Windy City

December 12th 2016

09:56 — In our room

"Noooo sleeeping! Goood Morning!" — An obviously overly motivated hostel employee plugs in his vacuum, cleans the room for about 20 seconds before leaving the four sleepy residents to themselves again — a proven wake-up method.

After staying in bed for almost two more hours after the vacuum attack, we spend the day with very mixed weather doing planning mostly. We're not feeling like more walking anyway, still feeling yesterday's hike in every muscle. So we're booking hostels, finding buses, texting AirBnB hosts and snatching plane tickets. Neither of us really wanted to do any of that, but we have to take care of it someday.

We've decided to try not being as lost on our arrival in LA as we were in Auckland.

The next day brings our longest drive so far — during the roughly 5 hours to Wellington, we take a rest somewhere between K-Pop and Classic in a town called Bulls. People here seem to share an affection for bad puns ('Afford-a-Bull' and variations) but do serve a nice Indian lunch menu.

We eventually arrive late in the afternoon and get to our room for the night. At a glance, down-town Wellington feels very young and much prettier than the small towns we spent the last week in: You see lots of street art, trendy bars and restaurants, and international food everywhere, especially Mexican and Malaysian.
We start our only full day in Wellington in the city's very hilly botanic garden — from here, we also get a nice overview of the southern-most capital city of the world (#funfact).
Due to our somewhat tight schedule here in Wellington, we don't stay too long and only do a quick loop through the pretty park.
Afterwards we find some Chinese lunch, swing by the Wellington City Gallery and then head to the 'Te Papa' museum, the national museum of New Zealand.

In a very modern and interactive museum, we are told about the the formation of the two islands, plate tectonics, and New Zealand's culture and history — and a heavily glorified version of the first world war, with larger-than-life heroic soldier statues with machine guns bragging about how many Turks they shot — reminds me a bit of the Korean War Memorial in Seoul.

Really interesting are the earthquake statistics: One a screen updating in real-time we see the quakes of the last minutes and their strength. There is some activity here every few minutes, often not felt by humans. But you could say there's a medium quake every week that you can definitely feel.

Summer in Wellington

December is supposed to be the height of summer in New Zealand — but that doesn't stop the notoriously bad weather here in Wellington from spreading winter-vibes.
In our room it's only really bearable under our blankets, and it's constantly raining outside. Maybe that will help us get into a Christmas mood...

There might have been winters in Germany with temperatures around 10°C, too — so it's hard to believe that it's supposed to be summer right now. Also, we're starting to understand why the Britons came here: Rain. Apparently it rains here so often that even traffic lights have little roofs to shelter under. And we're not getting spared, either.