Wellington: Flavors for all the senses

Wellington: Flavors for the senses
We pulled into Wellington right on time. After about a 20 minute walk into town we could see why it is referred to as the cultural center of New Zealand. It is much more “eclectic” in terms of people and architecture. Besides being the city capital, one of the major universities, the University of Victoria, is there. They have a lot of outdoor art which I’ve always found fascinating; including some interesting signs as we were walking in shown in one of the photos below.
We took a walk up Cuba street, which bares a lot of resemblance to Castro street in San Francisco. The irony of the Cuba-Castro connection did not hit us until we got back on the boat. First order of business was lunch in a Café about ½ way up Cuba street. Then we walked all the way up to the end and back down the other side. There were lots of very interesting shops and bars – plus this really cool waterfall which is kind of a Rube Goldberg type thing very reminiscent of one at the Children’s museum in Indianapolis. We were both so low energy we went to a coffee shop for a Latte and I finally gave in to indulgence in a local delicacy called “slices” – which come in lots of flavors. They are basically a very dense sheet cake with an equally dense icing and sometimes and in-between layer, which are cut literally into slices. Chocolate- Caramel, Citrus, Mocha, Cherry, Peanut-butter Caramel. They are quite different and VERY satisfying. Note to Kris Parmalee if you’re reading this – you could do an AWESOME job on these. We’re going to look for a cookbook with these.
We then went through the Botanical Gardens. One nice thing about New Zealand is that they apparently don’t have Japanese Beetles – we went through lots of Rose Gardens that were amazing – and no little critters! We also went through the sculpture garden and they had some very odd pieces as well as some very interesting pieces. One is a staircase out of black granite labeled “Body to Soul” On each step there is a different word – on the first step is “BODY” and the last one is “SOUL” – what the artist did is change one letter on each step to get the progression from one word to the other. So Body became bony became bend…sour … soul. It was quite fascinating and the artist’s intent was to have the viewer contemplate the progression from body to soul that we all go through.
We ended up walking for almost 6 hours, ending up back in the Cuba district. Had a garlic bread pizza with sides of homemade pesto and olive tapenade and split a bottle of white wine, before walking back to the ship. We certainly slept well!