For the full affect of this and future posts, I suggest you follow along with pictures, found HERE
I flew in to Wellington Wednesday morning and met up with the other interns. We took shuttles to the hostel, dropped our stuff off, and started walking around Wellington. The director of the orientation, Richard, is a Wellington native and had answers to most of our questions no matter how ridiculous. We saw some pretty neat places - the parliament building, the theater that the Lord of the Rings premiered at, even the street that the hipster hang out on! What really struck me that first day is the appearance of Wellington. The city itself looks pretty standard, but the mountains around it cannot be found in Indiana!
My three favorite parts of nature are:
1. water
2. mountains
3. greenery
and NZ is all three at once! No matter where you go you are not very far from the coast of the ocean and as soon as the water stops, the mountains start. New Zealand is right on a fault line, so the land as we know it is a result of earthquakes and volcanoes pushing solid ground above the ocean. Below freezing weather is rare on most of the islands so plants are in bloom year round. The few deciduous trees here have let their leaves go, but those are few and far between.
For dinner that night we went to a Japanese restaurant, which was good enough. The noteworthy part is that I had sushi! Real, honest to goodness, fishy, sushi. I'm not sure what the first one was, but it reminded me of tuna salad. I also had salmon and avocado rolls, and another one with salmon. The fish was really mild and I could hardly taste it, but the texture was a little strange.
The next day in Wellington we went to Zealandia, a nature reserve right outside the city. The park was surrounded by 2 meter fence to keep the predators out. Cats, possums, rodents, and other hungry mammals were introduced to the islands by humans and the flightless birds that NZ is famous for can't handle them. (If you are into birds I can tell you more about them later.) Even though we had quite the walk in Zealandia, most of us took a shuttle to the top of Mount Victoria and then walked back to the hostel. Mt Vic is only 190 meters tall so not technically a mountain, but still pretty sweet if you ask me. A scene for the Lord of the rings was shot there, so that's cool too! Dinner that night was Indian and the evening consisted of buying chocolate and playing cards with the other interns.
Day 3 in Wellington was the Seal Coast Safari! We loaded into a couple of 4 wheel drive SUVs and set off over the mountains to the coast. Along the way we saw some very nice houses, an ostrich, a wild goat that looked like a dog, wild horses, and plenty of wind turbines. We saw a couple of seals as soon as we got to the beach and we saw some funny birds too. On the way one of the tour guides stopped to pick some tree leaves and we stopped on the beach to have some tree leaf tea and muffins. I don't remember the tree, but it went well with banana rhubarb muffins.
Back in town for lunch I had a lamb burger and it was better than I could have imagined. Lamb meat is quite common here, which makes sense with so many sheep. One different thing about burgers here is that they are topped with pickled beets as well as the usual condiments. I might have to bring that back with me. We spent the afternoon in Te Papa, the national museum, had Malaysian food for dinner, and played more cards after that.
The next day, Saturday for those keeping track at home, most people left to their accommodations early in the morning, but my flight to Christchurch (Chch) didn't leave till the afternoon. I spent the morning walking around the waterfront and business district before Te Papa opened and I spent the rest of my time in there. There are some really cool exhibits in Te Papa! There was a giant squid and more about the natural history of NZ. There was quite a bit about the Maori, which was completely new to me. There was really cool stuff too about the recent history of NZ. The top 2 floors out of 6 were art, but I didn't get very far in the gallery before I had to leave to catch my airport shuttle.
This is already quite long so look for another post soon about Christchurch and my internship!
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