Entries Tagged 'Out and about' ↓

I decided today that even if I wanted to dress a bit more lady-like it’s ridiculous. Today I had a rare visit to a client site. I had to go on the bus. Shoes and socks a must! Had to walk to the bus stop. Get down the aisle of the bus as the guy lurched off up a steep hill. Wrestle my way out of the bus after a couple of stops in Chinatown trying not to trample all the Chinese senior citizens in the aisles clutching their little bags of strange smelling vegetables from their market day. Storm through all the tourists milling around in Union Square to get to Williams-Sonoma. Tromp up 3 flights of stairs at Williams-Sonoma. Walk back to work, several blocks through the day rapidly warming up. Walk home at the end of the day. I know SDF will say no pain no gain but blisters just aren’t worth it. Perhaps another day I could try flats or something but you just never know when you’re going to have to walk to the bank or if the day is going to heat up making my feet all hot and squishy. I’ll keep wearing Chucks!

One side of the block opposite the bus station that we walk passed quite a bit has signs up for car pooling – signs with destination names of towns in the East Bay like Walnut Creek, Oakland etc. It’s on a street that’s one of the routes out of town and mid afternoon people start gathering along the fence, waiting for a ride.

We’ve seen it a couple of times now. As we walked passed, there was a constant stream of cars with just a driver stopping by the curb near one of the signs, where 3 people of those waiting got in the car. Judging by the greetings, body language and silence in the car while it then waited at the lights I would say they were all strangers – just in the car for a ride.

So what’s it all about? Could Google it but we spent the rest of the walk home figuring it out for ourselves. The people stopping to pick people up were well dressed men in nice big cars. It was the start of rush hour. Traffic is really thick here but some lanes in the city and on the motorway are expressly reserved for car pooling, meaning 3 or more people in a car. So in order for someone to drive their nice big car home quickly and not get stuck in the traffic, by giving people a ride, they get to use these reserved lanes. Not sure where they drop them off at the other end, I guess it’s reasonable to assume it’s on their way home otherwise they wouldn’t’ve stopped at this end. Also, how to do they get paid back? Do the people getting a ride throw them a few dollars for petrol? Do they ever give the driver a ride another day … that’s the spirit of car pooling isn’t it – sometimes my car, sometimes yours? Although to be honest, I’m not sure the well-dressed business man would stand on the side of the road waiting for a ride.

The Sunday just gone we were on a bus for a return trip out to Emmeryville (first town over the bridge) and the bus took the car pool and bus lane which totally by-passed the toll gates for the bridge that are typically snarled with up to 12 lanes of traffic. Cars using the car pool lane must have a fast pass (unit for automatically paying tolls attached to their windscreen) but the fare in the car pool lane is about half the price of going through the toll. The fines for improper use of the car pool lane is $277.

This weekend just gone we finally got to ride on the rattly trams (as I’m calling them) – the above ground trolley cars or trams that run along Market Street. I believe these ones are taken by the locals who need to go places, tourists take the ones that look more like street cars, lining up for hours to ride up to the top of Powell Street … hoping they don’t get to relive the runaway tram moments from various movies.

We’d tried to take the tram a couple of times before but after a very long wait decided we were doing something wrong, no trams came. This time, a Saturday morning, we didn’t have to wait long and only had a short conversation with a homeless man at the tram stop “where y’all from? France?” … I know we’ve got an accent but no … before clambouring on to take rather uncomfortable seats for our ride a couple of miles up Market Street – the trams really do rattle along. Our destination was Four Barrel – finally getting out to try their coffee seeing as that’s where we’d been told to go a couple of times if we liked really good coffee.

I was hoping to ride on the orange tram, but a newer green and cream one picked us up. On the way back to town, the same, and I was rather annoyed to see that an orange tram was right behind us and caught us up!

Zipcars are fantastic! We’ve used a couple of cars since we’ve been here. They’re a bit like self-service rental cars – you become an accepted member, get a card and away you go!

We organised membership before we got here, it’s all online. We had to source and provide a copy of The Mister’s driving record as well! The only glitch in the process was that we couldn’t make a reservation for a car for the day we arrived without validating our membership, done by entering a number off our membership card. Being mailed to our new address. Hmm. So we had to cross fingers the card was in the mail box when we got there and cross other fingers that cars were available to use that Saturday.

Got off the plane the Saturday we arrived and cleared the mail box as soon as we got the apartment keys – bingo! The Zipcard was there. With a number on it. The Mister rustled up some pre-paid internet on his iPad and we went to the Zipcar website, entered the number and we were ready to make a reservation.

The Zipcar website is great – plug in where you live and the time you want a car and it lists all the cars that are in the neighbourhood and whether or not they’re available. We had no idea that in parking lots, basements of office buildings and apartment buildings there were so many cars! We thought they just lived in special Zipcar parking lots at a couple of locations dotted around city. Turns out there were a couple in the basement of an office block about 5 minutes walk away that had no bookings after the time we wanted it so we decided to book one of those.

If you wanted a specific type of car, 4-wheel drive, wagon, pick-up truck, unmarked car etc you might have to travel further, but so far there have always been small cars big enough to carry groceries or an ironing board close by.

Upon reservation success an email arrives with the name of the car and really specific directions on how to find it – which door of a car parking building to go into, whether or not you need to speak to a security guard, which street to exit on or return to and if you need to use a swipe card to exit the building it’s tucked into the visor. The car’s also equipped with an electronic fast pass unit so that you don’t have to pay bridge tolls. The names of our cars have been Mozart, Anthill and Mandy – 2 Mazda’s and an Audi A3. The cars have all been really clean when we’ve picked them up and full of petrol. You need to leave the car with at least three quarters of a tank of petrol.

The car is opened using the Zipcard, it’s electronic, so they don’t need people there to meet you or other drivers to hand over keys. There are huge fines if you deliver the car back to it’s spot late. You wave your Zipcard over a little thing that looks like a solar reader in the windscreen.

They keys are bolted into the car on a bungy cord and never leave the car.

The use of the car is charged onto your credit card and if you’re out on the road you can log into the site and see your reservation and if no-one else has it booked after you, you can extend out the time if needed – came in very handy when we were out at Ikea and the supermarket yesterday – got stuck in rather a lot of traffic!

Now we’ve used the cars a few times we see them all over the place in street lots with other cars as we’re walking around the place.

A fantastic idea. A little on the expensive side but fantastically convenient and an incredibly smooth operation.

We’ve met a few people here who say going to the market at the Ferry Building is the thing to do on a Saturday morning. Off we went. Man the place is packed – all fruit and vegetables and other things like honey, salami, herbs, bread brought in fresh from the surrounding areas. We didn’t really know what to get, decided we’d get a range of vegetables and make a roast vegetable and aoili salad (despite it being summer) plus other fruit and vegetables for the week. Probably ended up costing the same as the supermarket – by the time you’ve handed over crumpled piles of $3 and $4 in $1 bills at every other store you lose track of what you’ve spent!

Definitely got a couple of handful of beans from one of these piles – quite a few varieties to choose from.

It became apparent that we were a bit unprepared for market shopping. We never really shopped at the markets in Wellington otherwise we might’ve taken along our re-usable shopping bag or cart on wheels. I was rather laden down wrestling with a huge sprouting bunch of basil, several golf-ball sized potatoes, berries, loaf of bread, herbs, coffee beans  – carrying as much as we could in these weird biodegradable supermarket shopping bags the market stalls had – they felt like skin, all flimsy and like they might tear at any second. When our shipped stuff arrives we’ll have our Moore Wilson’s bag and our Amy’s Bread Shop bag so we’ll be properly local!

Also, no tomato crisis here – loads of varieties and reasonable prices – got to see actual green tomatoes – green as in the variety not under-ripened. And tomatoes here taste so good – so ‘red’ and tomatoey … must be truly vine-ripened in the sun.

For weeks now walking to and from work, whenever we go passed the clothing store Superette on Victoria Street I always look in to see what their Baby Moosey is doing. It’s a small stuffed toy (I suppose) that seems to take up a different position each day in the store window – sometimes in the leaves on the floor, sometimes somewhere on the display, perhaps snuggled between 2 woolly hats, and sometimes up on the shelf with the bags or belts. Usually when we’re going that way the store is closed, or it’s a Saturday and there are too many people in there for me to go in for a pat. However, today, I had to go home in the middle of the day to do the final power metre reading and the store was basically empty so I got over my discomfort that someone like me shouldn’t really be in a store so trendy, especially when I just wanted to fondle the display, and off I went. Totally worth it! Lovely soft little Baby Moosey – thank you for making me smile every day no matter what I’d faced that day 🙂

Ha ha Wellington I’m going to miss your roaring slapping rain once I’ve moved to San Francisco where I’m praying it’s fine and 23 degrees C every day. Saw this broken abandoned umbrella on the way to get coffee this morning.

We’ve spent a couple of really interesting weekends around coffee experts recently – the local and then national barista competition to see who was crowned best coffee maker in the country. The winner represents New Zealand at the World Barista Championships in Bogata in June.

The competition is very precise – just 15 minutes to make each of the 4 judges an espresso, a cappuccino and a signature drink (must involve coffee, no alcohol and showcase coffee in some way). Points are awarded for flavour, technique, coffee knowledge and experience. The contestants wear a microphone and have to talk through what they’re doing and are under close scrutiny from the judges – watching everything – how much coffee they spill from the grinder, how much milk is left over, and how tidy their work station is.

We knew one of the competitors quite well, Massimo from Fuel, plus recognised a lot of the other baristas from around town competing in the Wellington champs a couple of weekends ago.

It was a really fascinating experience and with the cameras everywhere and big screens showing close-up shots of extractions and milk pouring it was just like the world champ videos I’ve seen online. I think at the Wellington heats we were the only coffee drinkers/customers there – most seemed to be other baristas and people from the coffee trade – felt quite special! Unfortunately now The Mister thinks he knows everything about how milk should be poured to form symmetry on top of the espresso so I’ve been getting ‘advice’ every morning for the last couple of weeks on how I could improve my milk – what!?

A couple of pics from the Wellington champs (at the Supreme roastery):

Nick from Memphis Belle who won the Wellington competition

Aidan from People’s Coffee being watched by the technical judges

Arui from Christchurch showing the tasting judges the coconut she was going to heat up to enhance this flavour in her coffee

And some from the NZ champs yesterday (at the Mojo roastery):

Aymon’s every move being recorded

Massimo constructing his signature drink

And the winner Winner Hideyuki from Christchurch being mobbed by the paparazzi for an interview!

Heaps more photos here on Flickr.

I’m known for noticing things when out and about, walking to work on a familiar route or some road untravelled. The Mister never notices things – big brain, big important grown-up knowledge, compared to my tiny brain, tiny details, throw-away knowledge … Usually I see quite random things like a tiny bunch of dried flowers tied to a park bench, a dead weta, part of a belt, an orange scooter (not so random and pretty obvious) and of course there’s the famous potato siting.

And then today on an autumn day with only a slight chill in the air I spotted a pair of ice skates locked to the bar with the bikes on Victoria Street. Hardly the day for such wintry footwear. And surely it’s never *actually* cold enough in Wellington (despite southerly windchill) to get around town on a pair of ice skates? Actually don’t even know where you can skate around here?

Was rather serendipitous that on our mid-week day off the new Air New Zealand 777-300 was at the airport giving free tours to airpoints members – so off we went.

The plane is massive and very white inside.

We found the premium economy seats to be rather less comfortable than the current 747 and 767 seats in the same class – they were in ‘pods’ which means you don’t disrupt the people around you but the recline felt less and the leg room definitely very strange and cramped, due to the curves of the pod, basically pushing your knees to flop outwards into the aisle. Also the angle of the seat combined with the shiny hard white leather meant that you couldn’t help but slip down. Unless I was doing it wrong, I was rather uncomfortable!

If you want premium economy go for the window sets of 2 – they might be less ‘coupley’ (the middle sets have a small table in between to share) but at least your leg won’t flop out into the aisle.

We went to take a look at the sky couch – all the window sets of 3 seats together can be purchased as a set to make into one – the advertising pictures show what they’re really for: husband reads, wife curls up with head in his lap; mother watches TV with 2 little kids playing beside her – definitely not designed for 2 people to lie down together. Apart from the fact that The Mister’s feet stuck out in the aisle, we were snugged in quite tight and unless you sleep like that anyway, you wouldn’t be very comfortable for a few hours. And certainly no room if someone puts the seat back down in front of you. The tour guide was very quick to announce that they were a sky couch and not a sky bed when people begun to flock around us to see if you could in fact get 2 people in the bed couch.

Business premier much the same as now but a better screen and better mattress. However the new white leather seems a lot harder and not like the dumpy den chair offered by the brown leather in the cabins on the planes currently. The Mister obviously looked like the type of traveller they were targetting for this cabin – the media guy was very quick to take his picture!