Day Zero

First day of my south island trip and I was ready to go. Small suitcase bursting at the seams, Neville and Sian dropped me off at Queensgate (the local mall) in time to catch the “airport flyer”, which is a bus that goes all the way to the Wellington Airport. These busses are huge, longer and wider than city busses. They have wide leather (or faux leather, who cares?) seats, a television that shows you weather, news, a real-time street camera on the side of the bus, and a flight time table so you can tell when you’ve missed your flight, and free wi-fi. All for a forty-minute bus ride max.
Anyway, I arrived at the airport super early, so the ticket counter wasn’t even open. Tried doing the electronic ticket thing but the kiosk didn’t recognize my name. That along with the fact that the place I had bought the ticket from didn’t give me any kind of conformation number made me start getting pissed and worried that I wasn’t actually booked for the flight.
All the worry was for naught though, for I was accepted without question once the people arrived at the counter (which was only after an hour of waiting and the buildup of a monstrous queue behind me)
The pictures are of the winner for the World of Wearable art competition in Wellington. It was standing in the lobby while I was waiting, so I took a picture.
Realizing that I still had an hour left until my flight I walked as slow as physically possible into the airport. Realizing that wasn’t going to kill enough time I went to the bookshop and after much deliberation decided to buy Richard Dawkins new book “The Greatest Show on Earth”. I have to say, it was probably the best $40 of my parents money that I have ever spent. A hefty book, it massacred time that needed killing and kept me awake on the bus rides around the south island for about half the trip. Anyway I read that until my flight left, and while it was flying.
I met up with the Reeds (the same people I went to the south island with before) planning to kill the time in-between when my flight arrived and when I actually had to meet up with the group. Turns out one of their son’s friends just turned 18, so I got to crash a birthday party. It was actually really fun; they made me feel welcome even though I was kind of a last minute guest. Apparently they’d been told “a lot about me”, gods know what.
Highlight of the party, spaghetti pizza, no seriously kiwi’s are weird. The kebabs (they never say the shish for some reason) were actually delicious, and I learned a new card game (I think it’s called Mao or something) in which the entire point is to learn the rules. No one can tell you how to play, you just have to figure it out. When you win a round you get to make a new rule that you don’t tell anyone, it’s actually really fun.
After that they dropped me back at the airport where I met up with Ayden (our tour director), some other person from NZET (the tour company) that I never saw again, Masha (Russia), and Aikiko (Japan). After it was apparent that no one else was showing up, we went back to the bus where the rest of the group was waiting. A not incredibly short, but not terribly long either bus ride away we arrived at our accommodations and met up with the last few people on the list who weren’t at the airport.
We were given our room numbers and then went to the dining room, where we were served a “Kiwi classic”, bacon (which equals ham in kiwi speak) and egg pie (actually a quiche, not a pie). Esther (Brazil) found a fly in her salad and subsequently did not eat her greens for the rest of the trip.
We were then given a little exercise to do, we each chose a buddy (via a random draw) and had to learn some fact about them to recite to the rest of the group. I was chosen by Samia (Brazil) and I chose Heidi (Finnland) (pronounced “Haidee” or “Haydee”, I still don’t know, I swear she changed it every day). Every time we boarded the bus we had to check for our buddy (just to make sure no one got lost).
Anyway, after that I retreated to my room to read about the domestication of silver foxes until I went to sleep.