It’s the Final Countdown (do do doo doo… do do do do dooo)

Right, so this is a post about my final few weeks in Wellington. It should be read whilst listening to The Final Countdown by Europe. You can watch it on YouTube here.

Just as an aside before I start, I bought a NZ flag sticker today for my Macbook Air, and it’s already paid off- someone at the airport has already asked where I’m from and it at least gave me some context. Maybe a world map sticker would’ve been better. Not that I’ll be flashing the laptop out in public a lot..

So I guess the biggest thing since my last blog was that I went to the wedding of my friends Chris and Kelly in Napier. It’s not super relevant to this trip, other than it was the time-point for the start of the trip- I wanted to be in NZ for it, and that it ended up giving me a great break from stressing about the trip. If you’re interested, I took some photos at the wedding with my new 50mm lens (which i learnt a lot from- even though that means some average photos from the wedding). The photos are here. But yes- lesson from the lens was that you’ve gotta be careful using an aperture of f1.8 as you can take a photo of two people beside each other and one will be out of focus- that’s how small the Depth of Field is!

I also bought the new version of Adobe Lightroom. I had been using an illegitimate copy previously, but this one had some features i wanted (like built-in geotagging), and I felt guilty and it’s relatively inexpensive for Adobe products. So yes- if you see some maps of my photos (and you will) it’s because of that new software.

I obviously wrapped up my work at LINZ, at least for the time-being. It was more drawn out than it should’ve been, but I won’t rant about our IT supplier here- I did enough of that on Twitter!

I’ve had a lot of really good catchups with friends in the last couple of weeks. It made me really realise the great group of friends I’ve built around me and how much I’ll miss them over the next 2 years. That said, most of those people buggered off on their OE’s for a couple of years while I plugged away in Wellington so I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy.. ;-)

And of course there was the packing, most of which happened on the last day or two- with some stuff going to charity, some going to friends and flatmates and the rest getting sent to my parents. I still know I packed too much stuff and will no doubt either be hoping that I wear through some gear quickly or I’ll be posting quite a bit home in the coming weeks!