Te papa

Te Papa Tongarewa, The Museum of New Zealand, to give it its proper name, is a huge concrete building on the waterfront in central Wellington.

Entering, I find the cloak room who kindly look after my coat, and don't even charge for the privilege.

At the information desk the helpful assistant suggests the best way to see the museum is to take the lift to the top floor and work my way down.

So starting on the sixth floor, which has an exhibition of pottery by Peter Stichbury, an artist from Auckland. I can't say pottery is my thing (though I did a little in art class at school) but I did find it interesting.

Moving down to the fifth floor (the sixth had a relatively small exhibition area), artworks from many New Zealand artists, from both Maori and European traditions were on display. It's quite interesting to see how both have added influence from the other into their works over the years.

It was raining this morning, but cleared up into a very pleasant spring day, so rather than take the buys into the city centre, I decided to walk. It took about an hour, which was fine because apart from a long walk through Bangkok airport, I've not got any exercise since leaving ireland.

I'm now half way through the Te Papa museum, which is am awesome place to visit. There's a fantastic collection of items depicting New Zealand history, both Maori and european.

More later - I've still got a lot of the museum to get through before it closes at six.