Dunedin

After my first ever orphan Christmas with friends in Christchurch the Kiwi way- bbq on Christmas eve (probably the exact opposite of how I would normally celebrate) and dinner with international students on Christmas day. I decided it was high time I visited my relatives in Dunedin who had been inviting me down since I came to New Zealand.

A six-hour bus ride and there I was. A new place with new sites and new experiences just waiting for me to explore. We started out walking the pineapple track, named after a tradition to snack on canned pineapples when on it followed by depositing the tins at the end of the track. Sadly this tradition is no more, but the name persists. It was just a short walk up the hill from which the panorama opened up which gave me a better sense of how Dunedin was planed out. We later ventured to the beach and walked up the steepest street in the world - Baldwin street, that' one to check off my list. 

The next day started off with a visit to Tunnel Beach. It can only be accessed through a tunnel carved out of stone under the instruction of John Cargill, a politician in the 1870s, so his daughters could use the beach. The second half of the day was spent driving out to the peninsula and taking a boat to see the albatross as it's the only place they nest inland. It also hosts seals, penguins, and dolphins all of which we were successful in seeing :)

Had a great couple of days getting to know my relatives, however distant they may be, still made me feel like part of the family. The youngest member, only 4 months old, has been given a Lithuanian name which led to a bit of commotion, when I told them the correct way to pronounce it and it wasn't the way they had been saying it... :P they decided to go with an intermediate version between the Lithuanian pronunciation and the one they had been using.