Okay. So I'm now back in the USA. How do I pull this off? For some reason, wrapping up the last few posts of this blog seems like a daunting task. I know that I'll be glad for it in the end.
The weekend of July 23-25 was a funny one. I will name it "the weekend that did not go as planned."
Friday morning, I woke up and took the bus out to meet Kendall, who had to work that morning. our plan was to meet up at Animates, a pet shop. Simply put, we wanted to pet some puppies! Kendall had wandered into there at one point and they had a puppy pen, and when I heard that little tid bit, I added a visit to my to-do list. I arrived, and could find no puppy pen. The only pups that were there were behind glass (which, in my humble opinion, is a very sad place to put a puppy). Some were rambunctious, some were mellow, but all of them, when they saw a human approach the glass, would come running up, licking the window while wiggling and whimpering. Kendall arrived, and was bummed that the puppies weren't out and about. Fortune struck, however, because one of the workers there needed to change the papers on the bottom of the pen. Kendall and I volunteered to hold the two puppies while she did the task (tough job). The little dogs were so cute and calm once they were in contact with people!
Attached to the pet shop was a French cafe, La Cloche, that Noeline had pointed out to me on one of our many drives past, and so Kendall and I stopped in for a lunch. On the outside, it didn't look like much of a place, but once inside it, I really felt like I had been transported back to Europe. Camille said a few times that New Zealand was the child of Europe and America, for it seemed to have the best of both. I'm not entirely sure if that's how I feel. But that taste of Europe brought back so many memories from Belgium! I miss Belgium.
After a light, but satisfying, lunch, Kendall and I jumped back on the bus into town. Our plan was as follows: stop off at the video store, then cafe hop with our journals to enjoy some coffee and reflective time, and then head back to the apartment to build a blanket tent and watch the movies we picked out. This is the point where things started to not go as planned. As we walked out the gate of Maison Cabriole, there stood Allie, another of the American interns who was based in Hamilton and was in for a weekend visit. She was staying with the girls next door, but looked lost. We made eye contact, hugged, and Kendall and I showed her inside. Fifteen minutes later, after getting caught up on how things were going in her neck of the island, we all headed to the video store.
Sometimes, if things do not go as planned, I stop functioning properly. I know that makes me sound like a droid or something, but it's true. This was the case in the video store. With the additional company (not bad company, but unplanned company), my brain was somehow unable to process the act of picking out movies that I had been wanting to see for a while. With a selection put together, a less than satisfactory selection, I rented the movies. Kendall and I still were planning on cafe hopping; however, outside of the store, we mentioned heading off to a cafe while the other girls headed to the grocery store, and everybody decided to come along as well. We ended up in Fidel's on Cuba Street (yup, you read correctly) at the request of Indiana. Not as planned, and not a place I would have picked out, necessarily, but c'est la vie.
That night, Kendall and I did not end up making a blanket tent to watch our movies from. We did watch Mona Lisa Smile, if I remember correctly, before heading next door to watch Lord of the Rings.
The next morning, Kendall and I were again awake and ambitious at about the same time. We decided to head out to the Gardens (Kendall had yet to see them) and souvenir shop on the way. I grabbed Billy's souvenir (an All Blacks tee), we had a nice walk through the gardens, and then made our way to Sweet Mother's Kitchen for lunch. We ran into Indiana, Marlowe, Nikki, and Allie there just as we were finishing. I headed off to IPlay, the internet cafe, for a Skype date with Jesse and my folks. That night was more Lord of the Rings, which included me falling asleep on the floor.
Sunday, I went to church, then was picked up by Noeline for our lunch outing which I wrote about previously. The only addition I will make in regards to that day was the outing to Kaffee Eis for some top of the line gelato! SO DELICIOUS! That is when my addiction started...
And so ends Weekends in Wellington, Part 2!
