Anyway, the ferry ride is about 4 hours long. For a boat of its size, it was surprisingly empty. Not many travelers around, mainly families. So didn't really have anyone to talk to. One of the downsides of travelling alone I guess. You do get bouts of boredom. One is when doing outdoor activities. I mean not really outdoor. Imagine going to a theme park alone. Haha, ultimate boredom I think.
I was killed time by alternating between watching some stupid movie they were filming, reading a book and playing my PSP. Finally, after 3 hours like that, we saw land again!! Hooray! I thought we were going to reach soon. Turned out distance was very deceiving. Haha it was about 1.5 hours again before I actually touched land again.
The Marlborough Sounds at the beginning of the boat trip
Far view of Wellington
First commercial building I see in NZ!!
Love the location of that flat man
Wellinton is by far the crampest city in NZ. It is also super driver unfriendly. Lots of 1 way streets, narrow roads, and worst of all. Street name boards are virtually non-existent. And when there are boards, their locations tend to be soooo hard to spot, making it useless. Like there was this board which was blocked by this gigantic signboard giving directions to the State Highway. Super bad planning. Haha or maybe I'm just too spoilt to the organised Singapore streets. It took me about half an hour to find my school la! Damn irritating. Haha bravo LTA!
Administratively, it was surprisingly efficient for my room. It was all prepared for me, and all I had to do was sign a few documents and tada! I was shown to my room. Here are a couple pics of my empty room. Haha it was a total mess once its filled with my stuff. Oh incidentally, I only cleaned my room twice in 4 months. Super dirty I know, but its not as bad as what you might think. There is barely any dust there, plus I'm rarely in my room. So no big deal I guess.
Overall, it was a really nice and pleasant room. Pretty spacious too. I was half expecting some cramped up room, maybe is the image of the SMU hostel ba. I was housed with a German guy doing architecture, a Korean lady doing her degree in linguistics, and an American lady doing media and theater.
My hostel is catered more for international students, so we actually get a wide mix of different people. Not many kiwis though. But nevertheless, it was great fun getting to know and talking to so many people of different nationalities. Besides, this is probably the hostel with the highest number of exchange students.
After getting settled in, I spent the next few days rushing around to get enrolled. The system there is rather bad, as there is no one central place for us to register for our courses. It's like there are 8 steps in the enrolment process. And each individual step has to be done at a different office. So I have to travel from point to point to get it done. And what's worse is that some of them are really far! One part of the school is actually about 20 min walk away. So, all in all, it was an extremely tiring affair. But still got it done, and just in time for the start of school too!
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