I knew my life was now Wellington when I came home at lunchtime to find my (30ish) flatmate watching Parliament TV and objecting back to the screen.Wellington seems to be about thundering aeroplanes (the airport is in the city), creative graffitti ("i do not exist in the real world"), horrendously narrow winding roads, (suprisingly often through parks and bush (the Town Belt is quite insidious)) on which you have to stop to let oncoming traffic through, and a surprising lack of street signs, as Wellington does not encourage driving one's own car.
Roseneath especially is built over a knoll of a hill, it's roading a web of one-car-wide roads joining at acute angles, and it is not hard to find perfect hairpin bends with sides at sixty degrees to each other vertically.
The wind has fallen far short of it's reputation this week.
I have become addicted to Oriental Bay, and take millions of photos everytime I take advantage of their excellent parking rates. I have found my primary haunt already. They have a fountain in the sea!!!
I moved into what has turned out to be an interim flat for a week or two while I found somewhere I fitted into better. Their second-hand-smoke [or perhaps the dog] [I sincerely hope not, I will defiantly continue to effusively love dogs even if so] triggered a constant feeling of drowning, and inability to walk up hills [which pretty much rules out all of Wellington] and got me a lifetime supply of inhalers, which are fun. Weren't you always jealous of the kids with inhalers at school?So I have the excuse to leave, which my escapist itinerant nature is always going to want to regularly do anyway. Then I will have to find another excuse to move on....I also have to live in Newtown at some point. They seem to have deliberately conserved the buildings, furnishings, and persona's of the last three to four decades, and take pride in their vague disorder. Newtown also has all the psychiatric, tourettic, characters who hover round the hospital area. I was a token Newtown crazy yesterday, having drunk too much coffee which gave me an anxious appearance, and also having considerably compromised breathing, wandering round hypoxically in and out of medical offices trying to find a vacant doctor [none had spare appointment time].
Actually, street characters abound in this city. There is Blanket Man, who resides permanently on a few square metres of Courtenay Place, a main street of downtown.
I will miss the old lanky black dog when I leave. And my flatmates are brilliantly friendly; I have held the theory that smokers are more social since my time as a hotel cleaner, spending meal breaks in the nonsmokers room that was just around the corner from the smokers room from which emerged much chatting and laugher to fill our own silent lunchroom.
That is all.
