Writ­ing recaps of New Zealand’s Next Top Mod­el is some­thing that I’d nor­mal­ly do over at Pret­ty Pret­ty Pret­ty, but since the first episode of Sea­son Two was filmed in Welling­ton (nice work, Pos­i­tive­ly Tourism!), I thought I might put up some thoughts on all the places that they shot.

  • The girls stay at
    The Muse­um Hotel    , which one girl describes as “pris­tine”, while anoth­er express­es sur­prise that they’re not stay­ing in a back­pack­ers’ to save mon­ey. It’s cute that she knows about bud­gets, and hope­ful­ly she’ll learn about prod­uct place­ment soon­er rather than lat­er. The Muse­um Hotel is indeed a gor­geous space, and the bath­tubs are so big that you could prob­a­bly fit all 13 girls in at once. There is in fact a clip of them all sit­ting in a spa lat­er but I could­n’t fig­ure out if it was at th hotel or out at Boom­rock.
  • For their first cat­walk expe­ri­ence, the girls are charged with stomp­ing around the Water Whirler — which we’d already read about on Stuff. It was reas­sur­ing to see how bad most of the girls were at walk­ing in heels, but a warn­ing: if you’re think­ing about try­ing to recre­ate this scene, secu­ri­ty guards will have a very dif­fer­ent idea about what ‘fierce’ is. You are not allowed on the Water Whirler.
  • Because every tourist ven­ture needs a mon­tage, we get to see the girls with Solace in the Wind (a less polite per­son than me would com­ment on how Mr Solace appears to be more ani­mat­ed — and artic­u­late — than some of them) and get­ting excit­ed about shop­ping in the Old Bank Arcade. We also see them buy­ing cakes at the Har­bour­side Mar­kets, because it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that mod­els real­ly do eat.
  • For some time-killing, the girls are tak­en out to Boom­rock to dri­ve around in cars, do clay-shoot­ing and mar­vel as Sara Tetro arrives in a heli­copter. A cou­ple of the girls read off a teleprompter about how beau­ti­ful it is out there and a girl from Low­er Hutt says she nev­er knew it exist­ed. Still, at least she’s rep­re­sent­ing our city bet­ter than Danielle from Kaw­er­au who says she’s defy­ing the odds by not being preg­nant or in jail yet. I guess she won’t be get­ting a job at Tourism Kaw­er­au any time soon.
  • Next the group are off to Massey Uni­ver­si­ty, where heaps of peo­ple in the fash­ion indus­try have come from (except it was called Welling­ton Poly­tech then, of course). The girls get to run around in the impres­sive big hall of the old muse­um to find out who’s con­tin­u­ing on. It’s nice to see them in an inter­est­ing space rather than a gener­ic con­fer­ence room.
  • The lucky 22 who make it through are then off to the Embassy The­atre for their first pho­to­shoot. Did you know it was refur­bished for the Return of the King pre­miere? I’m suprised that Ker­ry Pren­derghast­ly does­n’t pop up to take all the cred­it for it. I also like that they’ve take the chaise lounge out of the toi­let for the girls to pose on. Glad to see it get­ting some use.
  • After the pho­tos were done, we find the judges relax­ing in the glitzy Fox­tail (min­i­mum spend $4000 for pri­vate hire) try­ing to decide who to kick out, and short­ly after that they break the news to the girls in the emp­ty func­tion room at Fox­glove (min­i­mum spend $4000 as well).

It’s good to see that the girls got around the city and had a jol­ly good tour. Heav­en knows they’re going to have to get around enough and give enough head to get ahead in the indus­try, after all…