We’ve moved from Queenstown to Wellington, leaving the South Island for the last time. Wellington is New Zealand’s capital city and we’d visited it a month ago. I like it. It is smaller than Auckland, still situated on a harbor, and visibly full of students.
First stop was a cafe for lunch. This one is notable because I’ve been angling for a savory meat pie for the whole month, and circumstances just didn’t work out for this option until today. A “mince and cheese” pie it was for lunch, washed down with another NZ classic, “lemon, lime and bitters”– tonic water flavored with lemon-lime– very adult soda. Mark ordered a kumara (like sweet potato) and bacon cold salad, and he was not a fan (too much kumara, not enough salad greens). Life worked out, since my pie was huge, and Mark also had another NZ classic: a ginger “slice,” or bar cookie. In short, it was a very simple NZ restaurant that gave us quintessential NZ lunch. Meanwhile, outside of the cafe, there were surfers in the water, and a couple of them sportingly arrived with their boards on motorcycles.
We had an orientation visit to a high point overlooking the city. Apart from the views, the other item of interest was a monument to Admiral Byrd, with an inspiring inscription about the pursuit of science being in service to all of humanity. The inscription, about the Antarctic Treaty, reads in part “…demonstrated the subordination of national interests to the wider cause of science and increased understanding between nations.” Sounds right to me.
Next we drove to the hotel and had a walking tour of the neighborhood. Wellington is a very walkable city, with a great harbor walk with lots of scenery. Some architecture is older and Victorian. We passed homes built on cliffs that had private cable cars to carry the residents from their garage to the house above! Hearing about Wellington means hearing about earthquakes, volcanoes, reclaimed land, and even the possibility of a tsunami.
Our evening program was a lecture by Professor Kate McMillian, about New Zealand’s political system. We’d heard her last month and it was just as interesting the second time. The New Zealand political system has a lot to recommend it, especially because it is not a two party system, and it is almost always necessary for a winning party to build a coalition in order to form a government. New Zealand is also laudable because they have been able to change aspects of their system several times in order to make their government function effectively and responsively in changing times. The US could take some notes.
