Tidbits and a trip to the Botanic Gardens

Life is good on a very fundamental level.  The air smells delicious, not only because the wind sweeps what little pollution there is away, but because everything is blooming and so many plants smell sweet and good.  The water is also really good.  It has no chemical taste whatsoever, just good clean water.  I love that our space is small simple and adequate.  There are lots of windows, which are single pane, so we can see the view unobstructed.  We leave them tilted open so we can hear the lovely, but unfamiliar bird calls all around and let in the sweet floral scented air.  It is wonderfully windy here, which makes a loud whooshing in the trees and an even louder whistling past the windows.

There are so few bugs that there are no screens on the windows, although today something got in.  I tried to shoo it back out but wound up swatting it instead.  It was the strangest smooshed bug I ever saw.  At home it would have been a house fly, but this thing was brown and fuzzy and I think it was pregnant, if a fly could be that, because there appeared to be a bunch of eggs.

Yesterday we visited the Botanic Gardens, spending most of the day there.  Like many botanical gardens, there were many plants that are not native to the area.  We did begin by walking through a native stable gully forest where we saw tree sized ferns and other extraordinary plants.

 
We then passed through the Tree House visitors center and on to the magnificent planted gardens.  One interesting thing we saw was a pine nut pine cone with some pine nuts still in it. There was a succulent garden with aloes as tall as Dorothea and other indescribably weird looking plants.

There was an herb garden with herbs both familiar and exotic.  One of the nicest places was the scented garden, where every plant was selected because either the blooms or the foliage smell good.  We spent a long time sniffing the many flowers.  Dorothea came away with her nose smeared yellow with pollen!

There was an enormous rose garden, where everything was in bloom, of course.  There were single roses and ones with so many petals they looked like peonies, and though you might think all roses smell like, well, roses, they are not the same at all.  They range from classic rose to citrus, musky spice to delicate apple.

We lunched in the Begonia House at one end of the garden.  The only legacy British colonialism seems to have left in the cuisine here is a taste for cheese, beer, and curry.  Our sandwiches were very tasty with lots of fresh things in them.  After lunch we went back out to the rose garden which has a shallow fountain in the middle.  Floating on the water were hundreds of rose petals and leaves, and a duck with a half dozen ducklings still fuzzy and tiny.  They were so, soooo cute!  They mama swam them over to a ramp and they waddled out and across the street to the proper duck pond where the other ducks were.  Make way for ducklings!

The kids were ready for something more kid oriented, so we walked over to the large play park in the gardens.  There they played for a couple of hours, met some other kids, and rode a zip line over and over again.

 







We then walked home to Weir House, our residence, for tea and a rest.

From our window we can see the Swiss engineered funicular cable car which makes the 20% grade trip between Kelburn district, where Victoria U. is situated, and downtown Wellington tolerable to travel.  (See Bob's last post for pictures.) You can hardly take a step here without going up or down a steep hill, with or without stairs.  The whole city is perched on a hillside overlooking the enormous harbor and bay.  The University stop for the cable car is just a hop and a skip from Weir House, so we took the easy ride into downtown Wellington and walked to the main shopping and night life district for dinner.  It is a pleasantly quiet ride compared to most commuter transit. 

After we got back and put the kids to bed, Bob wrestled with the computer and internet trying to post pictures, but there seem to be some blocks.  Here is a sample.  The birds are rather quick, so as soon as they're framed up and I'm about to click, they hop or fly off, so no birds yet.  The other photographic challenge comes from the wind which makes all the plants wave and flutter.  I will have to practice!

This morning the other professors and the students arrived.  There goes tranquility.  I am missing dance already, but there are so many compensations, and no lack of physical activity.