We spent a lot of the day today at the Otago Museum.

They have the best butterfly house we’ve ever visited, including one in Costa Rica. It had a greater variety of butterflies than we’ve ever seen. The exhibit is 4 or 5 levels, so you can look up or down to see lots of butterflies flying. It includes a tall waterfall which you can walk behind, lush greenery and lovely flowers, and a number of interesting birds. We enjoyed it a great deal.

(This photo is genuine ... not the result of Photoshop. The critter really was that large!)

The museum has an extensive Maori collection - lots of artifacts, Maori history, and information about archeological digs. One section focused on a particular tribe and included a video of an elder telling the Maori creation story, another video with several older Maori talking about their experience visiting Stewart Island at the southern tip of New Zealand and current efforts to preserve the wildlife there, an interactive display about the Maori language, etc. There were green leaves placed carefully on many of the exhibits and cases – but unfortunately we forgot to ask why as we were leaving the museum.

The Otago museum also has a very nice natural history section with two fascinating long videos about wildlife (not particularly NZ wildlife), a short video about the birds of Otago, and of course lots of stuffed critters from New Zealand.

There is a "Fringe Festival" (much smaller but similar in concept to the one in Edinburgh) going on right now, but there wasn't anything happening tonight that intrigued us so we decided to skip it.

We spent part of the afternoon at the small Dunedin Art Museum. It has a collection with a few very well-known artists (one painting by Monet and one by Turner, for instance). The collection is mostly works by European artists and New Zealand artists of European descent – very little art about or by the Maori. The museum also includes a little contemporary art. That's not our cup of tea, although I did enjoy a computer-generated movie of kaleidoscope-type images and also a series of five cone sculptures hanging from the ceiling in the 4-story tall entrance atrium. No photos allowed in the museum, unfortunately.

This is the Dunedin town hall and the nearby St. Paul's Cathedral.

I'm trying not to focus too much on food in this blog, but I do have to mention our dinner tonight. After our visit to the art museum, we stopped at the library for a bit of free Internet time. On our way back to the car, we decided to stop at a restaurant next to the art museum - Nova - which some reviews spoke of highly. I had the game special: confit of duck with a lovely sauce of brandy and dried fruit, then for dessert I had their Nova chocolate cone (a hard dark chocolate cone filled with chocolate mousse on a bed of anglaise and raspberry coulis). Quite delighful!