Beautiful Wellington

In my first week I have been out and about in the city non-stop. There is so much to see and explore, as well as nightlife to enjoy in the heart of Wellington NZ.

In the last week my two Kiwi Roommates moved into my flat. They are both first year students at Massey and are so excited to start. Their names are Holly and Bella. Bella is from Christchurch on the South Island and Holly is from just outside of Christchurch in a smaller town. They are both so sweet and have the greatest accents, and enjoy telling me all about New Zealand, as well as making fun of me when I don’t know their slang.

This past week, when we have not been at orientation all the Sates kids and I have been all over the city. We often have beach days at Oriental Bay, laying out tanning (or in most cases burning). Everyone knows who the American's are based on the immense amount of sunburns we all got in our first week on the island. However it is hard not to spend most of our time on the beach when it is about a ten-minute walk from our flat. Not to mention I grew up in a land lock state and have a lot of lost beach days to make up for.

In between our many beach days we made our way to the top of Mt. Victoria to look over the city of Wellington and out across the South Pacific. We also spent much of a day visiting the Wellington Botanic Gardens and having a picnic.We also made it up to the well know cable car of Wellington!

Today Kelley and I ventured to Te Papa Tongarewa, the museum of New Zealand. Te Papa is right down the street from us on the boardwalk of the harbor. Today Wellington locals got into their Dream Works exhibition for free, and they even considered us a local! Te Papa is an immensely large beautiful interactive museum with many outstanding exhibits. However the DreamWorks Exhibition was amazing and is a must see! The exhibition had all the sculpture models for the animation of many of DreamWorks movies like; Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Spirit, Shark tale, Madagascar and many more. The exhibit also had all the hand drawings of storyboards with all of the notes from the animators, showing just how much goes into creating an animated movie. It is truly unbelievable the amount of work, design and art behind each one of these movies!