Wellington
Trip Start
May 08, 2006
1
21
51
Trip End
May 06, 2007
Wellington,
New Zealand
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
I had a good time here. I arrived on a Thursday and spent a couple of nights partying with some of the crew from the Stray bus, then when they all moved on I bumped into Nick (the guy from Leeds) in the bar. Over the course of a few days we found that it was possible to spend $200 in just over one hour on drinks, discussed the strange disappearance of bidets, discovered our mutual hatred for brushing teeth and ate a lot of food.
There's not really a lot to say about Wellington that hasn't been already said, other than that it seems to posess an inordinate number of bookshops of various sizes and specialisations
01 The Lord of the Ring Exhibition was ace
. Arty Bees was a favourite of mine; a second-hand bookshop with an enormous fantasy section where smelly bearded men and greasy haired teenagers alike shuffled in to check out the Star Trek collection and gaze in awe at pictures of dragons, and scantily-clad women in metal-armoured corsets. Every available space was filled with volumes from Discworld, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time and of course, L. Ron Hubbard's back catalogue before he wrote the fantasy novel that everyone thought should be in the 'religion' section because it had an ology in it (sorry Tom).My visit here took on something of a fantasy theme, with large amounts of time spent reading WoT, discussing the merits of the genre with a sceptical northerner, visiting the Lord of the Rings exhibition in the Te Papa museum and randomly talking to people who happened to be huge fans of said books. Apart from that, and the constant trudging through endless rain, there was an awful lot of drinking and chatting going on which altogether, meant for a very enjoyable week spent there.
