Day 9: Thursday, Feb 28, Wellington

Mmmm, ground dog!... food.

Today was spent meandering around Wellington. The Downtown Backpackers hostel is right across from the train station, so when I went out this morning I joined the crowd of people headed to work. Wellington is a well-dressed city by New Zealand standards. I saw more suits here than I have elsewhere and lots of others dressed up as well. I say “by New Zealand standards” because Kiwis have a knack for looking hip and casual even when they are dressed up. Highlighted and slightly spiked hair is pretty common (even among guys), the most popular suits have bold pinstripes, and the shirts that a lot of people wear are very light and stylish. There are few plain white or conservative blue shirts.

We first headed to the botanic gardens overlooking the city. (I’m used to hearing “botanical,” but theirs is the “botanic gardens.”) They had a large rose garden with lots of varieties. There was also something called the “listening well” or something like that marked on the map. We got there and saw a tall (maybe 10m) cone that looked like a listening horn. I expected to put my head in it and hear amplified sounds from something, but I didn’t hear anything. Either my hearing is awful or it’s just a big, ugly suspended cone in the middle of their botanic garden. To get up to it we took a cable car. This was not a suspended cable car, but rather a train car on a steeply inclined track that is pulled up/down via a cable. It has become a tourist attraction, but it is also a practical way to get to school for the students who go to Victoria University.

We walked down the hill to the Parliament buildings and took a tour. There are three connected buildings, each with a very different architectural style. The library is in Victorian Gothic, the Parliament building itself is a low grey marble building, and the administrative building is a ten-story 1970’s building that looks like a layer cake or a beehive. I’m sure it has an official name, but everyone (even maps) just calls it The Beehive. I think it’s ugly, and a lot of Wellington natives agree – not to mention its impracticality. The tour was very interesting and added a few data points to my understanding of their government. They have only had the MMP system since 1996. (I didn’t think to ask what they had before that, but I guess a straight parliamentary electorate system.) They had a bicameral legislative body until the 1950’s. They decided that the population was so small and the second body (which wasn’t elected and I think was selected by the parties) was redundant. They did away with the upper house and the result is a government where a majority party can pretty much do anything as far as I can tell. It is very rare for any one party to get a majority, but even still the resulting coalition government seems pretty unchecked. It seems that the government was founded on (or is working based on) a few fundamental differences of principle, mainly as regards how much faith the founders had in people.

Global warming is a huge issue here. In the U.S. it seems like there is a “global warming is fact and everyone else has their head in the sand” camp, a “global warming is layers of hype overlying faulty data” camp, and a “we don’t know if global warming is or isn’t true, but we should be preventative” camp. If the papers are accurately representing all viewpoints, there is no debate over here. Global warming has been in the paper every day I’ve read it, but the only debate is what is the most critical issue or how best to stop global warming. If you read the paper a lot you get the idea that NZ is attempting to single-handedly roll back global warming.

Wellington is a small area right on the harbor (and even a lot of that is reclaimed land). The rest of Wellington spreads over the hills that form the harbor. Wellington lies less than a half kilometer from a fault line, and as a result there are strict building codes. The old Parliament building was jacked up so they could put dampers underneath it, and I get the idea that every other building by the harbor has something similar. The boardwalk is pretty nice and there were always a lot of people jogging along it. There were several public parks, including a big skate park. There were a lot of skateboarders and I’m not sure which came first – the boarders or the park. We have seen skateboard parks elsewhere, but in the U.S. they are generally privately-owned (at least the ones I have seen).

I have no idea what this guy was doing

We also started on the Te Papa museum. It is a big, free museum. I get the idea that it’s sort of their Smithsonian. The architecture is really interesting.