43 Tinakori Rd.

This is my new flat!! Basically, I live in a 4-bedroom house. It's kinda reminiscent of a college property, to be honest. The way it works is that when you move out, you find a replacement - there are no time-based leases like back home. Hence, over the last two years, probably 10 different people have lived in the house. Former tenants often leave things when the move out - like furniture, kitchenware, and the box of Halloween costumes in the front closet. Currently the house contains myself, Andy - a self-employed Tiler, Kylie - an architecture design student, and a doctor who is never around and is moving out in june. The place has enormous rooms - even bigger because of super tall ceilings (see picture of my room - and check out my awesome pink bed I got on Trademe - the NZ version of Ebay). Also, Andy tells me we live next door to marines who work at the embassy (I have yet to confirm this - but they do have an American flag flying in their front window).


In addition to moving in, this past week I did some hiking along the ridge-line that surrounds Wellington, and is essentially in my cousin's backyard. It offered some amazing views of the city to the east and also of the surrounding mountains that go all the way to the western and southern coasts. The city picture doesn't show Wellington central because it is further down the hill... these are the western suburbs of Wellington (it looks very similar to the picture I posted earlier of Karori, just taken from a lot higher up).




I also went to Te Papa, the national museum of NZ, where I got a good dose of New Zealand history. My favorite part were the bits on Maori artifacts and history. The Maori were the original Polynesian setters of NZ, and are very much a part of today's NZ culture (the Haka is a Maori story-chant that precedes many NZ national sporting events - most notably the All Blacks rugby games). Note that cameras are allowed and encouraged at the museum, so I didn't break any rules photographing this canoe stern (the canoe was about 80 ft long - it was really impressive but hard to photograph).