Franz Josef Frivolities

Now for some really exciting stories! I've gone through the bus ride to Franz Josef and all that fun stuff so I'll just jump right into Franz Josef.  There's two parts, first there's the town and then the national park area.  The town of Franz Josef is really non-existent; it's one of those places that really only exists because of the tourism industry.  There's several hostels, motels, and camping areas as well as tourist shops, and one tiny supermarket.  The rest of the shops there are for booking scenic flights over the glacier or guided hiking trips on the glacier.  Since I'm a little stingy, I wasn't going to fork out the cash for those hikes, I was also traveling by myself so I didn't really think it'd be too fun for just me to do.  There are, however, a ja-billion and one hikes around the glacier that you can do, so I picked out a couple that looked like they'd be up my alley and planned out my two days around those treks.

Distraction!

Hey everybody, this is just a super brief random distraction that I'm too excited to share about, I will probably have another post about traveling in the next day or so.

 To keep myself from being a lazy student I tend to go running 2 or 3 times a week, and usually I run down to Oriental Parade, which is on the bay in Wellington.  It's about a 5k round trip, but it can be a really hard run when the wind is going crazy (as it likes to do in Wellington).  Anyway, so I went out this morning to do my usual run, and on the way back in I happened to slow down and look out toward this pier by a beach that my run passes, and I see this little shape out on the pier.  I stood and tried to figure out what it was from where I was at, but I couldn't quite tell, and it looked like it was moving.  Intrigued, I went down to the pier to investigate.  What do I find when I get there?  Why this:

The West Coast...Via Bus!

I love seeing the clouds rolling over the mountains

Alright, so this might sound like a little bit of a boring post, but honestly one of my favorite parts of my trip was just staring out the window on the bus ride between cities.  I took the bus from Nelson to Franz Josef on Tuesday (the 10th), which takes the route along the west coast of the south island.  If you refer to the map in my first "travel" post you'll notice that Franz Josef is quite a ways from Nelson, which is true: I sat on the bus for almost 10 hours watching the scenery go by.  I lucked out a little bit for my bus ride, it was the only day that really rained on my trip and I was in a snug bus the whole way!  None of my plans got screwed up at all =)

Like I said, it might sound really boring but one of the coolest parts about traveling through New Zealand is just driving around.  It's like they tried to jam as much scenery into the small place possible so every hour or so the bus would stop at a scenic look out and you could see all sorts of beautiful rock formations and cool skylines.

Live at Six

So, this will be a subtle diversion in my plans to get all my travel blog posts up to date, but life happens!  The story behind this is that, at the first day of lectures back from break, my classmate Shelley said that she had a couple extra tickets to go see a show at Downstage Theatre.  Myself and another classmate, Gemma, jumped at the chance to see this show called Live at Six.  Free theatre is the best kind and this show was rumored to have some audience interaction and cool technological tie-ins.

Alright, so the show was scheduled for a 6:30 curtain, but we were told that we should get there at 6 because there was a special audience participation bit in the bar.  So we showed up, got our tickets and went to the theatre bar, where we picked up a program.  In the program were instructions to act like we were at a big media event after party and to look for a woman in a silver dress.  Anyone with a smart phone was told to snap some video of her if they could and then email it to an address provided.  Well we hung out in the bar mingling and talking about what we'd heard about the show when we see the woman in silver come stumbling in.  She was obviously drunk and careening around the room.  There was a small camera following her, but also tons of people with smart phones out.  After a minute talking with some random guy in the corner she stumbled away.  About 10 minutes later, when we were wondering if she'd be back--we didn't really get a good look at her--she came stumbling back in more intoxicated than ever.  She even collapsed at one point and some guy carried her out.  Shortly after we were all called to enter into the theatre where we see a looped video on youtube playing of what just happened in the bar!

Now we come to the premise of the show.  So the title sets it up a little bit: it's two rival news crews who are trying to spin the story of the woman in the silver dress getting drunk at this party.  It's a big deal because she's a broadcaster at one of the stations, and the guy who helped her out is a reporter at the other.  It's an entertaining look at the behind-the-scenes of story making.  The lines are witty, with a lot of kiwi in-jokes.  They split the stage area into kind of four sections: there's the two studios (splitting the stage down the center-line) and then the tech side and broadcast side (splitting the stage lengthwise).  There's also two balcony areas that serve as the anchor desks of each station.

Probably the coolest part of the show was that it was all done in real time; the show was 2 hours and it played over the 2 hours.  In that two hours there was a lot of back and forth about the ethics of the story, what actually happened, how they could find the videos of the events and how to patch them all together.  A lot of the action of the piece was centered around this technological side of things, so two of the minor/major characters were the two techie guys who edited together the footage for the news clip.  The thing was that there were the computer screens up on stage, and the guys were actually doing it.  They had the footage from the real camera that followed her, but then they also put up some of the audience footage.  You could tell it was legitimately from a smartphone/not by a professional because it had the typical grainy quality to the video, and it often was jumpy from her to the people around her, trying to get a better angle.  My friends and I got quite excited whenever we saw ourselves appear on the screen.

Anyway, the techi-cool part of the show had to be the fact that the "tech" guys on stage put together the footage from our phones and their footage, along with the bits of voice over they recorded onstage into the 2-3min news bit by the end of the show.  Everything was projected up the walls in real time, and you could watch them going on youtube, pulling clips down, checking their (character's) facebook, skyping, recording audio, and editing video.  It was so cool for that aspect of reality to be incorporated into the show.  It really, somehow, reinforced the suspension of disbelief and realism at the same time it broke the fourth wall.  Those two were also my favorite actors out of the bunch.  The main girl had a few too many tactics that she repeated, and the main guy seemed to only play his obstacles (but that I think was more a fault of the way the character was written than the actor).  The techies actually had a task to do, they did it, but at the same time you could see them get distracted and make fun of the newscasters, or get distracted and go on facebook, or even play a game.  They were so fun to watch!

Overall, it was a really interesting use of technology available to include the audience in the show, bridge the fourth wall while bolstering the reality of the show.  Some of the acting, unconvincing to me, was made up for by just the awesomeness of the video inclusion.

Next post will be about traveling, I promise!  Hope you enjoyed my diversion =)

Easter Break Beginning Adventures

Alright, so I will slowly get down all of the insanity of my Easter break traveling.  First off, we had a two week break from school: one week was for Easter, the other was a "study" break.  I took advantage of these two weeks by traveling through the south island of New Zealand.  Even though I had a whole two weeks, however, I didn't get through the whole island!  There's way too much to see and do in New Zealand for me to accomplish in one short trip.  On this trip I tried to stick with the free activities because-hey-I'm a poor uni student!  Most of my trip was tramping (what kiwis affectionately call hiking) which I love to do, and you can do for free, with amazing views, just about anywhere you want in New Zealand.

I started my trip on a Thursday night.  My flatmate Shannon lives in the north part of the south island in a town called Blenheim.  We took the Interislander Ferry, which takes you from Wellington to Picton on the south island (see map--->).  I've never been on a really ferry before, since the states mostly just consists of highways and no real mass transit system.  Geeze, I wish we had a better one, light-rail anyone? It was pretty cool because our ferry left at 8 so I got to see the city recede into darkness and then Picton appear from the black.  It also helped that the seas--the Cook Straight--were fairly calm.  Shannon told me that they're supposed to be some of the most dangerous waters, because the swells can get very large, but in our case it wasn't until about 20 minutes into the ride that I realized we were moving.  The ferry ride is about 3 hours so we got in to Picton around 11:30 then got out to Shannon's house around midnight.  Blenheim is part of wine country: the Marlborough district, so the entire ride there was passing vineyards in the dark.  Needless to say I was pretty out of it on the drive there so I didn't notice much besides the almost full moon rising above us.

Lag-time

Hey if anyone's out there reading--I have a TON of new posts coming in the next couple of days.  With one thing or another, school assignments due and Easter break, I've fallen off the blogging bandwagon.  I have a lot of written up in my journal that I just need to type up, look nice, and add photos.  I went traveling over break so I have about a billion and a half photos to slog through.  Here's a tease: