A Good Day

Sports Thought: Looks like the Ags should be in the tournament! They beat ranked Mizzou this weekend for their fifth or sixth straight, which should easily take them in as like an 8 or 9 seed. Good enough.
New Zealand is cool because: The most popular (as far as I can tell) cookie/biscuit is this thing called a Tim Tam. Basically it's two wafer-y chocolate cookies, with chocolate frosting in between them, and then dipped in chocolate. They're amazing. I was talking about them with a bunch of other international students, and every one of us had identical experiences where someone had recommended Tim Tams, we had bought them at the grocery, and then proceeded to eat an entire box alone in one day. They're that good. My flatmate Brittany and I are slowly trying all the other varieties. Currently we've got black forest, which is good, but nowhere near Time Tam classic.
New Zealand is lame because: I JUST WANT TO BUY SOME LIMES. Seriously. At one grocery store, limes come in packages of three for $3.60. That's $1.80 American. 60 cents a lime. That is not okay. And these ones are really ugly. Another grocery I went to had key limes (read: super small) for $17 a kilo! Not acceptable.
Food Find: I got a "bacon buttie" at the farmer's market, which is mostly just a bacon sandwich. They took a huge pile of (American) bacon, chopped it up, and put it on white bread with grilled onions, mustard, relish, and ketchup (actually tomato sauce ((they called it t-sauce)) which is close but not the same thing). I knew the sandwich was going to be good because there was about a twenty minute line to get them (the only other places that had comparable lines were selling super cheap blackberries). It was awesome, and just as heart attack inducing as you think it is.

Saturday I had an excellent day. I got up early and made it to the farmer's market, which happens every Saturday morning in the parking lot of the train station. The train station is this huge, ornate building that looks a little like a castle, so needless to say it's a great setting for a market. It was composed of about half people who had grown produce in Central Otago and then brought it here to sell and half people who had made some sort of good (baked things, candles, organic beer, various sausages and bacons). The primary goal of going to the market was to get limes, baby spinach, and jalapenos (only got the last) and the secondary goal was to not spend all the money in my wallet (barely accomplished). I got lots of plums and cherries, plus a plum pie and a great loaf of sourdough from this nice woman who baked it all from scratch. After learning how overpriced supermarket tofu is, I'm going to go back this weekend and get some homemade tofu from this little Asian woman who was selling it.
While I was at the market, I ran into my friend Ellen, who goes to school with me (although I didn't know her until I got here). She invited me to the beach with her and her roommate that afternoon, and it was such a phenomenal day that I couldn't pass it up. While we were waiting for the bus out to St. Clair's beach, we met these two British guys who are backpacking across the world before they start college, and they joined our group. Mostly we just relaxed on the beach, briefly went into the water (my feet were numb right as I stepped into it), and made fun of how each other said words. The funniest thing to me was that it was almost a bizarro beach: there were people playing touch rugby (rather than football) and one impromptu game of beach cricket (versus baseball).
That evening was the Highlanders versus Crusaders match, one of the more highy anticipated rugby games in the South Island. In a nutshell, the Super 14 is the main pro rugby league, and it represents Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. The Kiwis have five pro teams, and two of them are based in the South Island (rather than have specific cities associated with each team, they just have regions, and as a result play home games in a variety of locations). The Highlanders are Dunedin's team, representing the Otago region (and Southland). The Crusaders are the other South Island team, representing Tasman and Canterbury. As a result, this game gets pretty pumped up, especially in a college town where kids love to drink and watch sports. What struck me most was how reasonably priced everything was; tickets at most were $20 US, with souvenirs selling for about market value, and beer an unheard of $2.50. The game itself was pretty slow (it ended up being the lowest scoring game in Super 14 history, 6-0), but we went with an American who played rugby in college, so I got a pretty detailed rundown of how everything works.