Really alone this time
Sunday, 28 November 2004 (written 29 November 2004)
I’m pretty sure this won’t get posted until Thursday at this point, but maybe in the time between then and now, I can actually catch up on the days I’ve missed, so you’ll have plenty to keep you busy while I’m living something like 36 hours in the span of nine hours time passing on Friday. That’s when you catch up from my deluge from yesterday.
So let’s start with yesterday. It’s already slipping out of my brain. I like to do these write-ups because I get to relive the days each time, and then I can always go back and read them, and it’s like I get to preserve every moment. Welcome to the VIA-ing of Jen’s mind, right?
Yesterday. Sunday. I woke up thinking it was Saturday. Had that problem all day because most of Saturday had been spent in transit, so it’s as if the day didn’t exist at all. When I went upstairs for breakfast, a goblet of yogurt with fresh apricots cut on top was waiting for me. I started in on that (after running back downstairs for a Lactaid – thankfully, I’d thought to put two capsules in my wallet so they’d managed to actually arrive in Wellington with me), and Mary came out asking what else would I want? Cereal, juice, coffee, tea, hot stuff – eggs, etc. I accepted a pot of tea and scrambled eggs. I drank a LOT of coffee in Australia and am trying to get off it again. Part of that was Chris’ fault, part was Tom’s fault, since both of them drink coffee by the gallon, and part was that we kept trying to stay awake during the workshops and conferences after staying up too late the night before! After breakfast, I got online for a bit and spoke to some of you. I called Air New Zealand about my bag and was told it had been “located” but they didn’t have it yet. The guy was very nice, though, and when he took down my temporary address, he also added a note saying not to expect someone to answer the phone for calls and just to please bring it and leave it on the front step if no one was home. “Want my guess?” he said. “It went to LA,” I said. “Yup,” he said, adding, “By the way, call tomorrow morning if you don’t have it yet because after 24 hours, you’re authorized for NZ$100 emergency expenses.” Since I only had my tee shirt and jeans, Mary offered me a thermal undershirt and a ski jacket which I eagerly accepted. Then, since she was heading into town, she gave me a lift. Eastbourne, where the B&B is, is about three quarters of the way around the bay where Wellington is, so that’s about a 15 minute drive from the city center. Wellington is a rather bustling city for being so small, and Mary assured me I’d be able to walk all the way through it if I wanted to spend the day. I wanted to start at Te Papa (literally “our place”, the national museum of New Zealand), so Mary dropped me off there.
Te Papa is in a very unique looking building right on the waterfront. Inside the front door, I found an ATM and withdrew a quantity of NZ dollars. (Unfortunately, with all the craziness of Saturday, I had not been able to spend my remaining Aussie dollars, nor make a withdrawal of NZ dollars once I got to this country, so I had been very lucky that Mary picked me up at the airport and then took me into town. Otherwise, I would have had to borrow cash from her!) Ironically, admission to the museum is free, as is admission to most museums here. I think that’s a fantastic policy, but I’m not sure how they then manage to pull off the quality and quantity of exhibits I’m about to describe to you. Te Papa is six levels, each one huge, and each with different stuff on it. Nearly every exhibit is hands-on. On one level, the Earth and natural disasters were described in detail, and, to learn about earthquakes, you went into this little house, and after a brief movie, the earthquake “struck” and the whole house shook and lurched like crazy. There was a part of a level that was devoted to nature and animal life in NZ, and there was an impressive number of skeletons, fossils, models of animals, and even a rainforest walk, in and around replicas of trees and animals. Another level of the museum was devoted to the different cultures of people who make up NZ – Chinese and Italian particularly. Another level had a huge display of Maori culture, with green stone carvings, canoes, and several displays running footage of Maoris describing their creation myths of NZ. Another section of the museum had a display on the 1970s, complete with tacky carpeting, examples of goods popular in the ‘70s, and various monitors with pieces of shows from the 1970s. Most amusing to me was a five minute Graham Kerr video on how to unstick an omelet from a pan. I found this funny because when I was in early high school, I suddenly discovered Graham Kerr on PBS television, and for at least one summer was pretty addicted to his cooking show. I had no idea he’d already been doing that for twenty years. Apparently, Kerr is NZ’s first television chef. (No, I don’t know who followed in his footsteps.) There was a small exhibit on a different floor of how nature influences art and vice versa, with photographs (some very close up) of animals or plants, and each paired up with some architectural or artistic object. The only example I can remember at the moment was a bridge which looked to me like the Golden Gate Bridge, but I don’t think it was, and next to it, they had a rendering of DNA. And they really did look similar. Another layer of the museum looked more like museums with which I’m familiar, paintings on the wall, people being told not to touch them, etc. However, on that floor, like every other floor, a children’s area existed where kids could color and do other interesting activities, generally related to the theme of the exhibits on that floor. A nice touch, I thought. Regardless, after more than two hours, I hadn’t even hit all the floors, but I was getting museum-ed out. I exited by way of the museum shop which was the best museum shop I’d ever seen. I was severely tempted to buy you all gifts on the spot, but I held back. I would have had to carry everything with me for the rest of the day.
Once out of Te Papa, I decided to just wander the city. I walked through a very sketchy indoor market, made sketchier by the fact that when I intentionally wanted to go back to it today, it was closed… I figured pretty mostly anywhere I wandered would be okay. It’s hard to lose your bearings when one side of the city is the harbor, and the other side is mountains. However, I was soon frustrated by the fact that most of the streets are straight, which means that you think you’re right by the water, and yet, at the end of the street, you’re now several blocks further from the harbor. (Does that make any sense?) If the streets curved, with the harbor, this wouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, I didn’t end up wandering in the productive part of the city until a few hours later, and visited a whole bunch of outdoor gear stores trying to find a backpack Glen was looking for. I went in and out of other places too. Didn’t find anything extraordinary.
I had a few “must do” items on my list for the day, though. ATM had been one, but I also needed to go make my ferry arrangements for getting to and from Pickton. (How I was then getting from Pickton to Nelson, I didn’t know.) I needed also to go to a pharmacy and get some more cough drops, since my stash from Brisbane was nearly gone, and I was still coughing a lot. I also thought I should get more Tylenol since I was taking Tylenol Cold one tablet at a time, twice a day, and using just a plain Tylenol for the other 500 mg of pain relief for my throat. However, they don’t have Tylenol here. Nor acetaminophen. They’ve got Panadol, which, the pharmacist assured me, was some cousin of acetaminophen called something like paracetamol. Or, if you’re not paying attention, Panadeine. Which is paracetamol with codeine. I was, however, paying attention. I got some generic paracetamol, and selected a box of Cepacol lozenges because they actually had a cough suppressant in them – hydrometholbromine or whatever it is. I recognized it as a cough suppressant. Although they do seem to suppress my cough, they taste HORRIFIC. EW YUCK, is all I can say. I actually felt sick about halfway through the first one because it was just awful. You’re supposed to take two every three hours. I’m taking one every three hours, and it’s amazing. It’s almost to the minute, even if I’m not watching the clock, I’ll start coughing like crazy right at three hours.
I walked intentionally back down to the waterfront so I could get to the ferry terminal, and went and bought my tickets. Unfortunately, the fast boat (2 hours) isn’t so fast anymore since they now have speed restrictions. It used to make the journey in 90 minutes, but environmental damage ensued. The slow boat takes 3 hours. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to book the fast boat for my return on Thursday, and I’ll get in at 9 PM. (Mary has offered to come get me from the terminal, which is very very nice of her.)
I started to walk back toward the city, along the water, and happily ran into the Museum of City and Sea. I had heard very good, but vague things about it from my travel guide and from Mary, who said she’d never been there. Admission to it was also free. I was greeted by a friendly staffer who gave me a map, explained the three levels – level 1 is a special photographic exhibit, level 2 is about the sea, and level 3 is about the city and society. Then she asked where I was from. This is one thing I’ve noticed a lot on this trip – people ask me frequently where I’m from. More so than ever before. I’m glad they’re friendly, and I’m not offended, but half the people I end up talking to ask either where I’m from or what sort of accent I have! (The best was getting mistaken for being Canadian while on the ferry today. By a Canadian! Imagine that, eh?) The first level of the museum was alright – the special exhibit was a photography one. Up a central gorgeous dark wood staircase to the second floor. It might be about the sea, alright, but mostly it was about shipwrecks in the strait between the north and south islands. The very same strait I just bought ferry tickets to cross. At the far end of the floor was a screening room, which showed a 15 minute movie about the 1949(?) Wahine tragedy where the ship Wahine (pronounced wa-hee-nay) with 700+ people struck a reef during a storm and then sunk during a brutal storm. Their situation had gone from probably okay to tragic in 20 minutes. Even the lifeboats were capsized by 60 foot swells. The movie footage was brutal, and showed people on shore desperately trying to pull in lifeboats which were nearly being overturned in water only usually a few feet deep. 50+ people died. Suddenly, I was thinking maybe this north island/south island thing I was trying to do wasn’t such a good idea. I’m glad I had bought my tickets prior to going to the museum! As I was finishing up the second floor exhibits, a chime rang four times (it was four o’clock), and then, on the central wall of the museum behind the stairs, a film started playing, something about being on a commercial shipping voyage in the 1930s. It was fun to watch it on the wall, and people from all levels of the museum hung over the railings on their level to pay attention. I sat on the stairs. The third floor was divided into sections talking about different aspects of early life in Wellington, including education, health, sanitation, homelessness, police and crime, etc. At the far end, again, seemed to be a screening room, but one rotation of the movie had already started, so I walked in and did a double take. There was no movie screen. Instead, there was a shelf with some objects on it: a candlestick, a book, a coil of rope, some old glass bottles. And on the shelf, walking around, talking, was a perfect 8 inch tall projection(?) of a woman. She was 3D and she was interacting with the objects. When she walked behind the glass bottles, her image was distorted. When she sat on the book, she cast a shadow! It was amazing. She talked of two Maori myths, and for one, two other perfect little people appeared and acted it out while she was reciting it! After the show, only about 15 minutes, I walked right up to the shelf and looked all around it and found no projector, no mirrors, no strings, no anything. I was the only person in the room when it started again, and I was standing maybe two feet from the little woman and still couldn’t figure out how it worked. I checked my museum pamphlet. There was no mention of this anywhere. It’s like the perfectly kept awesome museum secret. Bill Bryson has a description of something similar, I now recall, but I hadn’t thought it was for Wellington, since his book is about Australia, not NZ. I’ll need to check that section again. Having examined every corner of the museum (Te Papa might have gotten away, but the Museum of City and Sea has been thoroughly inspected by me!), I exited through the museum shop, buying a bunch of postcards and stamps on the way out.
I walked along the harbor, taking pictures. I came across an interesting fountain in which two little boys were playing. As I started to frame up the shot, their father started yelling something. I thought he was yelling at the kids to get out of the picture, so I turned to him and said, “They’re okay; I’m fine with it, if you don’t mind.” “Yeah, but, they’re about to take a wee!” he said. When I looked again, the boys had dropped their pants. I have no idea if their pants were down when I went to frame the shot. I assured the parents that I hadn’t actually taken a picture, and we all had a good laugh about that one. In the meantime, the mother had gone to scoop up the boys, and I took a picture afterward.
I walked to Courtenay Place, the “end of the line” for all the buses, but more or less the city center given that it’s all the way over on the left side of Wellington (don’t know if that’s east or west). I couldn’t find a place I wanted to eat dinner that wasn’t really expensive or Indian (there was an Indian restaurant every two steps), so I kept walking until I came to one corner where a pub-type place looked to have decent stuff. I got my table for one, first time on this trip, and chose a beer (Monteith’s – same brand Chris and I drunk by the six pack in Melbourne – but this time I tried their golden lager. The pub had five varieties of Monteith’s on tap.). For dinner, I had an unexpectedly delicious meal. The description was something like “wild mushrooms with an herb pancake, tomatoes, onions, white balsamic, and cheese”, so I was anticipating something hot, probably with spaghetti type sauce. Instead, I was brought a huge plate of cold, fresh mixed greens with tomatoes and onions which had been marinated in a light balsamic sauce. On top of that was a steaming, thick, golden, curved “pancake”, which was supposedly wrapped around the large pieces of several styles of mushrooms, many of which had escaped out onto the salad. It was very good, and I ate the entire thing, suddenly realizing I hadn’t had lunch. It was 6 PM. I drank my beer slowly, and wrote postcards for the next hour, waiting for the last bus to Eastbourne which was going to arrive at 8 PM. The pub wasn’t too busy, though, and the staff didn’t seem to mind if I just stayed. Still, I had another hour to kill, so I took a long slow walk up and down Courtenay place. I managed to get on the bus in the proper direction, but it was very indirect, and by the time we got close to Eastbourne, it was nearly 9 PM. The other thing that didn’t help was that I missed my stop, since I had been a little unsure of where it was anyway. The driver took pity on me when I realized we’d passed it, and let me out on the side of the road. I walked back.
At the B&B, I worked out arrangements with Mary for this morning. She was having her two granddaughters sleep over last night, so was a bit frazzled, but very happy. We decided I’d have breakfast at 8. Blueberry pancakes. We also talked about what to do with my luggage situation, and decided that we really couldn’t do anything in the decision-making arena until the morning when I found out from Air New Zealand more details. Like where exactly the bag was, and when they thought they might have it in Wellington. I was already planning to head into town in the morning to spend my soon-to-be-authorized NZ$100 from the whole fiasco. I also wanted to stop at a bank to see if I could change my Aussie dollars to kiwi dollars.
On my way to bed, I climbed in the hot tub again and read a few more chapters in Whale Rider, which I’d purchased in Brisbane on Chris’ suggestion. Then showered, forgot to wash out my underwear and socks so did that in the sink, and climbed into bed. The book called me, so I got up and finished reading it. Good book. Now I have to see the movie, but no problem since Barb let me … um… borrow it. Coughed myself to sleep.
I’m pretty sure this won’t get posted until Thursday at this point, but maybe in the time between then and now, I can actually catch up on the days I’ve missed, so you’ll have plenty to keep you busy while I’m living something like 36 hours in the span of nine hours time passing on Friday. That’s when you catch up from my deluge from yesterday.
So let’s start with yesterday. It’s already slipping out of my brain. I like to do these write-ups because I get to relive the days each time, and then I can always go back and read them, and it’s like I get to preserve every moment. Welcome to the VIA-ing of Jen’s mind, right?
Yesterday. Sunday. I woke up thinking it was Saturday. Had that problem all day because most of Saturday had been spent in transit, so it’s as if the day didn’t exist at all. When I went upstairs for breakfast, a goblet of yogurt with fresh apricots cut on top was waiting for me. I started in on that (after running back downstairs for a Lactaid – thankfully, I’d thought to put two capsules in my wallet so they’d managed to actually arrive in Wellington with me), and Mary came out asking what else would I want? Cereal, juice, coffee, tea, hot stuff – eggs, etc. I accepted a pot of tea and scrambled eggs. I drank a LOT of coffee in Australia and am trying to get off it again. Part of that was Chris’ fault, part was Tom’s fault, since both of them drink coffee by the gallon, and part was that we kept trying to stay awake during the workshops and conferences after staying up too late the night before! After breakfast, I got online for a bit and spoke to some of you. I called Air New Zealand about my bag and was told it had been “located” but they didn’t have it yet. The guy was very nice, though, and when he took down my temporary address, he also added a note saying not to expect someone to answer the phone for calls and just to please bring it and leave it on the front step if no one was home. “Want my guess?” he said. “It went to LA,” I said. “Yup,” he said, adding, “By the way, call tomorrow morning if you don’t have it yet because after 24 hours, you’re authorized for NZ$100 emergency expenses.” Since I only had my tee shirt and jeans, Mary offered me a thermal undershirt and a ski jacket which I eagerly accepted. Then, since she was heading into town, she gave me a lift. Eastbourne, where the B&B is, is about three quarters of the way around the bay where Wellington is, so that’s about a 15 minute drive from the city center. Wellington is a rather bustling city for being so small, and Mary assured me I’d be able to walk all the way through it if I wanted to spend the day. I wanted to start at Te Papa (literally “our place”, the national museum of New Zealand), so Mary dropped me off there.
Te Papa is in a very unique looking building right on the waterfront. Inside the front door, I found an ATM and withdrew a quantity of NZ dollars. (Unfortunately, with all the craziness of Saturday, I had not been able to spend my remaining Aussie dollars, nor make a withdrawal of NZ dollars once I got to this country, so I had been very lucky that Mary picked me up at the airport and then took me into town. Otherwise, I would have had to borrow cash from her!) Ironically, admission to the museum is free, as is admission to most museums here. I think that’s a fantastic policy, but I’m not sure how they then manage to pull off the quality and quantity of exhibits I’m about to describe to you. Te Papa is six levels, each one huge, and each with different stuff on it. Nearly every exhibit is hands-on. On one level, the Earth and natural disasters were described in detail, and, to learn about earthquakes, you went into this little house, and after a brief movie, the earthquake “struck” and the whole house shook and lurched like crazy. There was a part of a level that was devoted to nature and animal life in NZ, and there was an impressive number of skeletons, fossils, models of animals, and even a rainforest walk, in and around replicas of trees and animals. Another level of the museum was devoted to the different cultures of people who make up NZ – Chinese and Italian particularly. Another level had a huge display of Maori culture, with green stone carvings, canoes, and several displays running footage of Maoris describing their creation myths of NZ. Another section of the museum had a display on the 1970s, complete with tacky carpeting, examples of goods popular in the ‘70s, and various monitors with pieces of shows from the 1970s. Most amusing to me was a five minute Graham Kerr video on how to unstick an omelet from a pan. I found this funny because when I was in early high school, I suddenly discovered Graham Kerr on PBS television, and for at least one summer was pretty addicted to his cooking show. I had no idea he’d already been doing that for twenty years. Apparently, Kerr is NZ’s first television chef. (No, I don’t know who followed in his footsteps.) There was a small exhibit on a different floor of how nature influences art and vice versa, with photographs (some very close up) of animals or plants, and each paired up with some architectural or artistic object. The only example I can remember at the moment was a bridge which looked to me like the Golden Gate Bridge, but I don’t think it was, and next to it, they had a rendering of DNA. And they really did look similar. Another layer of the museum looked more like museums with which I’m familiar, paintings on the wall, people being told not to touch them, etc. However, on that floor, like every other floor, a children’s area existed where kids could color and do other interesting activities, generally related to the theme of the exhibits on that floor. A nice touch, I thought. Regardless, after more than two hours, I hadn’t even hit all the floors, but I was getting museum-ed out. I exited by way of the museum shop which was the best museum shop I’d ever seen. I was severely tempted to buy you all gifts on the spot, but I held back. I would have had to carry everything with me for the rest of the day.
Once out of Te Papa, I decided to just wander the city. I walked through a very sketchy indoor market, made sketchier by the fact that when I intentionally wanted to go back to it today, it was closed… I figured pretty mostly anywhere I wandered would be okay. It’s hard to lose your bearings when one side of the city is the harbor, and the other side is mountains. However, I was soon frustrated by the fact that most of the streets are straight, which means that you think you’re right by the water, and yet, at the end of the street, you’re now several blocks further from the harbor. (Does that make any sense?) If the streets curved, with the harbor, this wouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, I didn’t end up wandering in the productive part of the city until a few hours later, and visited a whole bunch of outdoor gear stores trying to find a backpack Glen was looking for. I went in and out of other places too. Didn’t find anything extraordinary.
I had a few “must do” items on my list for the day, though. ATM had been one, but I also needed to go make my ferry arrangements for getting to and from Pickton. (How I was then getting from Pickton to Nelson, I didn’t know.) I needed also to go to a pharmacy and get some more cough drops, since my stash from Brisbane was nearly gone, and I was still coughing a lot. I also thought I should get more Tylenol since I was taking Tylenol Cold one tablet at a time, twice a day, and using just a plain Tylenol for the other 500 mg of pain relief for my throat. However, they don’t have Tylenol here. Nor acetaminophen. They’ve got Panadol, which, the pharmacist assured me, was some cousin of acetaminophen called something like paracetamol. Or, if you’re not paying attention, Panadeine. Which is paracetamol with codeine. I was, however, paying attention. I got some generic paracetamol, and selected a box of Cepacol lozenges because they actually had a cough suppressant in them – hydrometholbromine or whatever it is. I recognized it as a cough suppressant. Although they do seem to suppress my cough, they taste HORRIFIC. EW YUCK, is all I can say. I actually felt sick about halfway through the first one because it was just awful. You’re supposed to take two every three hours. I’m taking one every three hours, and it’s amazing. It’s almost to the minute, even if I’m not watching the clock, I’ll start coughing like crazy right at three hours.
I walked intentionally back down to the waterfront so I could get to the ferry terminal, and went and bought my tickets. Unfortunately, the fast boat (2 hours) isn’t so fast anymore since they now have speed restrictions. It used to make the journey in 90 minutes, but environmental damage ensued. The slow boat takes 3 hours. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to book the fast boat for my return on Thursday, and I’ll get in at 9 PM. (Mary has offered to come get me from the terminal, which is very very nice of her.)
I started to walk back toward the city, along the water, and happily ran into the Museum of City and Sea. I had heard very good, but vague things about it from my travel guide and from Mary, who said she’d never been there. Admission to it was also free. I was greeted by a friendly staffer who gave me a map, explained the three levels – level 1 is a special photographic exhibit, level 2 is about the sea, and level 3 is about the city and society. Then she asked where I was from. This is one thing I’ve noticed a lot on this trip – people ask me frequently where I’m from. More so than ever before. I’m glad they’re friendly, and I’m not offended, but half the people I end up talking to ask either where I’m from or what sort of accent I have! (The best was getting mistaken for being Canadian while on the ferry today. By a Canadian! Imagine that, eh?) The first level of the museum was alright – the special exhibit was a photography one. Up a central gorgeous dark wood staircase to the second floor. It might be about the sea, alright, but mostly it was about shipwrecks in the strait between the north and south islands. The very same strait I just bought ferry tickets to cross. At the far end of the floor was a screening room, which showed a 15 minute movie about the 1949(?) Wahine tragedy where the ship Wahine (pronounced wa-hee-nay) with 700+ people struck a reef during a storm and then sunk during a brutal storm. Their situation had gone from probably okay to tragic in 20 minutes. Even the lifeboats were capsized by 60 foot swells. The movie footage was brutal, and showed people on shore desperately trying to pull in lifeboats which were nearly being overturned in water only usually a few feet deep. 50+ people died. Suddenly, I was thinking maybe this north island/south island thing I was trying to do wasn’t such a good idea. I’m glad I had bought my tickets prior to going to the museum! As I was finishing up the second floor exhibits, a chime rang four times (it was four o’clock), and then, on the central wall of the museum behind the stairs, a film started playing, something about being on a commercial shipping voyage in the 1930s. It was fun to watch it on the wall, and people from all levels of the museum hung over the railings on their level to pay attention. I sat on the stairs. The third floor was divided into sections talking about different aspects of early life in Wellington, including education, health, sanitation, homelessness, police and crime, etc. At the far end, again, seemed to be a screening room, but one rotation of the movie had already started, so I walked in and did a double take. There was no movie screen. Instead, there was a shelf with some objects on it: a candlestick, a book, a coil of rope, some old glass bottles. And on the shelf, walking around, talking, was a perfect 8 inch tall projection(?) of a woman. She was 3D and she was interacting with the objects. When she walked behind the glass bottles, her image was distorted. When she sat on the book, she cast a shadow! It was amazing. She talked of two Maori myths, and for one, two other perfect little people appeared and acted it out while she was reciting it! After the show, only about 15 minutes, I walked right up to the shelf and looked all around it and found no projector, no mirrors, no strings, no anything. I was the only person in the room when it started again, and I was standing maybe two feet from the little woman and still couldn’t figure out how it worked. I checked my museum pamphlet. There was no mention of this anywhere. It’s like the perfectly kept awesome museum secret. Bill Bryson has a description of something similar, I now recall, but I hadn’t thought it was for Wellington, since his book is about Australia, not NZ. I’ll need to check that section again. Having examined every corner of the museum (Te Papa might have gotten away, but the Museum of City and Sea has been thoroughly inspected by me!), I exited through the museum shop, buying a bunch of postcards and stamps on the way out.
I walked along the harbor, taking pictures. I came across an interesting fountain in which two little boys were playing. As I started to frame up the shot, their father started yelling something. I thought he was yelling at the kids to get out of the picture, so I turned to him and said, “They’re okay; I’m fine with it, if you don’t mind.” “Yeah, but, they’re about to take a wee!” he said. When I looked again, the boys had dropped their pants. I have no idea if their pants were down when I went to frame the shot. I assured the parents that I hadn’t actually taken a picture, and we all had a good laugh about that one. In the meantime, the mother had gone to scoop up the boys, and I took a picture afterward.
I walked to Courtenay Place, the “end of the line” for all the buses, but more or less the city center given that it’s all the way over on the left side of Wellington (don’t know if that’s east or west). I couldn’t find a place I wanted to eat dinner that wasn’t really expensive or Indian (there was an Indian restaurant every two steps), so I kept walking until I came to one corner where a pub-type place looked to have decent stuff. I got my table for one, first time on this trip, and chose a beer (Monteith’s – same brand Chris and I drunk by the six pack in Melbourne – but this time I tried their golden lager. The pub had five varieties of Monteith’s on tap.). For dinner, I had an unexpectedly delicious meal. The description was something like “wild mushrooms with an herb pancake, tomatoes, onions, white balsamic, and cheese”, so I was anticipating something hot, probably with spaghetti type sauce. Instead, I was brought a huge plate of cold, fresh mixed greens with tomatoes and onions which had been marinated in a light balsamic sauce. On top of that was a steaming, thick, golden, curved “pancake”, which was supposedly wrapped around the large pieces of several styles of mushrooms, many of which had escaped out onto the salad. It was very good, and I ate the entire thing, suddenly realizing I hadn’t had lunch. It was 6 PM. I drank my beer slowly, and wrote postcards for the next hour, waiting for the last bus to Eastbourne which was going to arrive at 8 PM. The pub wasn’t too busy, though, and the staff didn’t seem to mind if I just stayed. Still, I had another hour to kill, so I took a long slow walk up and down Courtenay place. I managed to get on the bus in the proper direction, but it was very indirect, and by the time we got close to Eastbourne, it was nearly 9 PM. The other thing that didn’t help was that I missed my stop, since I had been a little unsure of where it was anyway. The driver took pity on me when I realized we’d passed it, and let me out on the side of the road. I walked back.
At the B&B, I worked out arrangements with Mary for this morning. She was having her two granddaughters sleep over last night, so was a bit frazzled, but very happy. We decided I’d have breakfast at 8. Blueberry pancakes. We also talked about what to do with my luggage situation, and decided that we really couldn’t do anything in the decision-making arena until the morning when I found out from Air New Zealand more details. Like where exactly the bag was, and when they thought they might have it in Wellington. I was already planning to head into town in the morning to spend my soon-to-be-authorized NZ$100 from the whole fiasco. I also wanted to stop at a bank to see if I could change my Aussie dollars to kiwi dollars.
On my way to bed, I climbed in the hot tub again and read a few more chapters in Whale Rider, which I’d purchased in Brisbane on Chris’ suggestion. Then showered, forgot to wash out my underwear and socks so did that in the sink, and climbed into bed. The book called me, so I got up and finished reading it. Good book. Now I have to see the movie, but no problem since Barb let me … um… borrow it. Coughed myself to sleep.
posted by Jen at 8:53 PM
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