Wellington – The Inspo Post

I’m back from a week and a bit in Wellington and still trying to catch up on sleep. It’s ridiculous how even a 2-hour time difference can play havoc with your body clock. The weekend, however, is around the corner, and the alarm at 4.20 am isn’t set.

Aside from visiting with my friend and overeating, this visit was inspiring on several levels. As they say in the classics, read on… (Do they actually say that, or am I making it up???)

Wellington on a Plate

When we last spoke, I told you I’d tried a few of the burgers featured in the Burger Wellington part of Wellington on a Plate. Apparently, there are 194 to try – there would have been 195, but one of them (Ernesto’s entry) was removed from the competition because of its name. We got talking to one of the chefs from one of the other restaurants who told us there’d been a complaint about the name of Ernesto’s burger from one of the embassies – something about it glorifying a drug lord or something. Anyways, the burger was pulled from the official line-up and renamed Censored and has rated very well indeed.

My pick of the burgers we tried was Zephyr’s Frankenstein, which was like a nasi lemak in a burger. The really cool part was mixing your burger sauce from test tubes in a beaker. Gimmicky? Sure, but also fun.

We also attended a ticketed event – Maumahara – which blended great food with audio-visual prompts to invoke the nostalgia of growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand … with a smear of politics too.

Nowadeus

I have no idea how to describe this other than to tell you that with images and sound coming from every direction it was immersive and seriously trippy with a banging soundtrack. One of those arty things that’s probably not for everyone, I LOVED it.

The blurb goes:

Step inside the pantheon and come face to face with an assembly of imagined deities in this trippy immersive experience. Here you’ll find eight ‘gods of today’ that reflect our modern day devotions and obsessions, the only question is, who do you make your offerings to?

Nowadeus awakens artist Tim Christie’s larger than life characters in an intense and hypnotic creative collaboration with The Grid, inviting us to reflect on the conscious and subconscious paradigms we pay homage to in our daily lives.

Featuring an epic cinematic soundtrack composed by Tom McLeod and spatial sound mix by Mike Hodgson, this captivating immersive art experience is taking over The Grid art space this August.

Weta Workshop

I have no idea how many times I’ve visited Wellington in the last twenty years, but other than in the COVID years, it’s been at least once a year, so your guess is as good as mine. However, I’ve never made it to Weta Workshop – mainly because I’m not into the movies so much and thought that was all it was.

Yes, there’s enough Hobbit/Lord of the Rings/Mulan/Deadpool to keep the enthusiasts happy, but there was plenty to inspire a run-of-the-mill creative like me. The way these guys think blew my mind.

Unfortunately, there are only a couple of places inside where you can take photos, but I spent ages talking to the guy who made the set models for multi-million dollar movie projects out of junk and found items and the guy who made models out of tinfoil which were then covered in a clay-like paint. A-mazing.

Parliament House

Okay, bear with me on this one. I’ve done a tour of the Beehive and Parliament in the past, but this time I had an ulterior motive.

For some time, I’ve wanted to write a novel set in Wellington, and I think I might just have the story. So, this trip to Parliament—and the pubs around it—was research. Even the beers were research. Seriously.

Because I was in the area I dropped into the National Library (what could be more inspiring than the Treaty of Waitangi, the petition for women’s suffrage, and Katherine Mansfield) and Old St Pauls.

As for the novel, I have an idea I might take out for a test flight in November.

Next time … Wellington on a Plate…