Wellington

Wellington is the capital of New Zealand.  It's built on hills much like San Francisco. 
It also has many earthquakes - as we would find out later on that day. 
We took a ship sponsored tour in the morning and early afternoon. 

This is the Capitol building also known as The Beehive.

 

Like all tourists do in SF, we rode up the hill on Wellington's cable car and visited a botanical garden.  Nearby a cricket match was being played.

Our ship is docked just to the right of the stadium and the piles of logs.

After our ship sponsored tour, we met James who is a friend of our friend, Tommy. 

First, James took us to the Te Papa Museum, the national museum of New Zealand.

While we were in the museum, we felt an earthquake.  Luckily, this museum was built on rollers like SF City Hall so we just jiggled a bit.  It turned out to be a 6.2 quake.  The staff at the museum were well prepared and told everyone to wait where we were until they made sure everything was OK.

This sculpture was made out of recycled cans of beef.  I thought it was clever...

After visiting the museum, we drove to an even higher viewpoint.  Wellington is very hilly and windy, and there was a wind turbine behind me at this viewpoint.

If you look in the upper right corner of the photo below,

you can see the wind turbine where I took the photos just above. 

Check out all the homes perched on the hillsides. 

We drove through all these neighborhoods on our way back down to the ship. 

It was great to see some sights of Wellington that were off the tourist trail.