Now Voyager: Meeting Kinto

Today is Sunday - recovery day and maket day on the quayside of Wellington. I get there about twelve forty-five still time to shop and the fruit and vegies are a reasonable price, for Wellington is very expensive. I feel a bit peckish, so buy a chicken and mushroom pasty, or something like it, sold perhaps by a French woman, for five dollars fifty, the cheapest you can buy any snack on the market day. A small coffee at this market is sold at four dollars fifty! I eat the pasty, along with many others doing the same, especially young couples, I notice, who seem to be there with their one off-spring. I see a French couple with a little fat four year old munching a German sausage, and then a mixed Japanese Indian couple with a little curly headed muffin playing with an enormous brass propellor embedded in the sand, a local memento sculpture.

This enormous propellor has more than a sense of irony today, as I have just read that the abandoned Interislander Ferry which lost its propellor a few months ago, just off-shore where it wasn't able to retrieve it, was immediately replaced by a European Dutch Ferry which is also now 'out of action' due to several faults, and they now are docked side by side, useless, on Wellington quay. It is a quite embarrassing result for the supposed premier ferry company owned and operated by Kiwi Rail. Now hundreds of passengers are stranded in the peak holiday season. Ferry travel is a very popular way to get to the South island and of course takes cars as well. The newspapers quoted that the company will now go down in history as the worst decision-making public organisation in NZ.

I decide to further my day on the quayside with a visit to a favourite coffee shop under the mega-wealthy appartment block, formerly the General Post Office building I believe, where a penthouse there sold recently for over one and a half million dollars. A pleasant young man serves me a flat white and I take a seat to browse the Sunday paper. I think that the Wellington Sunday papers are better than the Saturday ones, in my humble opinion. Btw, my excellent coffee here costs only three dollars, as against four dollars fifty take-away, where's the fair trade?

Kinto, whom I proceed to have a lengthy conversation with as I am his only client, is the Japanese name of my barista, born of a Japanese father and is now a Political Science student at Victoria University. Fluent in Japanese, he is a lovely blended Kiwi who will hopefully make a difference to these islands one day. I will doubtless see him again. We shake hands and I leave. Home for a nap, not a swimming class, before my dance tonight.