This morning I made my own coffee, then chatted with Mary and Owen as they had breakfast. Mary invited me to her weekly women’s ukulele group practice tomorrow night-how cool!
I went for what I thought was going to be a short walk around the neighborhood, but got distracted when I saw a walking path. It took me up into the local open space, Waimapihi Reserve, another wonderfully lush space where I passed a collection of fairy houses and a rake for clearing the path of leaves. There were signs showing the path to the wind turbine, something that was relatively new when we left Wellington in 1995, so I decided to head up that way. The walking track climbed up and up and the views kept expanding so I kept going- I saw some California quail, which I guess are quite common in New Zealand. The views at the top where the wind turbine is were incredible, it was also a sunny day so even better to enjoy it. It was great to see how much the bush had filled in around it, when I lived in Wellington this hill was barren.
I headed into town on the bus -the stop is only a few minutes walk from where I’m staying, and buses come every 15 minutes for most of the day. Besides being more frequent and having more routes than public transport in most parts of California, the buses are also very inexpensive. In order to ease the cost of living, the government temporarily (for 10 months!) reduced all bus fares to half price, as a consequence the 15 minute bus ride to the Wellington CBD cost me $1.07 New Zealand, about 65c in US$. Being on the bus reminded me that Kiwis drive the same speed whether they’re in the city or on the highway. It’s amazing how fast they speed down the narrow, windy streets.
After running a couple of errands and picking up food for lunch (a mince and cheese pie today), I went to a lunchtime concert at Saint Andrews church. A flute and guitar duo playing a variety of pieces from Bartok to Bizet, it was absolutely beautiful. The final piece was a Russian one where the audience clapped along. The church is located on The Terrace, a street lined with large office buildings. When I first moved to New Zealand in 1990 I worked for IBM in their office on The Terrace. My dad also worked for IBM, but in San Francisco. Back then they had an internal email system so he and I were able to email each other back in 1990! This was huge considering it usually took close to two weeks to get a letter and phone calls were US$1 a minute!
I wander down to the waterfront enjoying the sunny and calm day, there was very little wind. Lots of people were out enjoying the good weather in the harbor which was beautiful – as they would say here it was cracker! I went past the City Gallery Wellington, which is a contemporary art gallery and checked out the exhibits. A particularly intriguing one was a video that showed scenes from an old vampire movie, Michael Jackson’s Thriller video and 2001 A Space Odyssey. The artist digitally removed all of the people from the scenes and stripped out the audio so all you could see was the background. It made some scenes even eerier, very dystopian, and other scenes very benign. Thriller is a pretty boring video without Michael Jackson and the dancers!
Tonight I got to attend an art auction fundraiser for an organization that provides space, support and art materials for people dealing with mental health issues. There were very diverse and intriguing pieces of art and I wished I had the space and money to purchase some of them. It was a fun evening which included an introduction in the Maori language, and entertainment from a local group called Batucada, which were made up of drummers, people playing tambourines and other instruments and several women belly dancing. I loved the fact that most of the women were older and of all different body types, and they were all thoroughly enjoying themselves. The music was infectious! The live auction was fun, and most everybody seemed to have leave with some thing they won either at the live or silent auction.
It started to rain lightly as we left and by the time we got home the rain was pretty steady. I’m very grateful that I am now tucked safely inside my cabin, because the wind and rain have picked up considerably. For Wellington this is a stormy night, but not totally unusual. If it stormed like this in the Bay Area, it would be front page news (is that even a thing anymore??) and very likely trees and powerlines would be down everywhere. It’s amazing to think it was a sunny beautiful day only a few hours ago, apparently the storm is going to blow over soon and it should be clear again by morning. We shall see!