Arrival at Wellington

Friday, December 12th

At 9ish am, we all woke up to get ready to check out of our hostel by 10am.  We are getting pretty efficient in packing and organizing ourselves.  We got out by 10:20am and went to the Picton village bakkerij for breakfast.  That's the same bakery Steph got our sandwiches the day before.  It's rated the fourth best bakery in New Zealand.  It was really good.  I wanted to get the same sandwich as last night, but they didn't have it.  I got the chicken salad sandwich instead which was also very good.  Not that much mayo.  I even bought an extra one for our ferry ride to Wellington to ensure I got a good sandwich for lunch.

We sat at a bench out front while eating our breakfast.  A seagull visited our bench and we recalled Steph's seagull story.  Karma is a b.  The day before Steph wouldn't give Nilesh's hash brown to the seagull even though he didn't want it.  In her defense it would of been negative reinforcement.  Well, when she was eating a sandwich while we were walking to the car a seagull snatched it from her.  Annoying seagulls.  She fed a kitty the night before so hopefully that brings her good karma.

After breakfast we just chilled around until it was ferry time.  The ferry ride was 3.5 hours, so Bernice, Steph and I got movie tickets to watch Quantum of Solace.  It was an entertaining movie to help kill some time.

I also got to speak to my old boss about the current work situation in New York.  It's one of his saddest days of his career because a lot of his good friends were laid off that day.  In the next two weeks Merrill and BoA plans to lay off a bunch of people in research to streamline the research group.  It must be a dreary situation there.  I'm glad I had the chance to chat with him.  He is a great mentor.

Wellington was a bit dreary.  It was raining when we got there.  We checked into our YHA hostel and then got our stuff ready for the next day.  The five of us were in a six person dorm room.  Half way through the unpacking process, a couple walked into our room.  There was only one bed left.  Uhhhh, there's five of us.  Yea we are going to share the bed.  Ok...but they ended up being really nice.  So it was ok.

We went to custom printing to pick up my wallet that I left in Christchurch.  Then we ordered some custom printing clothes.  It took us forever to decide, me more than Steph and Bernice.  Poor Alfio and Nilesh had to wait for us.  Nilesh ended getting a ps2 to entertain him in India and Alfio went on the internet.  When we were ready to eat, we went to a Chinese place because it was nice and cheap.  It did the job.

We went back to our hostel afterwards to drop off the stuff.  We decided to stay in and drink our wine on the Friday night instead.  Some of our conversations over wine were:

Pirates - Nilesh's joke.  Pirates vowels are AEIOU-RRrrrr

Asian kids have old names.

The words egg for white outside yellow inside; coconut for brown outside white inside; twinkie for yellow outside white inside.

Kingdom, phylum, order, family, genes, species

Yep.  There were more where that came from.  At 1am, we decided to call it quits because we had hot yoga scheduled for 9:30am the next day.