Ello ello ello, all the way from Wellington with a capital W (get it - coz wellingtons the capital of new Zealand... Ok bad joke I know, but you try thinking of different ways to say hello all the time!)
First impressions of Wellington... Umm well it's a city, it's kinda dirty, the staff at base hostel take ridiculously long to check you in, and er did I mention it was a city? Naa it seemed nice enough, although perhaps lacking a bit of much needed character, but certainly not unlikable! The first evening there was pretty self explanitory - we ate using hobs that didn't work, we drank at a bar using 'base dollars' (like monopoly money) that you get free every time you stay, and we got back to the hostel at around 3am after gareth had fufilled his strip club needs and I had very sensibly decided to skype mum and Sarah - since the time difference would be perfect of course! Ps don't skype your parents drunk. My mum appriciated it greatly but others might not - plus it only adds to the list of things they can blackmail you with when you get home. After my beautiful skyping sessions I went upstairs to the room only to find a load of scraggly emo wannabe thirteen year old t*** laying into some guys on our bus because of the football team they supported, well, I wasn't having that! For 20 minutes straight I completly destroyed the 'leader' with so much verbal abuse i even got a round of applause at the end! Every insult he delt I had a comeback for and every joke he tried to make I just embarrassed him further - mostly about the fact that he was wearing green skinny jeans, and when he denyed buying them I was only too pleased to suggest that his mum still bought all his clothes for him - something he apparently didn't want his friends to know! Now I would never usually do that to someone but they really needed to be taken down a peg or two, they needed to know that if someone is older and far smarter than you, you respect them, you don't try and start on them to seem 'cool' - it was an important life lesson that I was more than happy to teach them! Suffice to say afterwards I had them eating out of the palm of my hand but again, I took no personal pleasure in any of it, it was all for the greater good :p
The next morning, amid hangovers a plenty, and after a nice healthy dose of mcdonalds :p we decided to be cultural and headed off to the famous Taupapa museum - new zealands finest collection of everything that makes thier country wonderful from the past present and future. It really was quite impressive to begin with, very national science museum in London 'esque'. we saw a squid that was the biggest ever captured (it wasn't THAT big though), some special rocks of some kind, a few wooden huts - as you can see we learnt a lot! But I was hungover in my defence! No the museum was actually pretty damn cool and you could easily spend a day there, just not when your a group of hungover backpackers... even if it was free! By the evening our hangovers had subsided so we decided to go catch a movie, unfortuantly everyone wanted to see robin hood. Which would have been fine had it not been starring Russell crowe. I hate Russell crowe, I hate his face, it offends me, I will certainly not pay money to see it enlarged on a big screen. So I went with the girls to see sex and the city 2 :p
For our final day in Wellington we did what everyone says you should do, we took advantage of our specific location in the world, we joined together to experience a part if something we all love.., we did a lord of the rings tour :p now there are some things you should know about this tour before I begin, the first is that it cost $80 - the equivilant of nearly 3 days accommodation, the second being that it pissed down with rain all day. The so called tour took us to various places from the film where we assumed might stand some relic of the set or would be so totally recognisable that we would have pictures taken and be able to say 'i was there!' when we got home... I didn't take a single picture. None if us did. It was a man, in a van, with a laptop, and every now and then he would stop at a tree or a rock and say, this was in the film, it was in such a such scene, do you want a picture with the rock? Hold on let me fast forward in the film to where you can see it... No no the park bench wasn't filmed, they put a fake rock in front of it or a bush so you wouldn't see it. Get the idea?! I did however have two faveourite parts of the day - when he took us to a stream, showed us the scene and then as we pointed out it clearly wasn't the same place, said yes your right, the bit they filmed here didn't end up in the final cut; and when we arrived at a quarry which housed helms deep and were privilaged enough to be allowed to take pictures from the other side of the road about 60 metres away, because really, it was just a quarry wasn't it! The final straw for me however, after our gourmet subway lunch included in the price no less, was when he took us to the tree where they photographed a promotional shot of legolas for a movie poster and then tried to convince everyone to wear elf ears, a blonde wig and a bow and arrow and get thier pictures taken. Yeah, that's going to happen. Dick. Basically it was the worst $80 I ever spent and we got completly mugged off by he who shall forever be known as 'the guy from wellington'. It was just atrocious. The only way possible for us to regain our good moods was to spend the rest if the day and evening watching movies in the hostel and eating dominos pizza with a couple of bottles of L