The End of a Vacation.

Day 6:
As we are all aware, you never accomplish anything on travelling days. It's a simple fact of life, Butko's Maxim, if you will.


Anyways, the night before my return to NZ, I'd spent the night alone in a 4 person dorm room, something that has never happened to me. It was almost creepy, it had the same feeling that a school gets after dark; the eerie silence of a place that's meant to be filled with people, but is devoid of life. On the other hand, it let me make as much noise as I wanted to without fear of waking up my dorm-mates, which was a good thing considering my 6:00 wake up time.

I again took an airport shuttle to the airport, this time for TEN dollars. Grrrr. Lucky for me, I showed up about ten minutes early, for no sooner had I exited my hostel with baggage in hand than the shuttle showed up. It was driven by some short, stout, communist block guy who adhered very strictly to his schedule. So much, in fact, that we completely abandoned somebody in a hotel because they weren't outside to meet us when we got there. It's a good thing my OCD demands that I get to places early.


My airport experience went somewhat smoother than it did on my trip into the country. Somewhat. I was "randomly" selected for a search though, which was a first. They padded me down, tested me for incendiary devices, and let me go, an all around painless process. What intrigued me, however, is that they actually asked for my permission to do the checks. It makes me wonder, what would have happened if I'd said no?


Oh, and following the earlier paradigm, my plane was empty. It's the first time in my life that I've had a free seat next to me, let alone three. Seriously, except for obvious pairs everybody had their own row. I've never seen that.


Anyways, by the time that I landed, retrieved my luggage, waited for the bus, took the bus to town, hiked through town with my luggage, checked in, dragged my Tetrised suitcase up four flights of stairs, and unpacked, I was about exhausted. So I elected to read/finish the first book of Stepen King's Dark Tower series. I had just settled in and read maybe one paragraph when the door opened and that night's dorm-mate came through the door. We talked for a little bit, I learned that his name was Saffir, that he is a Kiwi by birth (something quite rare in hostels, trust me), that he was working on his grad program in physical therapy, and that he was going out that night with one of his mates from college for a little pool. Would I like to come? Exhaustion and intrigue warred within my brain, and eventually intrigue won out.


So I spent the night with two Kiwis playing free pool (the table was broken, which was good because otherwise it would have been probably 15+ games * $2 a game = $30 for pool.), and talking about random things. They were both really awesome people, and by the end of the night it was like I'd known them for years. Thank you intrigue.


Thusly I was prevented from having a single quiet day on the entire vacation.


Day 7:
To preface: Wellington is not a very big city, and, after having spent the previous six days in Sydney, it seemed even smaller. Nonetheless, there's some charm to the city, having equal elements of Reno and San Fransisco with a Kiwi population. But, having already been here a couple of times, I'd effectively exhausted the number of possible touristy things to do. All except one. I had not yet been to the Botanical Garden. So, this probably being the last time that I would be in Wellington for a loooong time, I decided to go.


But they don't' make it easy on you. Trying to find the Botanical Garden in Wellington was like trying to find my way in Sydney's Central Railway system; a mouse, searching for cheese. And, as always happens, after having just decided that I was done looking for the entrance, I found the entrance. So I took the cable car up to the Botanical Garden. Honestly, it was far better than I'd thought it would be. Larger, longer, prettier than I'd anticipated.

The view of Wellington from the Garden.

My personal favorite part, they had this tree. The inside was like a jungle gym with every branch totally climbable. Needless to say, I spent way more time inside of this tree than I should have.


After exploring the garden for a bit, I found that I still had about 3 hours before everybody else was going to arrive in Wellington. Good thing I brought my book with. Yep.

3 hours later, I was walking towards the isite, which was to be our meeting place, when I noticed that the city was more. . . alive than normal. The reason, naturally, was that it was rugby time!

If there's one thing that I've learned over here, it's that Kiwis loooove their rugby. And, what's even better for me, Rodrigo had bought our entire crew tickets for the All-Blacks game that was going on that night! Seeing an All-Blacks game has been on my to-do list since the day that I got here in NZ, and, finally, I was going to get to do it! The last item on my touristy itinerary!

It was weird for me though, because the last week I had finally come to know how one could be alone in a sea of people, and I was starting to get used to my own company. Probably not a good thing, I know, but that's what happened. Soon I'll just grow a long ZZ Top beard and mutter to myself (of course, only the beard will be new, but whatever). Needless to say, it was a weird experience being thrown right back into the center of socialization when my friends came and picked me up for the game. I had actually kinda missed them, but don't tell them that, they'll think I'm going soft.

Anyway, we had all splintered off that week and gone to different places, and we all had different stories to tell each other, so that kept us busy right up 'till the beginning of the game. But before we get to the game, you should know that it's winter over here, we're near Antarctica, and it was an open stadium. Of course, nobody had brought blankets. So I talked Ben and Joe into coming with me to buy some from a closing Warehouse. The store was really, really picked over, and it took us a whiles to find the closest things resembling blankets that we could. Unfortunately, the didn't have price tags. Oh well, we thought, if it's too expensive, we'll just buy one. So we took them to the counter, showed them to the girl behind the machine, showed her the lack of price tags, she typed into her computer for a second, and randomly came up with the price: $6.27 each. Honestly, I think she just came up with it on the top of her head. So I bought 'em and gave 'em away as presents to Joe and, I think, Andrea. But maybe Ben got his hands on the second one, I dunno, he's crafty that way.

Joe and Andrea playing around in my awesome blankets.


So, blankets in hand we headed for the cake-tin, (or Westpac stadium, but who calls it that?) nearly got separated in the waves of people:

and eventually ended up seeing the All-Blacks whoop France 61-3. Yes, that was the final score. I really don't even know why the French even bothered.

There were fireworks, how cool is that? And they had a little girl's choir sing the respective national anthems of each country. This will sound dumb, but I didn't know that La Marseillaise had words. Ooops.

Before every Rugby game, the All Blacks do what is known as the haka. For those of you that remember, it's basically a Maori war-chant, and I believe that there are few things in life that are more intimidating that a bunch of Massive-as Kiwi Rugby players screaming at your face that pain is good. I was ready to storm the French players after hearing it. I can't imagine how charged the Kiwi players were, which is probably reflected in the score. . .

A gametime picture.

The crew during the game, drinking from their plastic beer bottles.


After that travesty of a Rugby game (for the French) Ben did the 2 hour drive home, the girls passed out in the back, and I was actually happy to be back in "balmy" Palmy.