Another Country

Memphis is closed for renovations today so I am down Courtenay place at a little Chinese- run cafe to test their coffee, and a Florentine! Am looking forward to my second documentary of the Film Festival which is an Aussie Aboriginal movie, called interestingly 'Another Country'.

The orange cafe...now called Cafe Two Spoons, was originally another bigger cafe which was the first I visited on my arrival in Wellington three years ago. Flight Centre has now taken over the prime Taranaki corner site and this smaller cafe is nestled next door.. But the view is the same as when I first came, Courtenay Place intersection, although Saatchi and Saatchi have taken down their enormous signage as they no longer exist here. But really Wellington changes very little, and that's both its charm and its downfall, as  it is such a vibrant city but it needs businesses to invest in the downtown business area. The imminent arrival of David Jones will be doubtless a big injection for the urban scene but that is down at Lambton Quay, the legal and government locale. In Courtenay Place there are several empty buildngs which desperately need tenants to sustain the finance of this busy small metropolis.

Anyway the coffee was OK and the Florintine a bit too sweet, and I am off now to the Paramount Cinema to perhaps purchase two more tickets, as this film festival is just too good to miss!

The view on to Courtenay Place

Have moved down the street to catch a second coffee on this gale force day in Wellington...any excuse! But Cafe Mojo is the new smart addition to Courtney Place which I don't frequent, being a Memphis fan. However it is incredibly well designed, very Melbourne style dare I say, and has great coffee and excellent service, also a local newspaper which I always need.

Interesting front page article about the misguided hunt for a lost family for two days, and how the young Maori nephew finally found them within half an hour's search.

Trans gender people more newsworthy these days as the stigma slowly disappears and the public becomes better informed. Will it be so for hiv people one day, I wonder?

Hillary chooses a safe running-mate, Tim Kaine, very presentable and ex-Governor of Virginia,obviously a true 'Southern Gentleman'.

More killings, this time in Munich, by an eighteen year old, when will it ever end?

The style of the South Island, in ever-popular Queenstown, which I have yet to visit, one day perhaps, it is for the millionaires I understand.

And here is how Christchurch used to be in the thirties, another London Bloomsbury according to this local writer, and I don't doubt it at all when I see the intellectual valour of the artistic Kiwis.

Now in the Paramount Cinema foyer where the hub of the NZFF shows its true colours. There are many diehard cinema goers, and most about my age it seems. Picture below says it all as I line up to buy two more documentary movies which I fear I would never otherwise see. One of famed Israeli Hannah Arendt and the other about YoYo Ma, cellist extraordinaire. I am now doubling up in a day something which I said I would not do. Ooh well, it may well be my last NZFF and I may as well admit it, I am a film-glutton.

You bring your own thermos of coffee to a film festival....

...or you line up for the ubiquitous excellent caffeine-hit.