Wellied

When we went to get the bus I obediently left my bag down because of the scolding I had received in Auckland for trying to pass my bag to the driver. This time it was a female driver and she said “Can you bring the bags over? I'm sick of carrying other people's bags. I'm not paid to carry other people's bags”, so it seemed like all New Zealand bus drivers are grumpy, but each in their own individual little way. This is odd because generally kiwis are extremely nice. Actually another exception seems to be the people who own cafes that the buses stop at: most of these cafes have nasty signs up warning you that you are not allowed to eat any of your own food even if you buy something to drink, “This is not Macdonalds! Food takes longer than 10 minutes!” and lots of other angry-looking signs; lists of rules in a little road-side cafe. Several times we had to shiver outside in the rain, to eat our pre-made sandwiches, and only then go inside to order our hot coffee. I wondered, coming out of one of those places, why the owner's friends had not suggested that the hospitality industry wasn't really his field; maybe because he didn't have any friends. But all this only made it seem more like home: where would the world be without Highland hospitality? I bet he had a Scottish surname. What they need are Aussies, South Africans, and East Europeans, who have revolutionised the hospitality industry in Scotland.

When we arrived in Wellington, Stephan, our German host, kindly picked us up at the bus stop. We had a couple of bottles of wine and chatted with him. He is a computer programmer, with permanent residence in New Zealand, working for clients mostly in Germany. He does his web-based work via the internet. It's my dream, I told him, how does he do it? Apparently there is a German website where you can register. I've still not checked, but I am dreaming that there is an English language equivalent, so we can live in Nepal earning European wages. Or somewhere else. Stephan was very accommodating, but his living room, where we were located, was a bit on the chilly side; and it had a cat in it. I love cats, but I'm also slightly allergic to them. I just had to remember not to touch my eyes after touching the cat. We had known about the cat in advance as it was on his Couchsurfing profile, so I could hardly complain. Self control, that was all I needed.

Joanne didn't sleep because of the cold, but I had been alright. And I woke up without itchy or swollen eyes! I had managed not to transfer cat hairs to my eyelids, which I regarded as a personal triumph. We had been told that the Wellington Museum is the best one in New Zealand so, despite the disappointment of the Auckland one, we thought we should go. After Auckland we had decided to restrict our museum visits to those considered the best.

View from Stephan's lovely home

With the daylight, we could see that Stephan's flat was in a fantastic location and the view was stunning. Wellington is a port surrounded by hills, one of which Stephan's flat was on, hence the great view. It reminded by quite a lot of Cape Town which has the same sea-plus-hills formula, which is almost always a winner. Stephan told us we were very lucky because “windy Welly” hardly ever sees the sun and it was a gorgeous day. We were already forgetting what the sun was like, so were keen to get out in it.

View from Stephan's lovely home

View from the waterfront

The waterfront

Kayakers coming into the harbour

Next door to the museum was a microbrewery. How could we not? There weren't any seats there either, but there were benches at the very boundary of the drinking area where we found a couple of spaces. And we sat in the sun and had a couple of beers / wines for Joanne. Then a couple more drinks, watching the Welly skateboarders out in force. Some of the beer was quite nice; of course I had to try all of them to decide which I liked best.

Sk8!

More skateboarding

Finally we felt obliged to go into the museum, but we were just slightly to sozzled to get much out of it. It did seem like a really good museum, with lots of interactive exhibits and much better organised than the Auckland one had been. Actually thinking about it, much of what I said I learned from the Auckland museum was probably from Wellington instead, just too fuzzily remembered to place correctly. We enjoyed it but it was wasted on us. Or were we wasted in it? After about just a week of cold, rainy weather, we could not see a sunny day go by without sitting around enjoying it. How are we ever going to adjust back to Scotland?

Dusk over the harbour

Joanne had offered to cook for Stephan to thank him for hosting us, so she cooked pasta and pesto with roasted vegetables. It cost us a fortune. I've said it before, but vegetables are really expensive in New Zealand. It would almost certainly have been cheaper to cook three steaks instead. Stephan's flatmates happened also to be entertaining that night, so we joined them drinking and talking after our meal. His flatmates and most of their friends were seismologists, Wellington being a world centre for it, receiving San Francisco levels of earthquakes. One of the guests was a cosmologist, which is my own field, and she had of course heard of my evil ex-supervisor George Ellis, “he's famous”, she said, although nobody outside of cosmology circles thinks so. We stayed up late and drank many bottles of wine. Everyone insisted the weather in Wellington is never like this. I suspected this was a lie perpetuated by Wellingtonites (Wellies?) to prevent other people from moving there. From what we saw it was a really lovely city, although in the wind and rain the allure of the hills and waterfront may have diminished somewhat.

The next morning Stephan drove us to the ferry terminal, which we had not thought very necessary until we saw that the terminal for our ferry company was much further out of the city than the terminal we had seen. What a gracious host! And what a lucky sod as far as his work goes. We were very lucky that he could host us because later that day he was leaving for China to spend some time with his Chinese girlfriend in Beijing, where he could continue doing the same German-rates work.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 21, 2009 from Wellington, New Zealand
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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