Feestpaleis/Wellington blog

We had a beautiful christmas day yesterday, it was sunny and warm throughout the day, at least where we live. After a relaxing surf session - sun, gentle micro swell and Lyall Bay all to ourselves - we sat on our deck enjoying the nice weather, while the western suburbs of Karori and Wadestown were covered in cloud and rain. Consider this picture, that we took while looking west from our deck:

Gloomy weather in the hills. Every now and then we would feel a stray rain drop or two, but it never rained where we were. Now see this picture we took while looking south from our deck, it’s as if it’s shot on another day:

That’s the weather we had all day. Pfew, glad we’re not in Wadestown anymore

link to this post

Hello there, and welcome to… Double Negation Time with Will and Gert! In today’s episode, the final conclusion of our previous post, which negated the assertion that surf was up, is negated once more, because it turns out that surf is up after all!

After handing in our boards to who will be known from now on as The Friendly But Expensive Ding Repair Man With Too Much Work, we went to Willemijn’s office for our internet fix, that’s when our previous post came to be. As you could have guessed, we were a wee unhappy with our boards sitting in TFBEDRMWTMW’s surf shop for the duration of the summer and sulked a bit before it occurred to us that we never actually considered the fact that there may be other surf shops operating in the Wellington South coast region… After a quick browse through the local Yellow Pages we learned about two other shops in Lyall Bay that we didn’t yet know about.

At the first new shop, noone answered the phone, but we had better luck with the next shop. Although their ding repair person would be away until after new year’s, our boards could most likely be fixed within two weeks. Choice! Happy as, we rushed to collect our boards and TFBEDRMWTMW was extremely glad to be relieved of a small portion of his workload for the coming 8 weeks.

The liberally tatooed and Very Cheerful No Worries Gung Ho Can Do guy manning the other shop took a quick glance at our boards, and his reaction was very different from our first board repair specialist. No frowning, fumbling chins, scratching heads and finger-pointing at the abundant damage that would cost so much time - and so much money - to fix. None of that. Our new broad shouldered local hero said “Naaaah man, that’s nothing! The other guy doesn’t even know what he’s talking about! You can surf with those boards man! Sure we’ll fix’em and it might only take a couple of days. It’ll cost you about a hunnert bucks, but in the meantime, just cover the spots you worry about with some wax and go out there, it’s massive today! Get hammered and beaten, you’ll sleep like a baby tonight!”.

Well, we’re not sure if he’s right, but we sure liked what he said. And he was right about the swell, after several days of fierce southerlies, that really was massive. We found many reasons and excuses why we really couldn’t go out there right away, rather wishing our first surf session after four months to be smaller, less windy and alltogether gentler. Luckily, the next day had just the right conditions!

After a wonderful evening of food, drinks, games and good company, our living looked like a warzone, so if we needed a good reason to get out of the house, that was one. The other one was of course the beautiful sunny weather, off-shore breeze and blue-green ocean that still had some swell left in it. We packed our boards and wetsuits and after a full ten minute drive - Oh how I love living on the coast! - we arrived at Lyall Bay. Lots of people out in the water and plenty of waves. It was fantastic to be out again, although our surfing was really crap after months of not surfing. But we have every chance to improve, since we can go out every day, hurray!

link to this post

Some of you (Rene!) are wondering why we didn’t mention surfing yet. Well… The movers that shipped our boards were less than careful and put quite a few dings in our boards. They’re in for repairs at our local Lyall Bay surf shop, but since everyone and their dog is having his board fixed for the summer, we might have to wait up to 8 weeks to have our boards repaired! Summer will be gone by then! Mutter gripe :-(… Looks like we’re limited to surfing at Lyall Bay during shop hours so we can rent boards. Or maybe this is the time to fork out a heap of cash for a new Surftech board. Sigh… No surf trip for us this summer, apparently…

link to this post

Wellington’s south coast is beautiful even - or especially - in rough weather. Solid swells hit the coast as southerlies are blasting across Cook Straight. I rushed out and took some action shots.

link to this post

We bought a car last week which we picked up today. It’s a 1999 Toyota Hiace van - without a doubt the most popular type of van in New Zealand. We won’t use it every day - public transport and walking are much better for commuting in Wellington. This car will actually be an SUV in the true sense of the word: a Sports Utility Vehicle. Sports, because it’s big enough to carry our surfboards, bicycles and camping gear we wish to bring on trips. Utility because it allows us to transport big and heavy things - like barbecues, lots of groceries, timber for Gert’s building projects and plants for Willemijn’s gardening.

Most people will just see a plain vanilla empty van, but I see a beautiful camper. At first it’ll just be some hawaii leis, a mattress and a chilly bin, but I’ve already started puzzling and sketching a proper camper interior, with cupboards, a fridge, an extra battery, mini-kitchen and fold-out bed. Not sure how far we’ll get, but it’s ok to dream, right?

link to this post

A week ago, we were in Sydney for a few days. Willemijn had to go there for work - she presented a paper at a conference. I had no excuse though, I just took a couple of days off, tagged along and explored Sydney, while Willemijn was busy in the Name of Science.

It was nice to be in Sydney, we’ve seen some wonderful animals - crazy birds, lizards, spiders and our favourites the fruitbats, some nice beaches and we met some very friendly people. However, it’s an incredibly big and noisy city, dominated by cars. There’s good public transport but it still takes forever to get anywhere, because the buses share the congested roads with the millions of cars. We didn’t care much for the CBD and central suburbs but found a very good Spanish restaurant and a few nice bars in the suburb of Glebe (close to where we stayed), and we loved the many beautiful beaches of Sydney.

In short, we had a great time, but we were very happy to be back in Wellington, our friendly city on a human scale.

See some touristy snaps here.

link to this post

Saint Nicholas, or Sinterklaas as us dutchies call him, is this cool old dude that hands out presents to every well-behaved kid in the Netherlands, every year on 5 December, on the eve of his birthday. Don’t talk to us about Santa Claus and his reindeers, this is the real thing, Santa Claus is totally ripped off from Sinterklaas. Anyways, Not only did Sinterklaas ship a box of nice and traditional dutch Sinterklaas candy last week, on his actual birthday, he hurried from Holland to New Zealand to deliver a ton of presents!

Yes dear readers, it has happened. Our Stuff Has Arrived! We forgot about most things we shipped so every opened box is a new surprise. In completely unrelated news, inhabitants of Island Bay are advised that a tiger is rumoured to be on the loose, accompanied by a flying fox. The duo’s whereabouts and origins are unknown this time.

Some snaps:

Or view all sinterklaas photos.

link to this post