Hello from Wellington

Hello from New Zealand. I arrived in Wellington around 3:30 pm local time. I got settled in my room and spent an hour or so exploring the city area adjacent to my hotel. It is really quite breathtaking. Wellington sits in on a beautiful bay encircled by small mountains. The picture above is the view from my hotel room.  I then spent some time visiting with the others from Manitoba before finding my way back to my room.

The flight across the ocean was interesting…and incredibly long. Sixteen plus hours is a lengthy time to spend anywhere, let alone in an airplane. Fortunately, I had an aisle seat, because I was up and down at least twenty times during the flight. After supper service, the captain came on the PA system and wished us all a good night’s sleep. The lights went out and most people took his advice. I myself eventually drifted for what ended up being over six hours. Of course, when I woke up the little video map that tracks your progress indicated that we still had over seven hours to our destination. That is a long flight.

One interesting aspect of the trip so far was learning the geography of New Zealand relative to Australia. As stated previously, I flew from Brisbane to Wellington. I always pictured one country sitting right below the other. Instead, we flew around three hours back in an easterly direction through three time zones. So I departed Brisbane at 9:00 am, flew for approximately three hours, and arrived in Wellington at 3:00 pm. There is certainly something to be said about the educational value of experiencing geography first hand.

For anyone contemplating a flight to this part of the world, I would really recommend Virgin Australia. Even the economy service was excellent, with two full meals, snacks and drinks on hand whenever you wanted them, the best in-flight entertainment system I have ever seen, and lots of room in a brand new plane.

Tomorrow is a national holiday in New Zealand…Labour Day I think. We are going to do a bit of the tourist stuff in and around the city before getting together later in the day to work on our collective presentation about Manitoba education.

I will leave you with a quick fact about this country. New Zealand is around half the size of Manitoba but has four times the people.