Post #163 - March 23, 2013 - Wellington, New Zealand

What we did: walked around town
Budget: NZ$150/$125; Spent: NZ$95/$80

It was another late morning this morning. We didn't wake up until around 11am. I tried in vain to call my parents, but Skype was painfully unhelpful. Patty called the clinic in Taupo to see if they had received the results of the tests on our bodily fluids. Apparently, Patty had quite an experience with the calling card. She had tried to use it in a phone that didn't accept that kind of card and it had gotten stuck. She tried to shake the card out of the phone, scrape it out with her nails, and then finally grabbed some tweezers and got it out.
It was another slow, cold day. The weather is really making us want to stay indoors. I wanted to walk up a nearby hill to get some views of town, but Patty wasn't interested, so I wandered up there by myself. Patty stuck around downtown where it was probably warmer.

The walk up the hill was pretty neat. Wellington is such a contrast to Winnipeg: it’s such a hilly city with neat little roads running this way and that. I got lost once or twice but made it up to a church that sits near the top of the hill. There were some pretty good views from up there, but it was a little too cold and cloudy to enjoy them fully. There was a little park up there that I wandered around for a bit and then headed back down to the hostel.

[pictures of Wellington from the hill]

When I got back to the hostel, we had a fairly meager dinner of soup, sardines, and bread, and then we worked on the blog before watching some of The Hobbit on our laptop.