A word about the weather

I had my first real taste of Dunedin's winter weather yesterday. In the morning it was beautiful, blue skies, low 50's. By 12 it was bitter cold and raining, the wind was blowing so hard closing car doors was a two handed operation. The hills surrounding town this morning are covered in snow and our deck has some residual hail. This is apparently called a "southerly". They are the worst storms we get because they blow straight off Antarctica and slam directly into Dunedin.

Weather here is very dynamic, it will fluctuate between pounding sheets of rain, and tropical sunshine without warning. One day it did so at least eight times in a 10 hour period. The other amazing part of this is that often you will see where it is sunny as close as a 1/2 mile away.The weather you experience depends on the cloud you are standing under at the time. On my first day this resulted in the coolest rainbow i have ever seen. It was a full arch, with both ends clearly visible. It was so close you really thought you could hike down the hill and touch it.