Finding Fun in Dunedin

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I've been spending the past couple of weeks in Dunedin, doing schoolwork and making plans for our semester break in April. Meanwhile, my friends and I have been finding things to do in and around Dunedin.

We went to a rugby game at Carisbrook Stadium, about a 30 minute walk from our area of the city. This was organized by Arcadia so it was free for us. We saw our local team, the Otago Highlanders, play a team from South Africa, the Cheetahs. I still don't understand the rules of the game but I know that we won, by about 30 points. The fans in New Zealand get pretty crazy because rugby is their national sport. A lot of people dressed up in the team colors and wore capes, clown wigs, and had wooden swords and shields.

One of my friends and I also walked to Baldwin Street in the northern surburbs of Dunedin. It is supposedly the steepest street in the world. We climbed up and there were a good amount of tourists there. There were also a lot of cars that would drive up just to turn around and go back down. The street had to be paved with concrete slabs because the asphalt kept sliding down the hill before it would set. Apparently it's a pretty dangerous street- I heard there have been a lot of accidents, heavy vehicles are not allowed on it, and one student even died when she tried to ride down in a shopping cart.

The same friend and I also went to a documentary festival in the center city last night, and we are attending a street performer festival on the weekend. So far our plans for the break are to go to Queenstown for about four or five days- a lot of the attractions in that corner of the country use Queenstown as a base so it's a good place to get to Milford Sound, the glaciers, and other things. After Queenstown we will still have a good amount of time before classes begin again, but we aren't sure what to do yet. We do want to get to Christchurch at some point, which is a city farther north on the South Island, but we may do that as a separate weekend trip. We have a few weeks to decide.

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Photos

House on Baldwin Street
Just to give you an idea of how steep it is.