A rough start in Welli

Hi all,

Time flies when you are starting afresh in a completely foreign city...!

Last time I wrote we were in National Park. We had a nice evening there, and a nice meal and some beers, and then left with the Stray bus early the next morning. We arrived in Wellington at about 2, and were left on the side of the road with all of our luggage. We drug everything to our hostel, which ended up being a dive.

We were a little down, so we took a walk around town. Te Papa museum is amazing, but everything is very, very expensive here. Worse than Brighton! Tomatoes are $8.99 per kilo, and chilis are $19.99 per kilo. It is just insane. We bought groceries and took them back to the hostel, but cooking is difficult when you are sharing a kitchen with about 50 people. To make matters worse, we were in a four share dorm with a rude German couple who liked to sleep between 3 am and 12 pm.

We were there for two nights. The day inbetween was spent viewing two flats and getting set up with a mobile phone. The first flat was inner-city and awful. The second one was pretty good...on THE summit of Mt. Victoria overlooking Wellington Harbour. Seriously, the house closest to the radio tower, and I can't even describe the view. Unfortunately, the guy showing the room smokes, and isn't the tidiest lad in the world. On the bright side, he has a pretty nice dog named Punch.

The next day (yesterday) we set up a bank account at ANZ and continued getting acclimated to the place. The city is pretty cool...it has a little of everything, but isn't very big, so that you can walk the whole thing in less than an hour. We moved to another hostel which is a little better, but I am getting very tired of dorm rooms and shared bathrooms. Last night I was woken up at least five times by drunk people.

So we've decided to take the place on Mt. Victoria on a short term basis starting tomorrow. It will be about half the price of staying in the hostel, and we'll only be sharing the house with one person (Sam). He is a uni student who just got back from living in Whistler for a year, and was hoping to rent to travellers. That means that starting tomorrow evening we'll have unlimited internet, so I'll be able to be in better contact with everyone.

I also got rejected from the first bunch of jobs I applied for. Hopefully things will look up once we get a good night's sleep.

Catch up again on Tuesday! Miss you all.