I can't say that I love Wellington... maybe it would grow on me if I had more time here... but I liked it enough for one day, and saw two really cool local places that were worth the stop.
I spent oh, maybe an hour or more just walking around. Wellington is pretty compact, so it's easy to walk. I didn't really get the sense that there is one architectural style that dominates. It's more of a mix of some cool buildings and some ugly buildings. A few bits of art thrown in as well.
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| The Floating Metal Ball. |
The first very cool stop was Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand. I'd planned to spend maybe 1-2 hours there, and wound up spending 4 without getting bored, then it closed and I had to leave. :( It's museum of a whole host of things related to New Zealand -- the animals, people, history, land, earthquakes, art, immigration, etc. It's divided into about 10 sections, each one devoted to one element of New Zealand, and each section is very rich. Lots of visual and written material and, where appropriate, audio and video too.
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| I feel dumb for just today learning that New Zealand's real name is Aotearoa, which means A Long White Cloud. |
When the museum closed, I wandered over to the cable car that rides up the hill past the Botanical Gardens, to get to the Carter Observatory. It had an exhibit about the stars and solar system (a pretty detailed one, at that), a planetarium with a really great show (it put the Mount Cook plantarium to shame!), and an observatory that is open for viewing on Saturday nights when the weather is good, as it was today.
Despite my knowledge of astronomy, I never paid much attention to telescopes before. It turns out, they each have about 1,000 moving parts, and the telescope operator had to adjust every single one
and the dome itself before we could start viewing. And only one of these parts was motorized: the outer dome. Everything else, including the inner dome, had to be adjusted by hand. So that took about an hour. It was a pretty strange hour. Once the operator started tinkering with the equipment, everyone got really quiet. In the entire hour, only the operator spoke, and he only said like three sentences until he'd gotten the telescope pointed where he wanted it to go. It was cold, and I was getting hungry and impatient, but I wasn't going to miss the rare opportunity to look through a real telescope.
And I was rewarded with a view of The Jewel Box -- a cluster of unusually colorful stars that can't be seen in the northern hemisphere. I did pass up the opportunity to see Saturn, but I would have had to wait another hour and I've already seen Saturn (complete with rings) from the observatory in Cleveland.
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| The Jewel Box. (Not my photo.) |
Now I'm in my (cold) hostel room, with a belly full of meat pies, a New Zealand "delicacy," just writing and reading until it's time for bed. I've got another long bus ride tomorrow (sigh) but at least it's not at the crack of dawn. Also, it's now fall in New Zealand and their daylight savings time ends tonight, so I get an extra hour of sleep when we fall back (yay).
I spent oh, maybe an hour or more just walking around. Wellington is pretty compact, so it's easy to walk. I didn't really get the sense that there is one architectural style that dominates. It's more of a mix of some cool buildings and some ugly buildings. A few bits of art thrown in as well.
Despite my knowledge of astronomy, I never paid much attention to telescopes before. It turns out, they each have about 1,000 moving parts, and the telescope operator had to adjust every single one and the dome itself before we could start viewing. And only one of these parts was motorized: the outer dome. Everything else, including the inner dome, had to be adjusted by hand. So that took about an hour. It was a pretty strange hour. Once the operator started tinkering with the equipment, everyone got really quiet. In the entire hour, only the operator spoke, and he only said like three sentences until he'd gotten the telescope pointed where he wanted it to go. It was cold, and I was getting hungry and impatient, but I wasn't going to miss the rare opportunity to look through a real telescope.
And I was rewarded with a view of The Jewel Box -- a cluster of unusually colorful stars that can't be seen in the northern hemisphere. I did pass up the opportunity to see Saturn, but I would have had to wait another hour and I've already seen Saturn (complete with rings) from the observatory in Cleveland.
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