W for Wellington

I realise this post is out of order. After I wrote the other one, it came to me that I hadn't actually written anything about what we did today.

So today, the big scheduled event was a cable car ride up to one of the higher(highest?) points in Wellington. By the way, this is the capital city of New Zealand. Anyway, the views from this high point were quit nice. There's a massive botanical garden there, and also a small museum about the cable car and it's history.

We trekked around the gardens a bit, quite nice, not much of a garden per se, but that's probably the time of year. Lots of green, minimal flowers. The views of the surrounding region are impressive. It reminds me of pictures of Greece, much of the housing is built directly into the sides of the mountains. Strangely, for a city of that size, it seems very quiet. You can hear very little auto traffic, mostly juts the occasional souped up car or motorcycle revving really hard, or a emergency vehicle siren once or twice. There doesn't seem to be as much noise pollution in general.

Back to the view...the harbor is magnificent, very impressive. Houses everywhere, like barnacles on the mountains, overlooking this large chunk of water. The water was fairly devoid of activity, I'm assuming that it's a bit early in the year for much to happen. A few sailboats, 1 speed boat, and late in the afternoon a single cargo container ship. We did see some kids jumping in to the water. I can't imagine that was anything approaching warm, it's the friggin' Pacific.

We also went to the Te Papa museum, a very impressively modern museum. It was a combination of history, nature stuff, and art. I liked the nature stuff the most, it's a stark contrast to how all the local varieties of things we have back home are often super sized versions here. Also interestingly, the museum has no admission cost, although there are donation bins. Same for the cable car museum I mentioned earlier.

I sorta skipped lunch, and a picture of my breakfast is visible below I think. Dinner was fish and chips and a local beer for both of us. The fish was nothing special here. We were in a bar though, and it seems a universal truth that the bar equivalents of any given food outside of a burger or hot dog, are almost always inferior to a real restaurant.

We decided to call it a night after that and do some upkeep things, repacking, electronics maintenance, pictures(which we still have a good number to go through), and a load of laundry. Nothing exciting. There are fireworks going off though. I'm not sure if for the ederly rugby thing that's happening in Wellington currently, or Guy Fawkes day(Remember remember the 5th of November...or something like that. See "V for Vendetta" to learn all I know about it).