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

So during most of the month of June is Matariki, the Maori new year (if you think about it, most cultures mark the New Year around mid winter). “Matariki” means, roughly, “little sparkly ones”, and is what the Maori call the Pleiades, which make their first appearance some time in June. Different Maori tribes (“iwi”) use different markers for the official New Year. For some, it’s when the Pleiades first appear (June 2nd this year), for others, it’s the first full moon after Matariki appears, or the first new moon (June 30th this year). Some use Rigel (Puanga, in Orion, which is upside-down here, and is therefore “the Bird Snare”) instead of the Pleiades. However you slice it, though, it’s June, mid-winter, and so there are smallish local events and festivals all around the country. In Wellington the National Museum, Te Papa (“Our Place” — a *fantastic* museum which you must not miss if you are ever in Wellington) is putting on a series of events all through the month, and Chris, Natasha and I went down for some of them today.

Here is Te Papa, which is a bit like Edgewood in Little, Big, in that it looks like a completely different building depending which side you view it from:

The weather, by the way, is gorgeous. Sunny, breezy, somewhere in the 60s.

We caught a performance by a local Maori dance troupe — I say dance, but they were singing as well. It was neat to watch after the little bit of Hula I’ve taken. There were a lot of obviously narrative movements, over a default step-touch-step-touch base, all emphasized by a near-continuous hand-flutter. Occasionally, they’d take out paddle-shaped feathered mere (war-clubs, but I’m not sure if the ones the women use for dance have a different name) and flip them around. Periodically, one of the dancers would widen her eyes and flatten her mouth in a quick grimace, which almost immediately melted back into the dancer’s smile — very striking. For the last piece, the men sifted forward and did one of their much more emphatic, rhythmic songs, with the women as back-up. I definitely want to see one of these with someone on hand to explain the movement vocabulary to me.

After the haka, we shooped across the street to the craft market in the pink building that Stephen and I didn’t make it to the last time we were here, because it’s only open on the weekends. I’d scoped it out Friday and discovered it has a little food court inside, with a series of stalls selling ethnic food. (The mural on the high ex-warehouse walls suggested that there was a Mexican place in here once, but not anymore.) I had some really yummy… something, from the Nepalese place. Like a tomato-based curry on saffron rice, with fresh cilantro and flat bread. For some reason “Nepalese” had never really occured to me as a cuisine, but then there are “Mongolian Barbeques” in the States, when every travel show I’ve ever seen has indicated that when actually *in* Mongolia, one dines on things like boiled sheep heads and marmot ala blow torch. So what the heck. It was tasty anyway, and I washed it down with yummy chai and some creamy jasmine bubble tea from the Japanese stall on the other side of the hall.

After lunch, we skated back into the museum for the 2PM planetarium show, where they were going to talk about what the Maori saw when they looked at the sky, except that it was full, so we couldn’t get in. Maybe some other time. We wandered around the museum a bit more — wandering being sort of compulsory, since the place is a maze, a quality Natasha and I decided we rather appreciated in a museum (Chris I think wanted it a bit more orderly).

Here are a couple more photos from the museum. Who knew that the Cornholio Beavis channeled was actually an ancient Polynesian deity ? (I wish I’d taken a few more pics of the Maori carvings, next time.)

We made a detour to the Mediterranian Food Warehouse in Newtown on the way home, and picked up cans of crushed tomatos bigger than my head, and a somewhat expensive but nonetheless welcome chunk of…

PROVOLONE.

That evening, Chris and I went back to the Lighthouse — the neat little theater we saw Spirited Away in — to see Whale Rider, which was very very good. Then we came back and had Chris’ home-made meatballs on chewy french bread with PROVOLONE.

Yum.