeling a bit surprised because everything worked out so easily. I’ll be working on adding some new tools for visualization of genomic data for the next 3 months in a biochemistry lab. It’s a bit odd though to be thinking about working again full time after nearly 6 months of travel and not work. I’m actually really looking forward to living somewhere semi-permanently and not living out of a backpack for a while. First though I have to find myself a place to live, which is proving to be a bit frustrating, but entertaining as well. There are tons of students flats (NZ speak for houses) in Dunedin looking for flatmates (if you ask about roommates they look at you funny). However, most of them are 1st and 2nd years, and as much fun as re-living that period of my life sounds, I don’t think I want to spend the next 3 months partying *every* single night. Dunedin is known as being somewhat of a university-party town. I spent this weekend looking at places to live because the weather is terrible for going outside due to a cyclone hitting the west coast … yes a cyclone. Here’s a short summary of the places I’ve looked at so far, feel free to vote for your favorite:

1. 4 guys, 19 – 20 years old, quiet, one deer hunter, one offered me a kayak from his parents place, pros: nice guys, kayak cons: they might find out how old I am and call me old

2. 1 Asian girl from Auckland, upon looking at her place I asked her if anybody was living there currently because there was no food in the cupboards and no furniture, to which she responded that she’d been living there for a week …

3. Giant boarding house of 13 rooms, friendly landlady

4. Boarding house of 5 rooms, all pink with flowery bedspreads, pros: ok with only a 3 month lease, cons: creepy landlord and no other tenants yet (bad sign in a city full of people looking for a place to live)

Looking for a place to live in NZ

I’m back in Dunedin and looking for a place to live. Here are some of the more entertaining posts online for flatmates:

“2 existing flatmates. Professional father and 16 year old daughter.”

“3 existing flatmates. Current flatmate is a small Chinese family”

“We should probably be able to procure some venison off one flatmate (a keen hunter) from time to time, and I have apricots for africa (live on an orchard). Otherwise none of us have any real dietary requirements.”

Arthur’s Pass National Park

I headed off to Arthur’s Pass with Kyra and Rob for a few days of tramping up mountains before they head home from New Zealand. Arthur’s Pass is a popular camping spot being only a couple of hours from Christchurch and having some spectacular mountain scenery. We got there at 10am Tuesday and decided to scramble up the Aiken track towards Aiken mountain and see how far we could get before the bluffs at the top got too sketchy for us to follow. On the way up we took a side tour to Devil’s Punchbowl falls, a classic walk in the pass that almost everybody passing through does. At the falls viewpoint we were chatting with a man who gave us his business card for a hostel he ran and said to us “you should come and visit us on the other side of the world”. We looked at his card and realized he was from Nova Scotia and we had a laugh about that, promising if we were ever in Nova Scotia to come say hello. We then headed up the mountain, and kept going for a bit after breaking the tree line but then we could see rain and winds coming towards us so decided to head down and not get caught out in the exposed mountain top.

The second day we had perfect tramping weather, blue skies and not much wind so we decided to head up the classic tramp in Arthur’s Pass – Avalanche Peak. At 1833m it’s one of the higher peaks in the park and once you get through the trees you have incredible views of several mountain ranges. Also on the top are kea birds, indiginous parrots in New Zealand and the only alpine parrots in the world. Sitting eating lunch at avalanche peak we had to watch our belongings as kea birds are incredibly curious and will steal your lunch, pack and anything you leave unattended. They also love shiny things and we found the next morning that they had stolen my camping pot and managed to unscrew the handle!

Our last day we decided to head back one day early because it had started pouring rain and we were getting flooded out of our campsite. In addition Arthur’s Pass was overrun with people doing the coast to coast race, which is a running, biking, kayaking race across the width of the south island in one day. The highway was packed with cars, every single one of which had a bike and kayak on the roof!

Driving on the left side

I don’t think I’m ever going to get the hang of traffic in New Zealand. Four months of insane South American cities I can handle but here in New Zealand I keep almost getting hit by cars! First you have the fact that people drive on the left hand side of the road, and bike on the left, and swim on the left … you get the picture. Plus pedestrians don’t have the right of way here so you’d better not expect anybody to stop for you at crosswalks. Every time I go biking I shoulder check the wrong way and crossing the street is just as dangerous. So while the muggers and kidnappers in latin america didn’t get me, the drivers in New Zealand might

I spent the last week just hanging out in Christchurch, enjoying the beach and some short hikes, as well as yummy NZ fish and chips (they really love their fish and chips). I love the beaches here, it’s been a long time since I swam at one with open ocean all the way to another continent and the waves here are massive and tons of fun to play in. This week Kyra, Rob and I are heading to Arthur’s Pass to go camping and hiking for a few days before they go home to Vancouver and I head back to Dunedin.

———————–

NZ Dictionary:
pharmacy = chemist
shout me a drink! = get me a drink!

“The sheep are not mocking you!”

I arrived in Christchurch and had a great reunion with my friends Kyra and Rob (who have been living in NZ for the past few months) at the bus station, it was fabulous to see them again. It was a really hot summer afternoon (oh the joy of summer in January!) so we decided the best way to spend it was drinking beer and eating fish and chips. We called our other friend Sam (a kiwi I met while he was on exchange in Vancouver) and had a gloriously lazy afternoon and evening. I’ve never been a big fan of fish and chips but they were actually yummy here. It was really nice to meet up with old friends again on the other side of the world!

Then today Kyra and Rob took me on a hike in the Port Hills above Christchurch. It was a super windy day, New Zealand gets all the weather systems blowing up from Antarctica so it can go from sunny and warm to cold and rainy really quickly. We had great views of the city and the surrounding suburbs and of course lots and lots of sheep!

“The sheep are tempting me with their tantalizing fluffiness!” – Kyra, who then tries to sneak up on one for a photo and it just runs away
- Rob mutters something under his breath about the stupid sheep always running away
“The sheep are not mocking you!” – Tracy