Wellington

After settling into the hotel, we decided the best thing to do was just get to exploring. No need to rest. First thing first though....need to unpack and change into some of the warm clothes packed for this leg of the trip. No more warm bikini weather for me...time to layer to keep warm. We walked along the seawall before heading into the tourist centre. The part of the seawall that we walked along had a bunch of plaques which commemorated different wars the Kiwis were involved in. From reading those plaques and from visits to other museums, that the Kiwis were afraid of the Russians invading many, many years ago. It struck me as odd that they would have feared a Russian invasion given the geographical distance between the two. Along our walk we also saw a bunch of modern art and depending on your taste it could be explained as either creative or just plain weird. We found our way to the tourist centre which is called i-Site and found some cool ideas of places to visit during our short trip. We ended walking up to the Parliament buildings to catch the last tour of the day. The tour lasted about an hour and our guide was very informative. The House was actually in session during our visit and we were invited to go watch the session. So after our tour we went to the gallery to watch the circus, I mean parliament session. OK, in reality it was more like watching a bunch of grown adults act like 3 year olds arguing at the playground. It was quite entertaining to see these elected officials continously talk (and "talk" is being used very loosely here) over one another. I'm not sure how any business gets accomplished during these sessions. And unfortunately their parliament system is similiar to Canada's....well you get the picture especially if you've seen our Parliament sessions on TV. These people run our countries and that's a scary thought. BUT, I highly recommend this entertainment if you ever get the chance. It's good for a laugh.

Afterwards we continued walking around trying to see as much as we could before it got dark. Seems as though that started happening around 5pm. We found ourselves on Lambton Quay, which seems to be their Robson Street, only better; much wider sidewalks for people to walk around and it just seemed to be longer. We did recognize a lot of the stores as ones we have here. And yes we did see Starbuck's a few times, but did not spend any of our Kiwi dollars there. Something that all coffee lovers need to know about New Zealand (well at least about Wellington and Auckland) is that you'll never have to go far to find a coffee shop. There seems to be an abudance of coffee shop options. And the best coffee by far is the flat white (a version of the Americano, but the milk is more silky than foamy). AWESOME!! Oh, how I miss those.....hmmmm....OK, back to the blog...

For dinner we met up with my friend Katherine, her daughter Caroline and Caroline's middle son Mathew. For old times sake, Katherine took us to and Irish Pub for drinks where I had to try the Guinness of course. As expected it did not come anywhere near tasting as good as the Guinness in Ireland. We ended up at a different restaurant for dinner and more drinks. It was really fabulous to catch up and to get to know Caroline and Mathew. It was really a lovely evening.