Gallagher Great Race and Lil Pumpkins Fun Run

This weekend, Silje (another friend of mine and international student living at Orchard Park) decided to volunteer for the Gallagher Great Race being held at the Waikato river. It seemed like a pretty interesting event, and neither of us had anything better to do, so we thought why not get some good karma and volunteer?

On Saturday, we signed up to help with the Lil Pumpkins Fun Run and Walk, which was a fund raiser for the Lil Pumpkins organization. It was really funny because we ended up just standing around and talking for about an hour before the race began.

I was assigned to marshall the first checkpoint of the face which was literally at the very beginning of the course, so about a minute after the race began at 10am, my shift was done.

The next day was the main event, which unfortunately ended up being just as anticlimactic as the first =/ We ended up standing on a bridge in the freezing wind and rain with really no purpose at all. Our job description was to make sure that no pedestrians threw anything into the river and to look out for debris. Now riddle me this... how were we supposed to stop anyone from throwing anything in the river, and if there were debris, what are we supposed to do about it way at the top of the bridge with no intercom? Not to mention that we were stationed beyond the finish line, so I don't think any of it would have mattered anyway. Nevertheless, there we were on the bridge in the freezing cold, maybe that's another reason why my now going on one month cold hasn't gone away yet.

Also, there were a bunch of random people walking around in costumes, don't ask me what that was all about...

These two girls on stilts, and another pair dressed as Alice and the white rabbit. My guess is that it had to do with the Fringe Festival, which is happening in Hamilton right now. I don't think I'll be attending anything in that event though. It's a bunch of shows and exhibitions, etc. I have neither the time nor the money, so I'm gonna pass.

I'd much rather plant trees.








The one cool thing about volunteering for this event though, was that there was a waka demonstration which lasted all of maybe 10 minutes and was the best part of the whole weekend long event.

Volunteering

For good karma! Or because I have nothing better to do =P

This semester I haven't been doing any travelling or anything too exciting, so Silje (another Norwegian international student) have been randomly volunteering for anything that pops up on the University of Waikato Facebook page. The funny thing is, sometimes these things just show up in the newsfeed on the day before the event, so one of us will message the other, "hey, wanna do this random thing at school?" "Sure, why not, I got nothing better to do."

This is how we ended up planting trees at the Oranga Lake on campus.

The results of our (not so) hard work

We even made it into the official video of the event, haha!

New Zealand International Film Festival

We've been on holiday from school for the past couple of weeks and most of the people living in Orchard Park have been travelling, so it's been pretty dead in Hamilton. I decided not to do any travelling myself since my budget is pretty tight this semester, and I still haven't bought my ticket home and I've planned a trip to Sydney with my bestie Tanya at the end of the semester, so I have to save up for that.

Anyway, a few weeks ago someone left the New Zealand International Film Festival magazine on the desk in one of my classes, so I thought I would give it a look, and there were actually a few films in there that I had been wanting to see, and some new ones I had never heard of that looked pretty interesting.

The cost per ticket was $12.50 for students for each film, so I had to limit my choices to three movies and I decided on Cabin in the Woods, The Angels' Share, and First Position.

All of the films were held at Lido Cinema, which was a very posh venue. The lobby had a really fancy looking design with chandeliers and couches around a fire place. Inside the theater the seats were like first class seating on an international flight, very spacious with a small table on the armrest for your wine or glass of beer.

Even better than the continental seating in the majority of the theater, the front row had leather recliners!

This was actually the first time I had ever attended a film festival, and even though it wasn't really "festival-ish" I still had a lot of fun, and it was nice to get out of Orchard Park.