Wellington, NZ: Day Two

Mari got up bright and early Saturday morning and went off to explore Wellington. Her main goal was to goto a French Bakery and get some croissants home for breakfast along with some good coffee. Unfortunately the bakery she had selected (Le Petit Bordeaux) seemed to be closed and looking for a new chef. Her coffee shop of choice (Masi) was also closed down since that block was under renovation.

She came back empty handed, and we got the kids ready and headed for the zoo via Cafe L'Affare. The cafe was crowded and buzzing at 9:15 am in the morning (which is quite unusual in NZ). We had an excellent flat white, a good blueberry muffin and the kids had their fluffy with quite a few marshmallows. We then went to the Wellington Zoo in Newtown. The Zoo was not bad, and definitely a fun activity to do with kids. There was a fair amount of walking involved and we got to see a few interesting animals and birds. The view of the giraffes at eye level was definitely the best part. We spent some time at the Newtown playground after that before heading for lunch.

Lunch was excellent dim sum at Regal (5 Courtney Place). The place was quite packed just like Kon Tiang or Koi Palace in San Francisco. A 15 minute wait turned out to be more like 30 minutes before we were finally seated. We were quite hungry and ordered a fair amount of dim sum to satisfy our craving. The roast duck and spare ribs were quite good. The kids enjoyed the shrimp sui mai, eggplant and fish, egg tart. There was not as much of a seafood variety as I would have liked (or probably those plates never made it to our table!). Overall an excellent lunch, i'd give it a 7/10.

Headed back to the Terrace and put PJ down for her nap. We resumed our adventures at 4:00 pm or so and walked to Lambton Quay and the cable car terminus at the bottom of the hill. Took the cable car all the way to Wellington Botanic Gardens. The children's playground was a good 10 minutes walk away in the middle of the gardens and met our high playground standards. (most playgrounds in NZ are well built and quite new!) While one of us was hanging out at the playground with the kids the other one took a 30 min walk through the gardens. We then took the cable car back to town and stopped at a small playground on the way down. This one in contrast was quite old and run down. I suspect there are not too many small kids in that area since the playground was next to Victoria University hostels.

Dinner that night was at Roti Chennai (the original Roti place in wellington according to their menu). We ordered a vegetarian dosa, roti with mild chicken curry for the kids, fish veruval and seafood/chicken laksa. The food was really good. The sambhar had lots of flavor and the coconut and tomato chutney played a good supporting role. The roti was nice and flaky, the chicken curry was quite mild which the kids liked. We had too much food, so did not really eat the fish dish (though the bites we had were good). The only sour note was the laksa, which was really bad. The noodles seemed undercooked and did not taste great. We topped off the meal with a good glass of rose flavored lassi. Overall our best meal of the trip so far and gets the highest rating of 8/10.

We had a nice climb back up to the apartment hotel which walked off our dinner as well as made the kids tired :) Another exciting day in the big city ...