Cuba Street, the Southerlies and more rain...

    We spent Saturday apartment hunting in Wellington, without any success, but it was not a wasted trip by any means because we wound up on Cuba Street, which is variously described by locals as "funky" or "seedy" depending, I suppose, on your moral perspective.
    Cuba Street, which has cafes called "El Fidel" and "Havanna Good Time" among others, is full of little bars and eateries, vintage clothing shops, stores selling everything from wood sculptures to  LP records and even a Flying Burrito Brothers restaurant. It also has a pedestrian mall that is a little like the Ramblas in Barcelona. It was raining pretty hard throughout the day and the wind was fairly strong, though nothing like the Southerlies that hit us a couple of days ago. The rain made it difficult to get any good photos but it didn't keep people at home. They were out in force throughout the afternoon.
    It was while we stopped for some coffee to take the chill off that we picked up a Dominion Post and discovered that the Southerlies we experienced in Porirua on Thursday hit Wellington even harder. The Post put out a special 4-page section noting that the storm was the worst in 37 years and even worse than the infamous April 1968 blow that sank the ferry Wahine in Wellington Harbor. There were more than 700 people aboard the ferry when it rolled on its side and about 70 of them died. As of Saturday afternoon more than 30,000 people in Wellington were still without power and clean-up crews were busy clearing streets of tree limbs, and a few trees, that were blown down in the storm.
    After Cuba Street we went to see the Wellington city museum, where we learned a lot more about the Wahine disaster and the history of the city itself. The museum was recently voted among the Top 50 in the world, putting it in the same class as the Smithsonian, and it's easy to see why. The exhibits are wonderful and they don't pull any punches... this isn't a Chamber of Commerce-type facility that only highlights the positive things about the city. Instead, it treats issues such as racial prejudice, the subjugation of the Maori people and bloody labor-vs-management clashes with great objectivity in addition to extolling the virtues of Wellington's earliest European settlers and it's even earlier Maori pioneers.
    On top of all that, it's free.

Someone spent a lot of time painting this cat...

Cuba Street in the rain...