Giedre tyttö Ozista

I was at the eFest conference in Wellington last week when I heard that my grandmother died. It struck me that even if I would have hopped on the plane the very same minute I heard about it, I wouldn't have been able to make it to the funeral... This was one of the first times when I realised how far actually NZ is from everything... Rationally I do know that it is far, but before this I haven't had experienced the claustrophobic "I'm too far..." feeling. Last week has been pretty sad, my grandmother was the last of my grandparents... Rest in Peace...

Going to Wellington was a welcome change from Auckland. NZ does have cities that feel like real cities instead of 8 suburbs trying to pretend to be a city. One thing about Wellington is that people actually walk to places, so the streets are full of people at all times. The distances are manageable and there are quite a few pedestrian streets (try to suggest that in Auckland and the shopkeepers will hit you on the head. They think that they won't have customers, if people can't park right in front of the shop). Wellington even has trolleybuses (no polution!) and a functioning train system. Meanwhile Auckland puts most of the tax money into building more motorways...

Wellington is the capital of NZ, so it hosts the Government, no wonder things are neat there... There's lots of public spaces, urban art and things are just nice to have, while in many cases Auckland doesn't even seem to have the basic infrastructure...

Conference went fine, we got lots of good feedback about the work that we're doing

And back home we had a major moving offices operation waiting for us. Everything is packed and was supposed to be moved to the new offices today, but as I left for home at 3pm (because I didn't have a proper workspace), we had only the 1st truck load of stuff delivered. The cat didn't like the mess a small bit!