Christchurch

This past tuesday, Gigi and I went on our way to leave Wellington to go down to Hayley's place for some serious thesis writing. We have all been really busy lately since our deadline is due next week, so we haven't had much time to travel around and see the area yet, but Gigi and I however did have a few hours in Christchurch before we were on our way to Dunedin, since our flight wasn't direct.

So, we decided to go to town after landing in Christchurch and see what the earthquakes early last year had done to this once so big and beautiful city.

I would have loved to say a lot of nice things about this town, but truth is, it's a giant dump. The centre of the city is completely demolished with everything falling apart, construction work going on everywhere, but no people. It mostly reminded me of parts of Poland and eastern Germany with buildings left unattended since WW2 where they were bombed to smithereens.

Amidst all the tragic ruins, I did however find reason for laughter! I'm telling you, someone's got their priorities wrong in Christchurch, apparently putting together an emergency shopping centre was a lot more important than, let's just say, restoring the many year old historical church in the centre of the city?

For more pictures, flick through my gallery here: http://imgur.com/a/dcyC3

Showering in the Elevators

So today at around 10:10am here on 50 Manners Street (Check Location), the fire alarm went off. My first thought, learning from last time when we had a fire drill, was to grap my gadgets and then get out. So I did.

10 minutes earlier, I could swear someone was showering on the other side of the wall, I set next to the service shaft and it really sounded like there was water in there.

I wasn't wrong. I walked down the fire exit and on my way out, I saw the elevators getting full of water... Once I got outside I talked to Gilles, who told me that he had been downstairs to grap a coffee, and when he was, he saw everyone from the 11th floor coming down soaking wet, reason: A water pipe had burst. Note: You can easily recognize people from the 11th floor because that's where the Spanish Embassy is.

And then came the fire brigade, 4 trucks loaded with firefighters, ironic, when all we needed was a plumber. Anyways, some pictures:

Those little amazing things... A tribute to Metlink!

On the buses, everyone says "Good day" (or morning or evening) when they get on the bus, and "Thanks driver!" when they get off.

You always know when the police or fire brigade is coming before you can even hear them: The buses stop, blovk the road for cars and makes space for them.

When your card isn't working you get to ride for free! (Happened to me once and the busdriver sees me every morning).

The busdrivers are always friendly and very talkative! I get off at the second last stop on my route so it's very handy for me.

They're not on time, but got precise GPS estimates of arrival so you don't have to worry how long it will take.

Update:
So I've been told that a friend of mine passed this on to Metlink, you're welcome to contact me guys!

On second thought, maybe the ones I should thank is GoWellington? I don't know which is the parent company or if they are related at all, both deal with transport in Wellington and I'm just a tourist.

It never ends!

New Zealand that is. Turn around a random corner and you see something new, exciting, pretty, weird or just amazing in some other way.

In the middle of Wellington Harbour, formed long ago, before the time of Kupe, when Te Ika-a-Māui was just fished from the depths of the ocean, lived two taniwha, Ngake and Whātaita, lies Matui or Somes Island.

Somes Island served pretty much the same role as Ellis Island in New York, just off Manhattan. While New Zealand never really screened immigrants to the same extension, the local farmers were worried about diseases and so Somes Island had one of (and at several times THE) the worlds most secure animal health checkpoint. One feature being that noone ever wrote notes, instead notes were recorded with a microphone on an external tape recorder outside the security zone. Quite clever.

There was more than animals out there, or so they say: During WW2 Italians were held prisoner on the island because their weird language made them spies. Thick accent+gibberish=spy. Good thing security was low and the Italians could go swimming, make money creating sea-shell jewellery and meet their families 2 times a month. Italians were imprisoned on Matui for 2-4 years, many never found out why.

In 1956, a chinese man was put in detention on a small rock (calling it an island is really an overstatement!) just north of Matui. He was believed to have leprocy and was put there for that reason. When possible, the lighthouse keeper would row out with food, and apparently more. After the chinese man had died 3 months later, they found furniture made from shipping crates and more. They never found out why died, but today the small island goes by the name Leper Island.

Now, this place is beautiful! Just look at the picture, enough history!

Featherston French Fair

This weekend was awesome!

So Hayley was coming, which in itself is pretty cool since I haven't seen her since her housewarming way back on January 20th.

Friday night we went out and played pool, luckily Hayley and I both suck really hard at it so noone really won a game, rather we would take turns losing for pouching the 8-ball too early. After a few games we met up with Hayley's friends and went clubbing until 1:30. When we went home we sort of talked a bit too much and forgot to get off, so we had to walk for 30 minutes to get home.

The next morning we were going to visit Gigi in Masterton to go to a French Fair in Featherston. We got on the train and went to Solway Station where Gigi met us and walked us back to the Copthorne Hotel and Resort. We dropped off our bags and went to the playground for the kids (Gigi and Hayley) to play.

After that we went to KFC, while there we planned the rest of the day: Go to French Fair, go back to Masterton, go shopping for me to cook again, go home and watch TV and drink loads of New Zealand wine. Pretty good plan we thought.

Girls and their bags and hats...

Pizza-machine!

"Market trash"

So on to the busstop, get on bus and go to French Fair. As expected we forgot to get off (again), and so we thought we had to walk but didn't. Because as it turned out, Rick the busdriver (who's going to play a major role later on!), offered to go back that way after stopping at Featherston station, we kindly accepted! 20 minutes later we were at the French Fair and could check out the attractions. Rick said he'd be back at 5-10 past 5 which gave us about 3 hours at the fair.

Personally I don't think it was awesome, but there was a lot of what I would call regular market trash for sale. They did have a fucking (and this is AWESOME!) mobile pizza-bakery! That's like, amazing! A car with a giant wood-fired pizza-oven on the back of it! Oh well. I bought a gift for Marta and the girls went shopping too and got a few things. The coolest thing was probably the Betty Boob coasters that Hayley got. How she can call them girly I have no idea about!

French Fair. That was the name. While people did dress up like stereotypical french people, we didn't meet any. 7-finger chocolate man was from Belgium and the apple-juice man from Romania. The rest were presumably Kiwis.

Eventually it was time to go and so we left, waiting for the bus. Rick did come back, but he was going the wrong way! Well: He had misunderstood us or we had misunderstood him, so he thought we were going back to Martinborough and not Masterton. Whoops! We got on the bus anyways because we did not want to get stuck in the middle of nowhere at a closed French Fair without french people.


We got to Featherston station where we would have to wait for 3 hours for the train to arrive. Rick saw that we were in a kinda sucky position and gave us an amazing offer again:

Featherston

He would go to Martinborough, come back and fuel up, park the bus, and take another bus home and drop us off at Copthorne because he lives in Masterton and Solway is on the way there. We couldn't really say no to such a great offer and got off in Featherston.

Back in Featherston we went shopping for groceries and got an ice cream while waiting for Rick to get back. Rick got there and fueled his bus, we got on, he parked it, and boarded the smaller slightly broken schoolbus. On the way back we had some great discussions on the development of the whole area where he's lived most of his life, spending 18 years in Australia since there was no work in New Zealand.

Bus 199 before departure to Solway

So Greytown, which we passed through on our way back, was the first inland town in New Zealand. It was created when all the rich people had bought the good land along the coasts mostly on the South Island, so poor people had no options for starting up. For 25 pounds they could but 1 acte land in Greytown to build a house on, and get 25 acres of land to grow to grow crops on somewhere around the city. With no money however, they couldn't afford to clear off the bush and start growing crops so after a few years you had a small town with a whole lot of poor people with big houses and no land because it had all been sold to the rich people. Masterton and Carterton which are nearby, were named after the two people behind this seemingly great initiative, Masters and Carter.

Anyways, we got back to Copthorne and thanked Rick many times for being so damn amazing throughout our day (which without him would have gone terribly wrong!). And I started cooking.

Pasta with a sauce made of: leak, carrots, beans, capcicum, tomato sauce and then some fried bacon. The girls loved it and it was truly amazing!

That was my weekend! Tomorrow back to Welly and work on project and relax! It was great seeing Hayley again and we had a great experience just, messing up our entire plan for saturday!

So Anders, what does Kiwis eat?

Fish and Chips,
Fish and Chips, and
Fish and Chips...

No really, that's all I've had this past two weeks, for tea at least (that's what my scottish heritage host family calls the evening meal). The reason being that Callum, the son of the house, has a science experiment going on, testing different types of packaging for delivering Fish and Chips.

So for the sake of science, we've been Fish and Chips. Callum had set up 5 different contraptions for packaging/wrapping the chips

• Pre-heated Crock-Pot
• Aluminum foil
• Woolen sweater
• Polystyrene box (aka Thermocole or Flamingo)
• Control (whatever packaging the shop supplied, a paper bag basically)

Upon the arrival of the Fish and Chips we would sit and wait for 5-10 minutes for Callum to measure the temperature as it was falling in each of the 5 wrappings and eventually we would get to eat and rate the transportation methods and their impact on the quality of our chips.

Consistently, the aluminum foil kept the chips hot, but soggy as there was no way for the water to escape the packaging. The polystyrene box was quite big, and seemed to keep the item warmer, and crunchier than regular packaging, but not a practical solution. The pre-heated crock-pot, would have the same effect as the aluminum foil when closed. However, if the original packaging was broken (happened on one occasion by accident) the chips would stay warm and crunchy, really good. The one solution to win the award of the best solution for keeping chips warm and crunchy however goes to the woolen sweater. While temperature was slightly lower than the pre-heated crock-pot, the chips stayed crunchy and most importantly: It's practical and requires no effort.

The control performed terrible: Crunchy but cold after just 5 minutes.

Those Wellingtonians

So on the bus morning, I noticed something quite peculiar, and since the traffic was slow I had plenty of time to ponder for the reason of it.

All the way in, the areas outlined with yellow stripes for the buses to park in had trash in them. It's most likely trash collecting day, but why would it all be in the bus stop areas?

Well, suburban Wellingtonians probably agree that parking is quite a hassle and also very expensive. The city council recently announced that prices will increase, again!

So to avoid blocking their drive-way or ruining a perfectly good parking spot, people simply dump their trash in the busstops, because these people have a car anyways and don't care about the buses. Smart eh?