Wellington part 1:

This weekend, Ben and I went to Wellington. I ended up taking about 8,000 pictures or so, that is, if I define the value of 8,000 to be 112, so these posts will end up being somewhat visually laden.

We left Friday at approximately 11:00 from a bus stop that didn't look like it even existed. Seriously, this was a bus stop going from Palmerston North to Wellington, one would expect that at the very least there would be a covering of some sort. No. It was a little bent section of the wood railings that enclose the road. Ben and I got there at about 10:40, so we spent over a half-hour wondering if we were in the right spot, you know, the "oh shit, we're in the wrong spot and we're gonna miss the bus" feeling.

It turned out being the right spot, so we took the two hour trip to Wellington, and we got out at about here:

I don't actually know either of the two females who appear in the foreground, so we'll call them Sally and Lizzy. So Sally and Lizzy are walking at the railway station in Wellington, which is a significantly larger city than Palmerston North; about Reno-sized in population. And, like Reno, it aspires to be a larger city. So, to give the illusion that it's bigger than it really is, they built the city center upwards,with what approximate to skyscrapers.

Anyways, we got off of the bus, had lunch, and started walking about town with the vague objective of eventually meeting up with Ben's schoolmate, who we were staying with. Using the Law of Probability (i.e. walk in enough random directions, one of them is eventually bound to be right) we saw a majority of the city and eventually discovered the St. George hotel.

The hotel itself was rather interesting; the Beatles had stayed there at one point in time, so it existed as a sort of national landmark. One floor of the building was rented out to anybody who wanted to stay where the Beatles did, the fifth floor. The rest of the building is rented out as a dorm for students studying at Victoria University. They had this weird keycard system that made it so you could only get out of the elevator/stairs at the floor that you card was keyed for. The end result of this is that none of the college kids could go to the Beatles floor. So they created a sort of mythology about the fifth floor: Nobody has ever been there, its rooms are nicer than ours, its still furnished like it was for the Beatles, Bigfoot has a room somewhere over there. It was really funny. Anyways, we stayed in a room with Trang, one of Ben's acquaintences from Mudd, in a room that barely had enough room for one, yet somehow we fit three bodies into it. Awesome.

We basically spent the rest of the day exploring the city, taking in the sights and all that. Apparently, Trang, has some German friends that she claimed to have had a falling out with. She was talking with them, joking, as we all tend to do in small groups, when, she chose to raise her right hand, hold it straight in the air, and say "Heil Hitler." She felt this had offended them in some way, I've no idea why, and that night they were having a flat warming party. So Ben and I attended the German flat warming party, spoke with a Dane, some Germans, and a pretty aweseome Kiwi for two hours. They all got a little smashed, so we took Trang back to her appartment and called it a day.

This is one of the Germans, Jenz:

Wellington also tends to take pride in being known as the Cultural Capital. It does this by taking vaguely artistic objects with no logical resemblence to each other, and scattering them about the city randomly.

I called the one above the "Mario Monument"

The silver globe suspended above a civic center.

And then Atlas shrugged. . .

Butko out.

For today.