Testing-testing-1...2...3

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Hello and welcome to my blog! I've never done one before. Let's see if I can keep it up!

In the last month I have traveled from my comfortable home in Glasgow city via a country house, a few airports, a university, some wild thyme and a handful of mechanics, to the small but shaky village of Lincoln in New Zealand. I am here to complete my MSci - Master of Science ish - by spending the next year studying the endangered katipo spider.

By writing this blog I am hoping to give an insight into what doing an MSci is like. It might also be useful to those contemplating studying Zoology at university or going to New Zealand. Most of all, however, I'd like to shed some light onto a very old order of animals that gets some extremely bad press - the Araneae, or spiders. If you are unfortunate (or fashionable) enough to suffer from Little Miss Muffet Syndrome, please read on! Perhaps fascination and wonder will slowly melt your disgust and fear.

At the moment, there is not much to report on the spiders as I have not started my project. In fact, I haven't even decided what project I will be doing! I have, however, been up to rather a lot in the last few weeks. I'll start with the flight.

If you have never been on a long distance flight before, there isn't much that you can do to prepare yourself. If you would like to practice, try sitting in a padded office chair watching TV for 8 hours. Then get up, walk around, set your watch a few hours forward and sit down again for another 8 hours. Then get up, walk around, set your watch another few hours forward and sit down again. Then think to yourself, I am just over halfway through.

Add to this experience the presence of people very close to you, stale air, the distant sound of someone throwing up into a bag and a complete lack of leg room and you have what it's like to fly to New Zealand! It is completely disorientating, tiring and frustrating. This was my experience the first time around, when I had never flown that far before. I was on a cramped Quantas flight with 2 stopovers.

This time, however, I was prepared! I remembered what it was like. I had brought with me an extra T shirt so I could change and some wet wipes so I could have a sort of shower. I also flew with Emirates. This meant I had a row of seats to myself (as it was the shoulder season, so the flight was nearly empty). Instead of packing the handful of passengers in one corner and leaving the rest of the plane empty, they had given everybody their own row. I lay down on my seats, covered myself with the little blankets, put my headphones on and listened to somebody advertising a hotel in Dubai. This sent me into a torpor very much like sleep, except I knew what was going on and I dreamed about the sort of couches they were talking about on the hotel advertisement. It was a brilliant way to spend the first leg of the journey. I can't really sleep on planes, but stretching out like that and shutting down was great. It prevented my body from trying to keep control of what time it was. Every so often I would get up and walk about, staring at interesting-looking people who were asleep. Sometimes I would watch a movie or take a wet wipe shower. But the majority of the journey was spent in the recumbent posture dreaming about plasma screens and swimming pools (it sounded like an exquisite hotel).

Dubai was a nice airport (count the paintings of falcons and Arab horses!). So was Bangkok. Sidney was the same as ever, actually rather boring. Finally I was at Christchurch...

I stayed the first night with Jenna, who is a friend of mine who grew up with my boyfriend Jamie. She put me up, made me hot chocolate and even let me borrow pyjamas so I wouldn't have to unpack anything! She ordered me a taxi for the next day to get me to the bus stop.

When I arrived in Dunedin I was really, really whacked. I'd tried to sleep on the bus but the scenery was too interesting. Christchurch to Dunedin isn't the most scenic route in New Zealand, but it certainly is different to someone coming from the UK. Replace houses, ancient towns and flat fields with mountains, the occasional wooden shack and thick forests. Replace cramped up cows with sheep and deer. It was certainly very different. I even saw a few Circus approximans, the Australasian harrier. Most of them were being bullied by spur-winged plovers.

Jamie was waiting for me at the bus stop. It was wonderful to see him and to have a great big hug! However, he had a lab to go to so I went to the library and fell asleep while reading about spiders.

The next few days were a bit of a blur. Jetlag hits me early, then leaves and comes back for more. Waking up at 4, then 6, then 8 in the morning and having an astonishing amount of energy only to crash at 6 in the evening. That's just how I roll. I walked into uni every morning with Jamie, glad to hear tuis and bellbirds singing again. These birds are endemic (found nowhere else in the world). Bellbirds are wee songbirds, that look like small green and brown blackbirds. They make short, rounded notes that reverberate through the air and carry a long way. Such a sound must be designed for the reflective evergreen leaves of New Zealand plants - it wouldn't sound so good in a British winter, with no leaves on the trees. The loudest birdsong in the world is made by the bare-throated bellbird in the rainforest - its call is similar, and relies on reflective leaves to bounce it around. The tui is New Zealand's honey eater. It eats mostly nectar, all year round. It is intelligent and makes a sound like nothing natural on Earth - the closest thing I can think of is that it sounds like a Transformer in the movie. It also imitates other birds (and people) very well.

I had a good time in Dunedin and made a couple of friends. It's a really, really nice city - very logically planned out, not too busy, nice people and shops. The university is also brilliant. They have a pair of jeweled geckos in a huge tank in one of the buildings - wonderful looking creatures, that bear live young - and an enormous museum complete with butterfly house. I went along to a few lectures and they were all really interesting. There were 3 about New Zealand's reptiles, one focusing on the tuatara - I learned heaps! It was all useful stuff for me, as I will be studying New Zealand's wildlife. It would perhaps not be so useful to someone who wanted to study other countries' wildlife, but bear in mind that I only went to about 6 lectures. The lecturers were brilliant, really engaging with the students and talking a lot of sense rather than drowning us in jargon.

I bought a car as well. She is a green station wagon called Megan and she's pretty cool. I can drive her around without thinking she's going to fall apart, which is very important when driving to a remote area in the countryside with no cellphone signal. She does use petrol, but not any more than I would expect from a car her size - I was impressed that she only took half a tank to get to Christchurch.

Eventually it was time to say goodbye to Dunedin. This was rather sad - I was leaving a little comfy oasis which contained Jamie, warmth and amazing food (thanks to Jamie's flatmate Erik, who really likes cooking), striding forth into a world I didn't know about, which contained student halls and people I had never met before.

It took me 5 hours to drive to Lincoln, because I got lost and didn't drive over 90km/hr very often. For those of you who don't know me, I was born without a sense of direction - that part of my brain just isn't there. I could get lost going around a circular racetrack. I got to my student accommodation late, in the dark, and the night warden showed me where it was.

After leaving the safety of my temporary home in Dunedin, I felt so isolated. All I could think about was how much I wish Jamie was here. Stepping into my room I saw things that reminded me terribly of my flat in 1st year at Glasgow University, which was in Murano Street, described by the university as a "student village". In actual fact, Murano Street is what happens when a minimum security prison falls in love with a mental asylum. In my sad state of mind, all I could see was my room in Murano Street.

However, I pinched myself internally a few times, trying to see the brighter side - and it slowly filtered through. This was NOTHING like Murano Street. I took my shoes off to feel a nice, soft carpet, which hasn't shown any sign of making my feet blister. My room here is twice the size of my first year cell. I drew back the curtains to reveal a wall of glass, half of which is a door that opens fully (no bars, no safety catches) and the other half is a window. I met my flatmates, Naitili and Hazel. They are friendly. They fixed my internet when it wouldn't work. At night they study, and don't run around the corridors screaming and laughing like Bellatrix Lestrange. For fun they play cards, and drink tea, not premium unleaded.

The last few days I have been looking around Lincoln, shopping and drawing. This really isn't much - Lincoln consists of a couple of shops. It is much smaller than Stroud, my hometown. Every morning I have been woken up by mini earthquakes - I have always wondered what they feel like, and now I know. It is like driving a Ford fiesta at 20mph in 4th gear, followed by a bumpy ride in a bus.

This morning I started work. I was given a few projects to think about, a PhD thesis and a paper to read. My supervisors, Adrian and Cor, seem like really nice guys and I didn't feel too nervous around them. Cor also told me that a bite from the katipo can't kill you after all - it just causes intense pain, the likes of which I haven't felt before, which doesn't respond to any painkiller. I was taken around by Emma, the secretary, who was really nice. She got me my card which means I can get into the building after hours and get library books out. This was somewhat of a struggle as nobody really knew how to label me on the system - postgrad, student, intern? Anyway, we worked it out.

So now I have a lot of reading to do, a wee cabin in an office which I share with Ben, who is studying beetles, and Phil, who is a lice man. Don't scoff at lice - they are very useful to taxonomists, as they often evolve with their host species and if they don't, there is sometimes a very interesting reason why. I have a lot of reading and deciding to do in the next few days.

Believe it or not, I wrote this all in one sitting! My other blog entries will not be so long. This one was long because it had meant to be in little bits, but I couldn't get Travelblog to send me my password until now.

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