Week 5- Eskimo rolls and worm holes

At this point I have eaten about 7 kg of potatoes and I never seem to grow tired of telling people about my bag of potatoes on my balcony. It’s good to know I’m not going hungry anyway. I began the week with a 6:30am coaching session, preparing the team for their semi-final on Wednesday. They’re a nice group of lads so I’m really enjoying coaching them. I also had my last hockey training session of the season so now my gear will go back into hibernation until autumn/spring 2018 (depending where you are reading this). My big success of the week came on Tuesday evening at kayaking where I managed to complete my first Eskimo roll. This is where you right yourself from within the boat when you have capsized. I was really getting the hang of it by the end of the session, managing to flip over on the first attempt most times just occasionally needing a second bite at the cherry. I was very excited to be getting out on the river for the first time at the weekend but unfortunately the trip was oversubscribed and my name wasn’t pulled out of the hat.

Come Wednesday it was time for the big semi-final. They started a little slowly in the first half and we were lucky to be 0-0 at half time but we were able to turn it around and play some great flowing hockey in the second half to take the win, 1-0, with a stroke about 5 min from time. I was genuinely proud of the second half performance and they were all back out at 6:30am on Thursday morning for training ready to prep for the final next week. I also had my first test that day, on the subject of air foils and wind turbines. Thankfully I knew my axial induction factor from my angular induction factor and could tell you that Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on the 14th of October 1947 so I did reasonably well!

I had my first taste of Frisbee socials, quite literally, on Thursday with a team dessert night. I brought hokey pokey ice cream with is the local name for honey comb ice cream. After a massive influx of sugar, we played some games including coup, mafia and cards against humanity. Though some of the cards against humanity references were a little lost on me as it was the Australian version. I again enjoyed the vegan lunch on Friday, this time a Thai Green curry. The lesson of the week, this week, is that cheap resistors don’t like hot air guns but professor’s fingers like them even less. We learnt this from a demonstration about the effects that varying temperature can have on the resistance of cheap resistors. This demonstration involved one professor holding a resistor connected to a multimeter while the other used a hot air gun to heat the resistor. As you can imagine it is quite difficult to do this without burning fingers and sure enough, that’s what happened! (The resistance of the resistor also varied massively with temperature. Just in case you were wondering).

Now with a weekend free, I decided to get some work done, apply for summer jobs and start a garden. My friend, Harry, was kind enough to loan me his car so I set of on an expedition to the garden centre to purchase my plants. This was the first time for me driving an automatic car so at the first roundabout that I came to I instinctively tried to press the clutch to change down a gear. Obviously, there was no clutch to be found, instead I found the brake with my left foot and came to a rather abrupt halt! Lesson learnt. Once there I spent about 25mins wandering around, smelling different flowers, before I decided upon three succulents called Freedom Bells, Pumilia and Blossfeldiana. I am quite pleased with my purchases. On my way home I stopped by Hobson Bay and went for a paddle, walked along the board walk and picked up some sand and shells to put in my plant pot. You can see the photos from Hobson Bay here.

That evening I sat down to watch the All Blacks play Australia. The half time score was 40-6 in favour of the All Blacks and it finished 54-34 so it was quite an exciting match to watch as you might imagine! On Sunday I decided to go to the Auckland War Memorial Museum which is literally 200m from my doorstep. It is a truly magnificent collection and there was far too much for me to be able to take in in just two and a half hours. I will have to go back to look at each exhibit in more depth but the highlights were taking off my shoes to go in a traditional Maori home, their ‘What if there was an eruption in Auckland tomorrow’ exhibit, seeing the ice axe used by Sir Edmund Hilary when he climbed Everest and seeing an actual Spitfire. Considering how far away from Europe I am, there were a frightening number of names on their memorial from both world wars.

You can see all the pictures from the museum here.