30 Sept: Begin Urban Experience

The Kapiti island tour was cancelled for bad weather, as we'd been warned could happen. We've re-booked it for Sunday. But that left us at 8am with nothing to do but to run on down into Wellington to begin our planned five days of urbane urbanity.

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Our hotel is very basic, barely above a hostel accomodation for amenities, but it is dead center in the entertainment district and easy walking from most everything else. Plus, they have an offstreet parking lot that (just barely) holds our 6.6-meter van.

The weather this morning was yucky. Temp about 11ºC (55ºF or so?) with steady rain and gusty breezes. Even the locals, who we've seen walking around in shorts and tank-tops in almost any condition, were bundled up in hoodies and looking bedraggled. Thus you'll pardon us, not a lot of pictures.

We walked from the hotel to the visitor center and then on to the Government buildings where we got a guided tour of the Parliament building which was quite interesting (in addition to being warm and dry).

This of course is the national seat of government. New Zealand went to a unicameral form of government in the 1950s, so there is just a parliament, no upper house. The actual meeting chamber is not unlike lots of the state house chambers we've seen (being collectors of state houses as we are). We can't show it because this was only the second place we've been that didn't allow cameras. (The other was a very uninteresting city museum in Wanganui. Oddly enough the city art gallery next door allowed them.)

We were shown one of the meeting rooms used by Select Committees. There are 13 of these, for Health, Foreign Relations, and so on, like the committees of the US House and Senate; most of the nuts and bolts of legislation gets done in the committees. The unusual point to us was, anybody who wants to address a committee can sign up to do so. If you want to put your oar in on Foreign Relations, you can. Oh, and while you are addressing a committee in session, you are exempt from libel and slander laws.

The big parliament building in the picture was built around WWI, but in the 1990s they did a seismic retrofit, as it sits less than a kilometer from a major fault line. The installed 150 big rubber shock absorbers under it, then sliced through the foundation horizontally with saws, leaving a 20mm gap, so the building floats on the rubber disks.

It's the big city so we decided to have some night life, yippee. The only live music we could find was in a supper club that is just a block from our front door. Supper and live jazz for an hour, then back to the modest room.