a visit to Zealandia

Over East­er, the weath­er sud­denly went all settled and warm. This is per­haps not unusu­al for autumn, but giv­en the crap sum­mer most parts of the coun­try have had for the past few months it was some­what unex­pec­ted. In fact the fore­cast for East­er was so dire that it played a reas­on­able part in us […]

Candidates: Annette King for Labour in Rongotai

We invited all can­did­ates in Wel­ling­ton elect­or­ates to con­tact us with their answers to fif­teen crowd­sourced ques­tions. Answers are restric­ted to 30 words each, and we pub­lish them exactly as we receive them.  Who are you and what do you want? Annette King, MP for Ron­go­tai (& Chath­am Islands). I want to con­tin­ue to be […]

Candidates: Kelly Buchanan for the Alliance in Wellington Central

We invited all can­did­ates in Wel­ling­ton elect­or­ates to con­tact us with their answers to fif­teen crowd­sourced ques­tions. Answers are restric­ted to 30 words each, and we pub­lish them exactly as we receive them.  Who are you and what do you want? Nev­er ask that ques­tion! Er, I’m a geek and social­ist, and want to drastic­ally […]

TAWA6: not this year

Let’s get the bad news out of the way quickly: we’re not going to be able to bring you the The Annu­al Wel­ling­tonista Awards this year. This makes us sad. But Decem­ber is always a damned awk­ward month, and col­lect­ively this year we’re short of sort of avail­able time required in abund­ance to get the […]

The Rugby World Cup and You, Too

Des­pite Hadyn­’s earli­er post we know there’s a reas­on­able pro­por­tion of you out there (just as among the Wel­ling­tonista itself) that are rel­at­ively meh about this whole World Cup thing. But whatever your opin­ions about the event, it has to be acknow­ledged that a lot of effort has gone into the asso­ci­ated off-field activ­it­ies, many […]

cuckoo for caffeine

You may be wan­der­ing along the water­front later in the year when a crowd of large gen­tle­men in col­our­ful cot­ton knit shirts may ask for dir­ec­tions to some­thing called the “RWC Party Zone”. And there­fore, as a polite host want­ing only the best for guests to our city, you may dir­ect them to Cuckoo, this […]

Lamason

There are many many ways to make a decent cup of cof­fee. We are see­ing some of these altern­ate meth­ods return­ing to com­mer­cial use around Wel­ling­ton’s more inter­est­ing cafés: the Swiss Gold; the Chemex; the V60; the cold drip… and the siphon. Dave Lama­son, formerly Peoples Cof­fee’s barista train­er, is pas­sion­ate about the siphon. So […]

Mojo Origins

We can­’t help feel­ing a little bit pleased that one of the Star­bucks on Lamb­ton Quay has closed, and been replaced by a shiny new Mojo: This is the new Mojo Ori­gins, out the front of Lamb­ton Square, behind a schist facade that some years ago had been put togeth­er for an earli­er ten­ant, Rodd […]

predictive bussing revisited

It’s been the bet­ter part of a year since we wrote about the Region­al Coun­cil’s Real Time Pas­sen­ger Inform­a­tion pro­ject. GPS units are now being fit­ted to a grow­ing sub­set of Go Wel­ling­ton buses (oth­er com­pan­ies to fol­low soon), so that their real-time pos­i­tions can be used to cal­cu­late exact “time to arrival” inform­a­tion for […]

Waterfront Fiesta

There are many nice cas­u­al lunch places in town. What we don’t seem to have though is an abund­ance of nice cas­u­al lunch places on the Water­front. We need more places like Kaf­fee Eis, and Fiesta. Fiesta has a small and reas­on­ably priced range of bur­gers, hot dogs, and nachos; not your greasy spoon vari­ants […]