s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Sunday was a bit less action-packed. I called my Mom to wish her a Happy Mother’s Day (although of course it was still Saturday there), then Chris and I went out to what we were assured was an “all-day Middle-Eastern drumming and dancing thing” at the Wellington Town Hall auditorium. It was not, in fact, what we were told it was, but it was just as fun. What it was, was a Wellington-celebrates-its-ethnic-diversity thing, which largely consisted of troupes of school-age kids from a wide assortment of local communities (Chinese, Korean, Philipino, Indian, Polish, and more…) performing some kind of cultural dance number. Some *fantastic* costumes, let me tell you, and some of the groups were quite good. I think the highlights for me were the group of Indian kids who did the big village courting piece from Ashoka, the only Bollywood film I have ever seen (thanks to Beth. Must see more. Especially now. Hee), and the Cook Island group that came on last — they did two pieces, the first with a line-up of some of the rockin’-est three-and-four-years olds I think I’ve seen lately (Holly — picture three-year-old chubby-faced boys doing Tahitian — only it’s the boys’ part, so instead of amis, they’re doing this in-out thing with their knees, and their hands on their hips, looking all three-year-old butch. I was dying.), followed by another equally-frenetic piece with adult women (I’ll email you about what they were wearing, Hol, it was wacky).

The two Chinese opera pieces were fun to watch, if largely incomprehensible. (Note: If you’re ever in a Chinese opera, you want to be the General. The General gets to wear this headpiece with pom-poms and a pair of these incredible 6-foot pheasant feathers that wave and quiver above his head like gigantic moth antennae. Unless sequins are your bag, in which case you should try to be royalty of some sort.)

The “Middle Eastern” part we were promised came in the form of one of the local dance troupes, who unfortunately did not fit in very well, in that while all of the other groups actually belonged to the ethnicity they were showcasing, this was your typical group of middle-aged white suburbanites, and worse, they were doing some fusion pieces that were mostly Latin-influenced, and were dressed for that sort of Flamenco skirt-work. Fine anywhere else, but not a very good fit here, unfortunately.

Almost as an afterthought, we got a short set by an Iraqi woman named Huda, who sang a medley of Arabic tunes accompanying herself on doumbek. Huda is, conveniently enough, one of the three names I’ve been given of dance teachers in the area, and I got her card when her set was over.

Unfortunately, there was a big sign at the front of the auditorium that said “No Cameras”, and I obediently left mine in Chris’ backpack, so instead of 500 pictures of gorgeous ethnic costumes taken from too far away and blurry, I must leave you with a couple shots of the Public Library. I *love* those palm tree columns — several of them even have those little squiggly bits that hang under the tops of palms when they’re done blooming. Way cool ! The giant metal fern ball is out back, suspended above the courtyard, and the gull was one of several hanging out in the sun along with the pedestrians. It’s a red-legged gull — they sound quite different from the herring gulls I’ve known all my life. Where herring gulls have that baby/cat crying scream/sing-song, these have a sort of high-toned rattling gargle. It’s pretty wacky.

Sunday evening was spent watching the new (new here, anyway) Hornblower on TV. C&N have been showing me the eps on evenings when we have a couple hours to kill (they refer to it simply as “Fabulous Hat.” As in “Shall we watch some Fabulous Hat with dinner ?”), and I’m enjoying them immensely.

So Saturday, Chris went to the cattle call for Return of the King in Upper Hutt. It seems that the LOTR folks needed some extras to fill out the ranks of the Rohirrim for some pick-up shooting they want to do. Chris, being blonde, beefy, and well on his way toward shaggy figured “what the heck ?” and went to the muster — along with every other blonde Kiwi for a hundred kilometers in any direction:

The second pic is of four guys that a photographer — presumably working for the casting folks — pulled out of the line to get extra photos of. He lined their heads up on the wall like that, not me, and had them alternately scowl and smile at the camera. The white-haired guy was actually quite impressive when he was standing up acting natural — he reminded me quite a lot of Thorbjorn, for those of y’all that knew him.

They really only were looking for “blonde or red-headed men over 16 with long hair”, “formerly-blonde or red-headed men over 55 with long hair or else no hair and beards”, or “women over 55, preferably long-haired and formerly blonde or red-headed, but we’re so desperate for older women we’re really not all that fussy anymore.” As you may be able to tell from the pan, reduced though it is, this did not stop tons of blondes with the wrong hair length, age or gender from showing up. It also failed to deter a not-insignificant number of young men with shaved heads and trendy goatees (of various colors). The casting people were unfailingly polite, and would periodically repeat their requirements to the crowd and encourage anyone who didn’t fit the profile to fill out the handy don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you flyer “just in case”. Chris arrived early enough to be within spitting distance of the front of the line, and it still took a solid three hours for them to usher him in, take his photo and vitals and thank him kindly. Natasha and I wandered around Upper Hutt for a while, and then had a lovely conversation with a woman from Rotorua who was waiting for her husband to get through the line, too.

After that, we grabbed lunch at a local kebab place, then hit the road to check out some potential places for Stephen and I to start house-hunting in a couple months. (The trick being that we want a place with a paddock, but we want a decent commute into Wellington as well — easier to find here than in Boston, but still not all *that* easy…). One of the places we stopped was Stokes Valley, which turned out to our delight to have a Buddhist monastery at the top of it:

Another place we paused was at the end of a long twisty road down the bottom of a long twisty valley on the other side of Wellington out past Karori. There were farms along the road, but the valley was so steep it was quite dark, and while there was bush on the shady side, the sunny side was all gorse and brambles. We saw (and heard, and apparently thoroughly annoyed) a flock of feral goats, which scrambled away from us up the steep hillside, maa-ing their consternation. The prize at the end, however, was this beautiful tree, growing out of the shady defile the stream had cut. I couldn’t help but wonder how many generations have shared their childhoods with this incredible tree — the valley seemed so isolated that surely there couldn’t be so many who knew of it, and yet it was clear the place saw people regularly.

Dinner was a scrummy lamb roast at the home of some more of C&N’s friends, who lived way up on one of the ridges behind the city, where the wind comes screaming through and the sky looks like it’s right *there*. James is an electrical engineer and a musician, and he built this amplifier into a cake pan:

It sounds fantastic, and it’s non-stick !