New Zealand 08

It’s another beautiful day in NZ. Ok, it’s not so beautiful today, it’s actually completely awful - rainy and windy and cold - jihuu! But we had a couple (one and a half) very nice, sunny days in the weekend so can’t really complain. It was still quite cold but the when the sun appears, it makes a world of difference. 

Those of you who don’t know the full story of our being there, here it is in short. Alexei is writing a PHD and he had some contacts in the local university and came here to work for 6 months. And I’m here just as a free rider:) Luckily I got some time of from work and I’m trying to work as a translator here sending translations to Finland. It is quite interesting to do what I’ve actually studied and also - NZ didn’t give me any choice. A working visa to NZ? No way!

I’m been working on some test translations since we came and there has been more work in them than I expected so couldn’t really relax even during the weekend, had to translate.  But now they are done and I’m free of them. Now I’m just waiting for the news if the quality is ok or not. I’m really rusty! 

We are still waiting for the jet lag to pass but so far it hasn’t. Our days consist of a couple of hours of “activities” (like going for a beer and some thai food:), then coming home and sleeping for 3-4 hours (just can’t help it!), then again doing something (like going for a beer and some thai food:)), hanging in the internet until 2 o’clock in the night and then sleeping again for a couple of hours. We keep waking up at 6 every morning…

Well, probably the rhythm will change now that Alexei has started working. It was his first day yesterday! He was shown the campus by a Maori student (who promised to invite us to some annual Maori meeting with Maoris all over the country gathering together - sounds interesting, I hope he actually will invite us), shown his room and stuff. He likes it there, place is ok and people relaxed and nice (like everywhere). They have a good library there as well. He didn’t get to start working actually yet though (some passwords missing..) but on Tuesday then maybe. 

On Saturday we went to see this huge museum complex they have here called Te Papa, the national museum on New Zealand.  The place was full of families with children and the exhibition was also at least partly directed to children - so it was easy enough to comprehend even for us:) It seemed to be a family day on the whole, they had a concert as well for families in the museum with the national orchestra of New Zealand presenting some classical pieces. Since it was free we got to enjoy some classical music as well. There was some quite interesting stuff about the history of the country and the Maoris as well as some Heureka style exhibitions of the earth, nature, animals etc. The giant wail skeletons were nice! 

My catch today! Ok, a year ago

Enjoying the weather outside Te Papa - you can see the town behind me can’t you?

And then the sun appeared - hurray!

We wanted to have a look around the town since it wasn’t raining for once so we hopped in the Wellington cable car and went up the hill to the botanic gardens which were amazingly beautiful (see the photo coverage below - I just couldn’t not take photos:)

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And this is all right here in the centre! And then in the end of the day there was of course some beer and thai food:)