Wellington/At Sea

February 17, 18
Wellington/At Sea

I was hoping to catch up with my friend again today in Wellington, but communications didn’t exactly work out and I ended up getting of the ship later with a friend from the ship. I had a rehearsal in the morning for the show that night, a show where my friend Terry was the featured performer. He’s the lead singer on the ship and put together his own show, and luckily for him, the ship has been letting him perform his show during the cruises as a headliner act so that he can get used to performing it. Anyways, we did the rehearsal and then I got off the ship with Terry.
Today Wellington must have had the best weather in recent memory, or at least so was the consensus of everyone on the ship I talked with. Terry and I took a shuttle into the city and decided to make our way over to the Te Papa museum, a free museum that I’ve heard nothing but great things about.
On the way over to the museum, I came across a music store, something I can never help but go in. I’ve been looking for more saxophone reeds, and luckily, this place had some. I ended up buying a random collection of reeds to try out on my mouthpieces as I continue to fine-tune my sax set up. I bought some really obscure Australian reeds too, so I’m excited to see what happens with those.
Moving on, we made our way to the museum, where I was immediately impressed at it’s size, design, and free price. The highlight of the museum was that colossal squid that they had on display. Yeah, one of those giant squids you hear about every so often – well they had one and I saw it! This is the only colossal squid on display to the public, and was caught somewhere in Antarctica and donated to the museum. Apparently, the Squid had been pulled up by a research fishing vessel, and having seen a line of hooked fish, the squid grabbed one and didn’t ever figure out to let go till it rose to the surface and was near death. It was then brought aboard the ship, frozen, and then carefully thawed at the museum and put on display. Anyways, it was cool to see it myself and watch the videos about it.
We eventually left the museum, grabbed a coffee somewhere, enjoyed the weather and headed back to the ship so that Terry could prepare for his show. The show went fine, I had a solo where I went to the front of the stage, and that’s about it for the day.
I’m actually writing this on the 18th, so I don’t know yet how the day’s going to end, but I figure I should just do it now before I put it off for a week. We’re sailing today and are supposed to sail around some Volcanic Island that I’ll hopefully be able to see after rehearsal. Otherwise, I’m trying to help put together a tour for tomorrow to go rafting, but have been sitting in my room unsuccessfully trying to get a hold of the other person who’s been putting the tour together. What happened was I tried to get the tour together for some of my friends, contacted the operator and was told there’s someone else on the ship trying to do the same thing and that we should combine groups. I’ve been trying my best over the past 24 hours to contact this other person but have had no luck at all, meanwhile, I’m 45 minutes away from needing to have told the tour operator a final number. Hopefully everything works out and I’ll get to do this tour tomorrow, but nothing has been clearly arranged and we might have waited just a bit too long to get this tour scheduled…fingers crossed though. And that’s about it for today, seeya!