Small Done Right

Did I mention that Wellington is comfortably small? When we were downtown, lodging at the bayside hotel Weta provided for us, it took only a few days of walking around to realize that the city centre, though large enough to have a few different districts with their own look and feel, is really quite a manageable size. It's hard to get lost downtown, and it takes only fifteen minutes to wend your way along the coast to the reach the nearest suburbs. Considering that parts of downtown Wellington look and feel every bit as cosmopolitan as downtown Toronto, a city easily fifty times larger, Wellington has a lot to offer! And it exudes less of what I think of as the competitive energy of populous cities like Toronto and New York (don't get me wrong: I love Toronto and New York, but you know what I'm talking about). It has a quaintness that cities like Boston and New Orleans share. It's clean, comfortable, and well-appointed like Ottawa, yet subtly foreign and exotic. We really love this combination!

In terms of area, Windsor's downtown is of course much, much smaller than Wellington's, but the entire city of Windsor is probably more sprawling than Wellington, which has houses tightly packed together on its suburban slopes.

Marilyn, our Relocation Manager from Weta, in comparing Wellington to Auckland, described Auckland as being sprawling and tacky, smaller but similar to Sydney, Australia. "Auckland is a smaller version of Sydney, which is a smaller version of L.A. Wellington is a smaller version of Brisbane, which is comparable in North America to San Franscisco; it has a heart," she told us. She is a deeply proud Wellingtonian, and so she should be.

The outlying suburbs of Wellington are also handily compact. We live on the Miramar Peninsula, which -- judging from the map -- seems to make-up roughly one-fifth of the entire greater Wellington area. I found out just how tiny and narrow the peninsual is after walking around 'my' neighbourhood a few times. Starting out on the east coast (Worser Bay) and cutting across the peninsula on foot to the west coast (Evans Bay) over the hilly middle part of the peninsula via zigzaging pedestrian 'streets,' I found myself overlooking the tiny Wellington International Airport on the other side after only twenty minutes of walking! I really love this about Wellington; it offers itself up to you. It doesn't demand that you schlep your ass over long distances to get somewhere different.