We landed in Wellington late yesterday afternoon after a quick two-day catching-up-with-friends stopover in Melbourne. As usual, that involved a lot of shopping and tasty food.
The shopping wasn’t terribly successful this trip, mainly being focused on fruitlessly searching various ALDIs in the vicinity of wherever we happened to be, for the elusive Expressi machine, one of those newish pod coffee machines, made even more attractive because of its $79 price tag and the availability of chai latte and hot chocolate pods as well as the boring coffee varieties. Since Perth doesn’t have ALDI, we thought we’d buy one and send it home in the post.
No luck though. Three ALDIs and no machine. Sigh.
In any case, we were fortified in our struggle with the awesome culinary delights of D’Lish Fish, a yummy fish’n’chippery in Port Melbourne who does gluten free batter, the unparalleled Brunetti for patisserie, and delicious Asian fusion restaurant Gingerboy
And on to New Zealand! Almost. The flight was deleted by an hour and a half, which gave us ample time to have breakfast and consider unwise duty free choices at the airport, before hopping onto the little 320 to jump the ditch. (It looked really little when the qantas A380 swanned past!) We were sitting at the back of the plane behind a family who seemed to spend the entire 3.5 hours wrestling each other in the aisle. Apart from that, and some turbulence (perhaps the pilots didn’t appreciate their wrestling either) the flight was pretty uneventful.
Landing at Wellington was a bit nerve-wracking, mainly because the landing strip starts at the shoreline, so a lot of the final descent is over water. All you can see is the water getting closer, only relieved by some random mountains looking pretty close! All this, and it was a very smooth landing.
Baggage and customs check was easy (and the sniffer puppy dogs didn’t really want cuddles, sadly) and we were out into the brisk Aotearoan air.
Wellington hasn’t changed much since the last time we were here. Lots of different styles of houses all mixed in, the CBD isn’t huge, and all cupped into a valley between hills facing the Cook Strait.
We stopped in for groceries at New World which we’d stayed next to on our last visit (and saw the wine we’d had at Gingerboy last night much cheaper than in Australia!) and found delicacies like peanut butter icecream and lots of varieties of gluten free bread.
Next stop was our mates S and A’s place, where we’re staying. They’re right in the middle of the action here, and we haven’t seen them for about six months, when they moved over here.
We gave into our weakness for Hell Pizza for dinner, and washed it down with local brews – Rennaissance chocolate stout for R and Isaac’s Winter Cider for moi. Tasty!
Two Weeks Away 
