Museum Visit

Today I was a tourist in my own city. Actually it stills feels strange to think that Wellington is my home now and although the Northern suburbs are very familiar I still feel like a tourist when I go into the central city. Today my mother and I were tourists as we visited the Museum of Wellington City & Sea. It's a collection of some important, quirky, tragic and interesting items and records of Wellington's history. Mum was particularly interested to see the Wahine disaster display and documentary.

Something that I found funny was the account of the first car journey in NZ and how it ended:

Cars first arrived in New Zealand in 1898. They were imported by William McLean, a Wellington businessman and politician, who bought two of them in Paris. One he named Lightning, the other Petrolette. On his inaugural drive he set off along Kent Terrace, one of Wellington's widest and straightest streets. McClean failed to take the first bend and crashed into the Basin Reserve fence.

The most fascinating display was probably the holographic telling of a Maori legend. The holographic characters looked so real - like miniature people performing on stage. The little boy beside me was genuinely perplexed about where the narrator had gone when she appeared to disappear into thin air on the stage. The video below is from YouTube. It flickers a bit and you don't really get a feel of how real the 3D images looked but it gives you an idea of what it was like.