“Whatever. Travelling!”
–anonymous jackass

I don’t have a lot to say about Auckland. It isn’t terrible, but it didn’t give me many good stories. Certainly nothing I can blog about, at least. I went to a Scala conference one weekend, and Lord there were a lot of beards in that room, and I’m not sure what I expected. There was a break in the afternoon to get at the beer fridge, “So go on, have a drink, mingle a bit,” said one of the host employees. In roughly 20 minutes, I got through three beers and mingled very little. Dev stuff is not always my jam. A Woman’s Day writer named Seb let me stay on his couch for a few days while I wrapped up my time in Auckland. He was a fun guy, and his apartment looked like this:

He also pointed me in the direction of the Winter Garden, which was easily my favourite thing in the city. I spent two long afternoons there, reading and drawing the flowers. I would like to live there and am not interested in hearing about why it’s not suitable as a home.

I left on an overnight bus, 11 winding hours to the south for Wellington, a city I’d heard lots of very nice things about. New Zealand is somewhat bigger than I thought, hey. Looking absently out the window around midnight, I realized it was my first time seeing the wrong stars, too much light in Auckland. We stopped at a gas station, and I got out with the smokers, laid on my back on a dryish piece of wood, shivered and looked. They really are wrong, you know. I wasn’t sure they’d look obtrusively different but they’re just completely off. I glanced over at the smokers. How do they tolerate it?

Wellington has sea on three sides and is extremely windy. The entire city feels like a giant ship and I like that a lot. I’m trying to get a job and a place to live, and hopefully that will work out and I’ll be here for a good while.

I will certainly not be staying at Nomads Central Wellington, which the rest of this post will be an extended review of. Kendra has a very particular facial expression that she uses to express the thought that you’re being extremely stupid, a combination of offense taken and incredulity, both at the fact that you could even possibly be so stupid. I first walked in to Nomads off the night bus on a Monday morning, and got the key to the bag room from a gal that used that exact same expression to react to my arriving earlier than check-in time as well as my locking the key in the bag room. That second one was my bad though, yeah (side note: this is far from the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in a hostel. Ask me about the time I accidentally did a load of laundry with orange Kool-Aid crystals instead of detergent). As time has gone on, some doubt has arisen in my mind as to whether she actually thinks everyone is stupid or that’s just a neutral expression to her. I might be overly sensitive to it on account of getting it approximately 17,000 times from Kendra, so benefit of the doubt, I think.

Nomads is advertised as offering a free meal every night of your stay at the bar next door, which is true-ish. The “meals” are really just snacks and if I paid anything for them, I mean literally anything 10 cents up, I would be pissed. Everything the surly staff dish out, from chili on rice to bacon fettucine, tastes exactly the same.

Nomads also advertises having a kitchen available to guests. This is akin to advertising Bunbury as having an arena available to NHL teams. I guess you could say that and it wouldn’t, strictly speaking, be an outright lie. Kitchen amenities do not, for instance, include an oven. They do include free pancake batter in the morning, which I was somewhat excited about until my actual first morning here. These pancakes are terrible. They taste like nothing and the syrup they have is, I’m sorry for my Canadian maple syrup snobbery but, godawful. In practice, I could pretty much take or leave the pancakes (Let’s keep score! I’ve gone from excited to indifferent on the subject of the pancakes). There are four four-element stoves in the kitchen, for a total of 16 burners. Of these, four burners are capable of generating enough heat to just barely cook food to a safe temperature. They struggle mightily to do it, so cooking a single pancake takes about twelve minutes (I pretty much don’t even want the pancakes at this point, and the batter takes up precious counter space, so put me in the anti-pancake camp from here on). In most hostels, nobody bothers to make breakfast, or if they do it’s just cereal or whatever. I like to make eggs most mornings, and generally can do so unmolested. At Nomads, the kitchen is swarmed every morning with cheapskates that can’t pass up 13 cents worth of free pancake batter (I am now deeply resentful of the pancakes). This combined with the limited burners and slow cooking leads to what would be an enormous queue of people if the people in this hostel had the common courtesy to queue. Instead, it’s a culinary jungle less forgiving than Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen when ratings are bad. This very morning I watched someone cut the line in front of a patiently waiting middle-aged woman with small children. “Dude,” was the only thing I could think to say, and she was very quick to apologize. “Oh, are you waiting?” she asked the woman, betraying herself by demonstrating that she knew precisely who was actually supposed to be next. On my second morning here, I brought my pan over to my plate to drop off a pancake, and when I turned around to put it back on the burner, a shifty French guy had jacked it. The ensuing standoff ended fairly quickly, and a good thing because I truly don’t know how far I would have gone to get that burner back, but it has led to ongoing tension as it turns out the guy is one of my roommates. The pancakes, then, have gone in my mind from fun hostel bonus to scraps of gristle tossed to a mass of profound inhumanity disguised as backpacking youth. It would be better for this hostel if pancakes had never been invented.

The French guy. My roommates. Last night, I had a few drinks, went to a show, and went to bed around 12:30. It was a fun and reasonable night. I woke up what felt like an hour later when a young gentleman blundered in and collapsed onto his bed, making no effort whatsoever to be quiet. This guy had a nasty case of hiccups, and was apparently pretty frustrated because he tended to groan loudly after each one. After a few minutes, it became clear to me that he wasn’t going to stop. I leaned over the edge of the bed. “Who the [puppies] is that?” he asked, gobsmacked by the idea of there being another person in his 10-bed dorm room. I asked him if he would mind shutting most or all of the way up. He did quiet down a bit and I managed to get back to sleep. I woke up again some unknown amount of time later, when some people walked in and turned the bloody lights on. They, too, seemed surprised to see me, a person trying to sleep in his bed. They switched the light back off and bumbled around in the dark with their phones, apologizing loudly and repeatedly. I heard the unbelievable but unmistakable sound of a guitar being tuned. “Shut,” I suggested, “the [puppies] up.” The guitar was put away and the revellers shuffled out of the room. One I heard mutter, “Seems a bit aggressive,” which I thought was unfair because really I think it was pretty diplomatic given the situation. I fell asleep again after they left and woke up again when some people came in later. I don’t know if they were the same, I can’t tell these people apart. One of them took a lot of convincing to sleep in his own bed. The one he wanted to sleep in and had to be physically repelled from happened to be the one right under mine. I told him to shut up and go away, to which his response was absolutely ideal. He said nothing and went away. I looked at my phone after this. It was 4:00.

Actually, there was one more quote from last night I remember. When people were galumphing around with the light on and most expressed some regret, there was one guy who said, “Whatever. Travelling!” and laughed. This guy has a lot of symbolic importance to me.