Was rather serendipitous that on our mid-week day off the new Air New Zealand 777-300 was at the airport giving free tours to airpoints members – so off we went.

The plane is massive and very white inside.

We found the premium economy seats to be rather less comfortable than the current 747 and 767 seats in the same class – they were in ‘pods’ which means you don’t disrupt the people around you but the recline felt less and the leg room definitely very strange and cramped, due to the curves of the pod, basically pushing your knees to flop outwards into the aisle. Also the angle of the seat combined with the shiny hard white leather meant that you couldn’t help but slip down. Unless I was doing it wrong, I was rather uncomfortable!

If you want premium economy go for the window sets of 2 – they might be less ‘coupley’ (the middle sets have a small table in between to share) but at least your leg won’t flop out into the aisle.

We went to take a look at the sky couch – all the window sets of 3 seats together can be purchased as a set to make into one – the advertising pictures show what they’re really for: husband reads, wife curls up with head in his lap; mother watches TV with 2 little kids playing beside her – definitely not designed for 2 people to lie down together. Apart from the fact that The Mister’s feet stuck out in the aisle, we were snugged in quite tight and unless you sleep like that anyway, you wouldn’t be very comfortable for a few hours. And certainly no room if someone puts the seat back down in front of you. The tour guide was very quick to announce that they were a sky couch and not a sky bed when people begun to flock around us to see if you could in fact get 2 people in the bed couch.

Business premier much the same as now but a better screen and better mattress. However the new white leather seems a lot harder and not like the dumpy den chair offered by the brown leather in the cabins on the planes currently. The Mister obviously looked like the type of traveller they were targetting for this cabin – the media guy was very quick to take his picture!

Well, actually red pandas from the Himalayas  but they were orange pandas to me and you can see why!

Had a day off work today and decided to do something very different from sitting in an office or home in front of a computer so a mid-week trip to the zoo was in order. We got to feed and pet the orange pandas as part of Wellington Zoo’s Encounter programme – they do the pandas, giraffes, cheetahs and big cats.

4 people at a time were allowed into the enclosure with the zoo keeper and we visited with 2 sets of panda pairs. They ate fruit out of our hands or fingers and put their paws up on our knees when we were sitting on logs in their enclosure.

One of the pandas was so eager that when The Mister was the 1st one to sit down it leapt right up onto his knee like a cat!

It was such a great time – the 4 pandas definitely all had personalities of their own and it’s just so hard to explain how insanely cute they were. They had warm little feet and the older ones were coarse to pat, a bit like an old dog’s fur, and the younger ones were quite soft and cat-like. Beneath their orange fur they had a thick downy layer almost like possum fur. Their little faces were just so adorable.

When they’d filled up on fruit they went back into the trees and fell asleep almost immediately!

Loads more photos on Flickr.