Our first stop and main attraction of the day was Te Papa museum which is the national museum of New Zealand. We arrived there at around half 10 as we had to walk down to the harbour front as that's where it is located. The building itself was pretty cool and inside was six floors of wonders. We started at the bottom and worked our way up but spent a lot of time looking round the second floor which had a giant squid on display. It was dead but it was still amazing lying in this preserve tank. Apparently it has the biggest eye of any animal in the world! We were very intrigued and watched a video on how they caught it and examined it.
Also on the second and first floor was a bush walk which took us outside. It wasn't raining and was quite sheltered so we walked the little route through lots of grasses and trees. There was also a little cave area that gave us information on glowworms but we already know about them because of our trip in Borneo. It wasn't long before we wanted to get back in the warmth though so explored the other areas of the second floor which had information on birds and other animals. There was also an area that focused on earthquakes and tsunamis. This was very interesting as New Zealand has had quite a few earthquakes and so we learnt about the history and also got to try out an earthquake simulator which was a little house that shook and showed a video of a full scale earthquake.
By the time we'd finished the second floor (it was the biggest) we were pretty hungry and so went back down to the first floor to the cafe to get a pie. We had brought sandwiches with us but we had to give our bag in as we weren't allowed to carry it round with us. This gave us an excuse to have a pie as well. They weren't too expensive. I went for a mince and cheese pie which was rather tasty but didn't have enough cheese flavour. I'm having a real cheese problem. It was a good thing to have to keep us going so that we could explore the rest of the museum. We also took advantage of the free wifi as well.
The third floor brought us to a Gallipoli war exhibition that was fantastic. They had figures of real soldiers that were double the size of a normal human which really gave an impact when you walked past them. I didn't know anything about the Gallipoli war so it was very interesting to read all about it. This was probably my favourite exhibition of the whole museum.
Further up there was stuff on Maori people and examples of what they used to live in. The best part of this exhibition was a little mini film about a Maori guy that was running away from another Maori clan and had to hide within yet another Maori group. We missed the first couple of minutes so I'm not sure why he was running but it was interesting to see the traditions that came out in the film.
The fifth floor was art work which we weren't hugely impressed with but there were a few nice portraits of people that I enjoyed. Up on the top floor was a viewing deck that looked out onto the city and harbour. It was nice but super windy so we didn't stay out for long. This was the end of our museum tour. We knew it was huge and we weren't wrong; we'd spent most of the day there. It was after 3pm when we left having bought a couple of lovely postcards. It was cold and windy but not raining so we decided to do a walking tour that was written down in our guidebook. We started at post office square and walked along the harbour to a cool Maori bridge which we crossed before pausing our tour to get information from the i-site about Weta cave which we wanted to visit tomorrow.
After our brief stop we walked back to the harbour and passed a cool statue of a bronze guy leaning over the edge of the harbour walk to face down into the water. After this we went through Whaitangi park which was a very posh skate park. We kept up the poshness by going into a posh supermarket when we got back into the centre of town. We spent a while in this supermarket as it was pretty amazing, kind of like whole foods, but it was far too expensive for us so we didn't actually buy anything. By the time we were out of there it was nearly 6 so we headed back to the hostel to cook tea. Tonight was risotto night with chorizo sausage and green beans. When we actually got room to cook we had to wait for quite a while for the risotto to be ready. It wasn't bad though. Obviously the chorizo sausage was amazing and because we'd bought a carton of stock the rice had some flavour too. The kitchen was still disgusting though. One girl failed to serve rice properly and ended up throwing half of it on the side because she was incapable of keeping it all on a spoon. I nearly lost my patience with her.
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