catching up! wellington etc

hello hello

so its been a while. after four days in wellington (which i think were the closest thing to a bender that i have ever experienced... more on that in a moment) i settled down on a vineyard outside blenheim with the amazing Dalton - Hayward family. an absolute one of a kind experience with such generous, wonderful people. in order to best summarize my experience of the past week and a half or so, i'm going to write one post on wellington, and then another on the WWOOF experience in Blenheim.

So. Wellington.

This is the capital of new zealand, and is by far the windiest city i've ever been to... anyone who knows me knows that wind is one of my biggest pet peeves. ever seen a cat get stuck in the wind? you know how they get all fluffy and then kind of get this crazy look in their eye? that was me... for four days. so i spent the majority of time in the city, sadly, in the hostel watching bad bad television and nursing brutal hangovers. wellington people know how to party... out of my four nights there, three of them were spent out at the bars until 3 to 5 in the morning. this is not typical alli behavior-- but the party scene can be infectous, and given that the bars were still packed by the time we left at 5 in the am, it was easy to lose track of time.

Highlights of wellington include going out with the lovely quartet of robert (from ireland, a professional poker player- upon learning this, my mom gave me the invaluable advice "oh... well don't give him your credit card."), garry from scotland, and katy from maine. and tom from england, when he was around before running off and getting a job.

also a highlight was going out to dinner my first night with katy and a girl julie from chicago to the restaurant "monsoon poon"... we shared some apps and entrees and a bottle of wine, and it was just lovely. my first time out to a restaurant in NZ... and let me tell you, not having to tip is a welcome treat.

TE PAPA- the most amazing museum i have been to in a long time. 5 floors of amazing, well put together, and completely FREE exhibits. incredible. the dork that i am, i spent loads of time in there wandering around. especially interesting is the outside "bush garden", which has a large lagoon, a makeshift new zealand "bush" (forest) and limestone caves. great for the kiddies. inside i loved the natural science exhibit as well as the cultural exhibits, particularly the life-size recreations of traditional maori buildings. worth avoiding was the surreal junk-shop-come-to-life-display, where you sit through 10 odd minutes of weird images and noise and various items throughout the room "coming to life". weird shit.

that was about it for wellington-- i do recommend visiting it, it is a very nice cafe-culture sort of city.

anyways.

i'm now in the nelson YHA and going to kill the dude playing the out of tune piano in the room. i don't care if you kick ass at the piano, dude, its completely out of tune. knock it off.