We are currently staying with a couple here in Wellington, Warren and Marian. Prior to arriving here we had never met them in person, just talked to them through email. We were pleased to find out that they are not axe murdreers but are delightful hosts. They squeezed us in among their 2 teenagers, 2 cats and a dog. They fed us! They let us use their washing machine! Even took us to a movie!

sucking force that had drains emptying straight down in a flash - no time for swirling of any sort. It has actually been scary in some places. Of course, the Indonesian toilets we flushed manually with a scoop of water from a nearby bucket were of no use. The, uh, drain area, let’s say, was too wide for the amount of water one could scoop in an effort to create a serious swirl. And besides, there was the danger of skewing the experiment by which direction one scooped the water. However, her months of effort were finally rewarded here in New Zealand. In successfully repeated experiments she was able to find drains that, due to a blockage of some sort, drained slow enough to be observed. Guess what?! Water DOES swirl counter-clockwise south of the Equator. Who says this trip has been just fun and games? We can now add serious scientific observations to our list of accomplishments.

Speaking of observations, we’ve noticed an Australian and New Zealand penchant for erecting large THINGS in front of a shop to advertise its specialty. All of the following were at least ten feet tall and, in one case, thirty feet: a seashell, a cockatiel, a frog, a clam, two crabs, a pink prawn (our favorite), Captain Cook (thirty feet), several fish, a banana, a bunch of bananas, a mosquito, a sandfly, and a bowl of fruit.