Parties and other festivities

Let's start with all the things that were to be celebrated in the last few month, and some other occasions that had less obvious reasons:

Rugby World Cup
We have of course also joined in the Rugby-Crazyness that captured all NZ during the Rugby World Cup. We went to the Ireland-Italy match here in Dunedin's new stadium and joined some friends at a BBQ before. As you can see on the pictures almost every one was supporting Ireland who also won the game in the end. But after 6 or so weeks of nerve-wrecking Rugby-watching NZ's All Blacks won the World Cup and NZ was happy ever after ... (or at least for the next 4 years)!

Tom's 28th Birthday
We celebrated with a Cordon bleu dinner!

Melbourne Cup

Tom went to the horse races with hit boss and was raving afterwards about all those "hot chicks" ;)

"Betriebsausflug" with Farra

Tom's company organized a charity trip with the Taieri Gorge Railway and took Luci, Erica, Noelia and Erica's brother along!

Terminator Party

Tom is sometimes called "Arnie" at work - whether it is for his muscles or accent remains open. But it inspired us to invite some of his colleagues for a "Terminator Party"!

Christmas-Party in Luci's lab

Luci's 30iest

Tom had organized a surprise party with some Dunedin friends on the evening of my birthday! Thanks for the fun and yummy food!

Now this was quite a while ago!

It has been quite a while since I put the last pics online, but now I've finally gotten around to it, and here they come!



   

Finally, some new pics!

Let's start with a trip just half an hour's drive out of Dunedin: Long Beach
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Next comes the Winter side of NZ: Wanaka is about 3-4 h drive from Dunedin, and we went there for a weekend of skiing and snow-mobiling!
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Let's directly go from Winter to Summer: For a longer weekend we flew to the Kingdom of Tonga in the Pacific!
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Es hat geschneit! Es hat geschneit!

What looks like light snowing for an Austrian, is actually a once-in-10-years event here in Dunedin! We wanted to see some things at the Peninsula that day so we didn't stay home and worked our way through the snow. We visited Larnach castle (NZ's only castle), the Aquarium in Portobello and went on a boat trip to see Albatrosses!
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Port Chalmers

After we had already visited the Otago Peninsula a few times, we chose to go the sea on the other side of the bay this time. A big containership was just about to come into Port Chalmers!
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Winter Festival in Queenstown

When we went to Queenstown for its "Winter Festival" we were expecting something like a Ski Opening, or a "Winterparty" in the adrenaline capital. It turned out to be a rather quiet weekend - and snow strictly restricted to the (just open) slopes. Was nice anyway, and as NZ is quite small apparantly, we met some of Jürgen's colleagues from the winery.
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What to do in Dunedin?!?

That we are not getting bored here in Dunedin, we try to visit what the city offers! Here two quite different experiences:

Jane Goodall, the world famous Chimpanzee researcher, visited Otago University. We went to her lecture and were fascinated by her stories and ideas.
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Dunedin celebrates Midwinter ("Wintersonnenwende") with a big lantern parade. School kids and clubs made lanterns themselves. This year the theme was "creatures of the night"
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