Waitangi Day

I have found a new cafe on Abel Smith Street with an enormous mural depicting a prescient Albert Einstein covering one wall and a piano nestling underneath, obviously waiting for an afficionado to come and tinkle its keys. This is quintessential Kiwi, creative, laid-back, unpretentious but with so much thought and style behind it all.

It is a fabulous new cafe but with a familiar barista, Kinto, at the espresso machine. It is Wellington, don't forget, you always meet someone again. 

Today is a cool Waitangi Holiday, the Sevens are raging at Westpac Stadium, but with only half the seats sold they are wondering if it has a viable future. It does cost $150 a ticket for the two days of footy, plus food and drink, so most visitors would spend many hundreds of dollars over the weekend. This is a world event, and one of the most popular venues worldwide has always been Wellington as the people go crazy over these days and the Rugby world loves it. But it also needs the bums on seats to bring in the necessary dollars to make it a viable affair. The sports journos are posing questions...

A hoodie closing in on Einstein

More wall Art

Yesterday's party at ANZ

I didn't think my photo outside the ANZ bank on Willis street would make it the Dom Post, but it did, albeit taken by another photographer. The two men in frocks are both senior officials with the ANZ Bank, encouraging non discrimination of the GBLTI community, and even encouraging the trans-genders to express themselves. The now have specific Rainbow coloured ATMs - go ANZ, my bank too!

Food, what Kiwis do best!

There were 350 kilograms of strawberries, amongst other specialities, eaten at Government House to celebrate Waitang Day.. They do it well here, and many were invited by internet lottery - one for the masses!

Just like a Kiwi...? Saving money is a Kiwi trait..

Kiwis loving adventure...

Kiwis love going to faraway places to experience the thrall of Nature 'in extremis', like this cyclist in Otago. I have not been nurtured like a a Kiwi, and could never become one, they are an incredible race of hard living achievers and I am in the autumn of my years I know that, but I still am happy to have seen it up front and personal, this amazing ability to challenge nature and live life to the absolute full. There are no prizes for losers in NZ, and to be true, it seems that here there are none.

Waitangi Day is the subject of the editorial of the Dom Post. It is spoken of as a time to discuss vehemently the early land disputes and to relive the trials that the Maori peoples went through when this Treaty was hurriedly pushed through Parliament 175 years ago. They love an agument and it will go on forever as intrinsically the two languages do not understand each other. And nor do rhe races it seems. All the while the Maori people are slowly but surely regaining their pride in their Whanau and Iwi, which over nearly two centuries was tried to be buried or at least diminished by the Pakeha but without ever succeeding. 'Te Reo' is back on the agenda, and although from personal experience  it has some awful teachers, but they believe in it, and that is all that matters.

 I will take home this fervent love of country and family with me to Oz, a country where all this 'whanau' stuff is just not as important as, in Aussie talk, 'throwin' another prawn on the barbie..'.

Resting, waiting for a burger...

Two things have become evident on this all important Waitangi Day holiday...first I am not really able to identify with all the so-called queer people that present themseves as such. When I am with my queer brothers and sisters, they are all with me and I feel I am not with them. This became evident at the ANZ party where all the pollies and trannnies were together celebrating their differences, and interestingly I did not feel to be part of the scene.

And today I am having a hamburger at the coolest little hamburger stall in Cuba Street with all the young ones, and some who are older, but I feel I am intolerably old. This is a young person's paradise and I am not the person to be part of it, although I appreciate so much the opportunity to have experienced it. 

The sun is shining, the coolest music is playing, and I am waiting for 'Trevor', the name of my burger, to be called. It couldn't be cooler, and I am happy to be in it, but not of it.

Also I just emerged from 'The Theory of Everything', Stephen Hawking's  biopic, another Academy Award movie, this time for Eddie Redmayne. He gave a fantastic performance and it was a film totally of my era. It is hard to believe Hawking is still alive at age 72, in a wheel-chair with motor neurone disease, having been given just two years to live forty years ago.  Amazing story and amazing man, but a real scientist without belief in any supernatural experiences. Anyway, Quantum Physics lends itself to the reduction of everything to the Light and Sound, in reality, to nothing but vibrations, which we in ECK call the sound of Love. 

Effectively the basis of Physics is actually the same as we believe in Eckankar....

The cool hamburger van...