So, the last time you heard from me, I was kicking an Otago girl outta my hotel room. Go Tim. After all that excitement, I packed my shit and headed for the airport. One other woman was on the airport shuttle. We get to the airport, I collect my boarding pass, and proceed to the gate. When I get there, I realize that something very strange just happened...
I didn't have to clear security.
Like, no baggage screening, no metal detector. Nothing. Anyone can come and go from the gates. What fucking year is it here, 1965? I realize that terrorists aren't exactly sitting in their caves, planning to blow up all 29 people on the Air New Zealand flight from Buttfuck to Middle-O'-Nowhere, but still, no security at all? What the hell?
After thinking about that for a half hour or so, we all board our flight, and...the lady from the shuttle is sitting beside me. Weird. It was a short, comfy flight into Wellington, but the landing was unreal. I had heard it referred to as "Windy Welly", but I had no fucking clue what I was in for. The plane was swaying back and forth so bad, I was pretty certain a wing was going to hit the runway before the wheels did. But, since you're reading this, that obviously didn't happen. So far, flying in NZ was full of adventure. If shitting your pants is an "adventure".
Get off the plane, and onto another shuttle...and the same woman gets on the shuttle. Wow, this is getting "breakfast buddies in Jasper" like. Then, it got even weirder when she got off at the same hotel as me. What the hell? We were both eyeing each other warily, because it was a pretty fucking big string of coincidences. No, I didn't end up tossing her. Probably shoulda though.
Hotel was dead center downtown, so I went for a long-ass walk in the rain. The city is FUCKING SWEET. Right on a big harbor, super-clean downtown that wasn't too busy, and houses sprawling up the hills in all directions. No homeless people at all, unlike Auckland. This was a pic I took from the museum...it's some ritzy area of town:
Anyway, after all that walking, you can guess where I stopped:
Hey, I was thirsty, leave me alone. This was the coolest pub EVER though. They showed every North American sport imaginable. The NBA Finals were on when I was in there, but they also show the MLB, NFL, and...the NHL! Hell yes! And pints were 5 NZD, so like 3.40 Canadian. What's not to like?
After that, I went to what is referred to as the best museum in NZ, Te Papa. It's mostly Maori-oriented stuff, and it's fucking HUGE. 6 floors, massive building, tonsa shit in it. To be honest, I wasn't that impressed. All that space didn't contain much cool shit. The Otago museum was like 10% of the size, and still had cooler stuff. Maybe I'm just not a museum guy, who knows. Here are a couple pics from the museum.
A Marae, some sort of Maori humping hut or something:
The jungle area outside:
I went back to the hotel and chilled for a bit, then got keyed up for the big rugby game. My hotel had a bar in the lobby, so I ventured down there for a few wobblers and discussed the game with a few people. As usual, all the Kiwi's were super nice and helpful in explaining the finer points of the game I hadn't grasped yet. Wellington's team, the Hurricanes, were in the semi-finals and people were pretty excited for it. Unfortunately they lost, but it was still a super good game and I met some cool people.
I didn't want to pay bar prices all night, and I was pretty tired from the walk earlier, so I went looking for a liquor store. I found one..and it was closed at 6pm on a saturday. Odd. I ventured a little further and didn't find anythin else, so I went back to my hotel to inquire about this. The lady at the desk said "That's the only liquor store around here. Downtown is pretty dead at night on the weekends."
WHAT?
The city is very cool, but they do little to cater to the thousands of people that stay in downtown hotels each night. It might be on purpose, so the people are forced to get food and drink from their hotel at inflated prices, but it was pretty shitty. Every pub in the area was fucking jam-packed due to the rugby game, so I had no choice but to chill in the lobby bar for a while longer and watch some more rugby (different league, different rules. It'd take too long to explain). I called it an early night a few hours later.
The next day had one purpose - getting to hang out with a giraffe! The Wellington Zoo has a program where you get to go inside a giraffe's cage and feed him and pet him n shit. I'd been looking forward to this for a while, because giraffes are my cousins, according to most of my friends. And they're cool, like me. So about 2 hours before I was going to head out, I got an email from the zoo:
"Dear Mr. Burke,
Due to the current weather conditions, the giraffe is not accepting visitors today for the safety of the giraffe and the zoo visitors. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you would like to reschedule, please contact us. We can also offer you a refund if necessary.
Sincerely,
Angry Asshole Giraffe and friends"
I told Lisa about it, and surprisingly she came up with a pretty witty burn:
"Are you kidding me? Not even a giraffe will keep a date with you? haha!"
Damn you woman.
Since I didn't have much else to do, I just went exploring in the rain again. The most famous building in Welly is called the Beehive. Doesn't look like a fucking beehive to me though. Here's a pic - Beehive or no beehive?
I spent most of the day just checking out various things downtown. The city is more livable than touristy, which I liked very much. I didn't dig everything closing early though. The wind got tiresome after a while too. Hey it's wind, how bad can it be, right? BAD. My hat blew away 3 different times. Walking around felt like you were walking uphill, because it was a struggle to walk into it. I'm not even kidding. And this isn't even me being lazy. Honest. Fo' real.
I managed to grab food and beer at a regular time on this day though, so it was all good. I had an early flight to Rotorua, so I figured I'd stay outta pubs and just chill in my room and watch rugby. Mission accomplished, and I won 45 bucks betting on the games. I had no clue what the fuck I was betting on, but it made the games interesting at least.
It was still raining like hell the next morning, but I had a flight to catch. Go to get on the airport shuttle, and GUESS who's on there. Yup, the lady from before. I wanted to say "Hellllo NEWMAN". She was my nemesis!
