Wellington, New Zealand
I recent wrote about driving around New Zealand, but I lived in Wellington. Here are a few of my impressions:
1. It is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, top five easily. The best view is from Mount Victoria, incredible vistas are everywhere, and the Victorian homes are very nice too. Very little of it is downright ugly.
2. I do not love either steep inclines or wind. So in those regards Wellington was less than ideal for me. Think of the basic weather as like that of San Francisco. I preferred the warmer climes of Auckland.
3. In the early 90s, the city did not have excellent Chinese food. But Malaysian and Burmese alternatives made up for that. Bistro food, in nouvelle New Zealand styles, was very good.
4. Most of the best fish and chips was outside city limits, for instance in nearby Newtown. There was one good local fish and chips shop near Parliament.
5. The major government buildings were remarkably close together, does any other capital city in the world have this? You could just walk from one meeting to another in a small number of minutes.
6. I was very much an outsider there, but if I went to a classical music concert it was remarkable how many of the attendees I would recognize.
7. There was not much of an internet to speak of back then, keep that in mind when processing these remarks. When the Fischer-Spassky match #2 was being played in Yugoslavia, I relied on the movves of the games being faxed to me. The Kiwi newspapers just were not that good or that timely. Phone calls were expensive too, and the mail was slow.
8. The biggest/best bookstore in town, on Lambton Quay, had a quality feel but still a pretty limited selection and a general lack of timeliness. Fortunately, the library of Victoria University was pretty good. I spent much of that period of my life reading books about the Italian Renaissance and eighteenth century England.
9. My overall feeling was that Wellington residents were pretty happy and had a high quality of life. If nothing else, you could just drive around the bays and have, within minutes, a quality “vacation” better than almost anywhere else in the world. That said, it was not the best place for very ambitious people, most of all for reasons of size and distance.
10, I found the small wooden church in Wellington — Old St. Paul’s — to be one of the nicest and most moving religious structures I have seen.
11. I forget the name of the place, but the main area supermarket was the very best I ever have enjoyed. It offered superb seafood (good luck finding that in the U.S.), first-rate lamb, a suitable array of spices and Asian condiments, and amazing fruits and vegetables across the board and also in most seasons. Very good chocolate, and also ice cream. And all at very good prices and low hassle.
12. Often I was expected to work on something, or to give advice, “simply because I was there.” We again return to the importance of no real internet. I sometimes think of that time as my “beginning as a blogger,” though of course there was no such thing. The deadline always was “now,” and the relevant standards were comparative. Good luck!
13. If you ever got tired of Wellington, you could just go drive around the rest of New Zealand, though that did not remove any of the frustrations (e.g., small book shops) that one had with Wellington. Nearby, Lower Hutt has some good Art Deco structures.
14. Overall, one could learn a lot there very, very quickly, and that automatically made it great.