Back To School

Otago University---the oldest school of higher learning in New Zealand--is, by American standards, a sorta cozy, smallish school, replete with the normal college mix of old buildings and 80's-era abominations alongside a beautiful river. As it's summertime here (enjoy that, New Englanders), there are only a few thousands students on campus (as opposed to 20k during regular term), so our group of Tar Heels constitutes a large , loud school of fish in a small pond. Of course, we wouldn't have it any other way. 

Our academic schedule is broken up as follows: 2-hr lectures on Wine Business and Tourism in the morning on Mon/Tues, followed by a workshop form 4-6 on those afternoons. As much as Cael and Scott are jonesing to open Excel and build some financial models, it seems likely that we wont be messing with too many numbers this term.  Our erudite professor, Cally, is a nice Canadian who recently took her PhD from Otago. While she has yet to drop any "abooots," she did use "eh?" a few times yesterday, much to our mature amusement, and she possesses that distinct warm, maternal nature common of our neighbors to the north. Cally loves wine. Soon she will love us, provided we resist making Canada jokes--a nearly-impossible feat.  After the jump - TOUR 214 Day One

Our first class passed without much to report, but our first workshop was a welcome digression from normal academia. Before classes started, we joked that these workshops would consist of wine-tasting and merriment. As it turns out, we were right. Sitting at row tables alongside our Kiwi classmates, Cael, Dick, Robert, Scott, Trevor and I were first schooled in the ways of taste identification: we sampled sugar water, tonic, salt water, citric acid, umami (the 5th type of taste), and then tannins. We rated these samples as follows: sweet; needs more gin; tastes like the ocean; could use a little vodka; and tastes like miso soup, only grosser. Tannins, we realized, are the chemicals found in really cheap, young wine; I.  associate them with awful hangovers. They were pretty gross. From here we moved on to actual wines--a New Zealand Chardonnay and a Shiraz. Trevor was complimented for detecting a hint of grapefruit in the Chardonnay; I ventured that I could sense melons in the red. Dick offered that he felt the Chardonnay was white wine while the Chiraz was red wine. Everyone was right, and we all laughed at some of the ridiculous adjectives offered by our wine-snob laminated guide. We escaped after two hours without any embarassing moments, though it should be mentioned that Dick spilled a glass of wine--sober.  (Note the warning below: Hopefully more on this front)

I should mention that we rented cars on Sunday and headed out on the peninsula, where we walked amongst seals and near Albatrosses. The scenery was spectacular and the weather beautiful, if a bit cold and windy. Right now we're watching the Oregon/Auburn game on our computers in the student center. Indeed, we've become those International Students--huddled together and giggling at things that regular students here will not understand. Tomorrow we take the train through a gorge en route to Queenstown, where the bold in our group plan to Bungy and do other stuff that might piss our parents off. More to come soon.

- Tim