done

I don't feel that I've properly been somewhere unless I've walked around it early in the morning before it gets busy; when there are people around they detract from the structure and shape of a place and are usually fascinatingly watchable and attention-hogging, especially if they have to be navigated around when walking about. Dunedin definitely deserved an early-morning poke, especially as we'd only be here for one day. I wasn't aware until quite recently that a lot of the city centre street names resembled those of Edinburgh though in an amusingly different arrangement of vaguely San Franciscan upsy-downy-slopey streets devoid of litter, neds, stag/hen parties, slow-moving people in brightly-coloured anoraks who take time out from moving slowly to stand still on street corners taking video footage of an equally static opposite street corner and shouting inebriates with threatening accents. There was the occasional student dressed like a wizard but that's only to be expected. I've always been vaguely fond-from-afar of Dunedin purely because it was indicated on the splash screen of the Pegasus Mail software used by Edinburgh uni and which I saw every day for years after being introduced to email of which I had only heard rumour at school (which had computers but nothing as modern as the internet in 1994). Despite the occasional feature seemingly designed to make life difficult for the administrators (the ability to easily mistype an address with the result that a message would be sent to everyone on one of the four mail servers was quite popular) I still judge mail programs by it today. One of the features they didn't advertise the existence of until after I graduated was the nice and quick instant messaging tool through which I met some nice people including some I eventually shared a flat with for the next couple of years.

I don't know if it's specifically the Dunedin Cadbury outpost which is responsible for the foul-tasting travesties sold under the Creme Egg wrapper but which taste nothing like the originals but I was considering visiting the factory purely to complain though I later forgot to. Normal Dairy Milk tastes different over here (presumably because of the different taste of the local milkstuffs though milk by itself tastes like milk) (though still perfectly edible) but somewhere along the way the Creme Egg has fallen foul of mistranslation and just tastes plain wrong. Luckily I haven't seen any Mini Eggs so was spared the ordeal of eating them and disliking them. Apart from that there's been no problem with food over here apart from the apparent salt-by-default treatment applied to potatoes, roast potatoes and chipses. Given enough time I'd start remembering to ask for no salt the same as I eventually learnt to pre-emptively demand a lack of milk in coffee in Germany and no butter in breakfast-rolls on the rare occasion which demands one.

We just missed arriving in time for a tour of the Olveston house so just went to a museum for a few hours in between attempting to find some vacuum-packing luggage bags so that Nicky can fit all her stuff into her rucksack rather than the vast green holdall thing she switched to at the last minute to make space for our walking boots and Trangia, all of which remain unused so far on this trip though the extra space might be handy for anything we decide our lives back home would be vastly benefited by dragging all the way back with us. Luckily seven years in a tiny flat have hammered the urge to buy space-filling shite out of us though a little space will be needed for presents for people and the apparenly obligatory pile of local sugar products for work; I did see something with a suitably stupid name a couple of days into the trip but have since forgotten what they were and have not seen them again. I expect Auckland will provide.

Despite the unfortunate habit coffee shops over here seem to have of shutting at 16:00 we eventually managed to find somewhere prepared to serve a short Americano and cakeything to keep us going until proper-meal-eating time; unfortunately the breakfast-target-place next to the motel which we missed at breakfast as it wasn't yet open was shut ten minutes before we came past. The evening's food was supplied by Ra's bar/grill sort of thing on that octagonal bit in the town centre with the statue of Burns in it; extremely nice food (chicken with sage'n'onion stuffing) and nice friendly waiting-people and (rare) an evenly-warmed chocolate dessert-cake thing with almost the right amount of cream beside it. Thanks must also go to the anonymous owner of the wireless network I was able to connect to from the motel room.