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

Wind and Water. Wellington’s had both Wind and Water in abundance for the last couple of days — in abundance, and at speeds in excess of 70mph. Umbrellas are more a liability than an asset in these conditions, really, more sail than shelter. Getting hit by a 70mph gust, for those of you used to less fractious climes, feels a lot like getting hit by a freight train made of air. Getting hit by a gust like that with rain in it… It’s kinda funny watching the poor gulls try to go about their business — there’s no point trying to fly anywhere, since you’ll never manage to end up wherever it was you were aiming for, and even the little flock I pass in the park, wisely staying on the ground — wings tightly furled, beaks into the wind, to let the wind just go by them as much as possible — were getting pushed around like game pieces, staggering through the grass on their little red legs.

These are, I have come to learn, “southerlies”, although not as cold as southerlies often are, since these were kind enough to take a little tour around the Tasman before hitting us, instead of blasting straight up from Antarctica. I can tell the difference between these and “northerlies” because these shove me toward the train station (“GetoutGetOutGETOUT!!”), while the northerlies push me *away* from the train station (“No, no, stay!“) — as good a reminder as any that on this side of the planet, the North Wind is the friendly one.

In the Water arena, the news tonight was full of pics of streams and rivers Running Amok (which usually means either running somewhere they oughtn’t, like through living rooms in Lower Hutt, or just generally being hooligans, and pulling down parts of roads and things). The harbor, usually this amazing clear greenish teal color, turned an opaque slatey green almost as vivid as those green chalkboards, but darker, and all frothy. The trees in the park across from the office spent all day thrashing about, and the buildings are all howling at their corners — but I guess that’s back to Wind, isn’t it ?

In general, Wind and Water do some pretty amazing things together here. Sometimes it’ll be a fairly calm, fair day at ground level, but the clouds are *racing* by overhead like some Discovery Channel time-lapse. Sometimes a front line will move in and just stall, and hang in the same place all day, changing only its color and texture with the light. Sometimes both will happen at once, at different altitudes. Sometimes the clouds come down and run misty fingers along the curves of the hills like the back of a cat. Once a couple mornings ago I walked out of the house and could see a single blurry cloud sitting down the bottom of the valley, but by the time I got to the train station, I guess it had finished whatever conversation it was having with the river and gone about its business.

Sometimes the river itself puts up mist, the way rivers do, and one morning it was so thick and yet so localized — just right there, over the river, but completely opaque — that from my vantage point at the Silverstream train station it looked like nothing so much as a giant dragon made of cloud, snaking its way up the valley on some draconic business of its own. You could *see* it moving, veerrry slowly, and sometimes a coil of it would billow up as high as the poplars that hemmed it in and then very slowly sink back down again as it chugged along. I wonder if ancient (or even modern) Maori would have thought of it as a taniwha, or as river mist, or both. I know I’m willing to call it both. The Hutt River, by the way, is beautiful, and I *will* get good pictures of it sometime and post them here. It’s a braided river in many places (when it’s low) in a gravel bed, and there’s park all along both sides, with a path that you can walk or bike all the way to the harbor on.

I *think* the southerlies are supposed to die off tomorrow, taking the rain with them. The pongas in the garden outside my door certainly aren’t roaring the way they were last night, so we’ll see what things look like in the morning.

There’s a Cambodian place down the road that sells Mee Seim. It’s not the manna from heaven that Carambola’s is, but by gum it’ll do. (The big test, of course, will be how well the leftovers do cold for lunch tomorrow.)

It seems like I did very little today, for it to have been such a long, tiring day. I dropped Chris and Nick off in Kelson (not as easy as it sounds, considering the place I was dropping them off at was up a narrow, nearly vertical drive, with not much in the way of places to turn around) so they could get a ride into Newtown for the annual Kendo business meeting, went to an open house in Kelson, went to another open house in Makara, and then drove into Newtown to pick up Chris and Nick and take us all home again. I guess it was tiring just because there was *so* much driving, much of it on twisty little roads that really didn’t feel wide enough for Chris’ big sedan.

The place in Kelson was nice. Fairly elevated (I’m coming to learn that being higher up means you get more sun than the folks down in the valleys, although it usually also means more wind), with a couple of paddocks, a view all the way down to the harbor, and a border on some conservation land that one might perhaps be able to walk or ride through. The ad implied that you could do just that, but there was actually a fairly steep gully between you and it, and I didn’t see anything that looked like a path, so I’m not sure how practical that assertion really was. Still, it looked like a decent house, with decent sized rooms and lovely wooden floors.

It was all of five minutes from the highway, which is good, but I’m not sure if there is anything like a “village” or shops or anything in Kelson, or if you have to drive into Lower Hutt to get your liter of milk. Something to investigate.

From Kelson, I took the motorway into Wellington, then wended my way up and through to Karori, and from thence to Makara. I’m still not sure whether I would eventually get used to the twisty mountainous stretch of road between Karori and Makara, or if it would eventually make me crazy. Difficult to say. It certainly feels much longer than the ~10 minutes it actually is. I suspect that unless the one little… I guess you could call it a “service station” — I think it worked on cars, but it didn’t sell gas — that was also advertising “crafts”… anyway, unless it also sells milk, you’ll be taking that twisty road out of the valley for your liter of milk (or getting some from your neighbor’s cow ?), so, hmm. It was a pretty little farmlet I looked at, though, built by a couple who’d moved down from Auckland 30 years prior. They’d lived in the c.1850 farmhouse while they’d had the adjacent Lockwood house built for them (that’s the old farmhouse in the foreground of the first photo below). 1850 doesn’t sound very old (certainly not for anyone who’s been living in New England, where the hamlets proudly announce their 17th century foundation dates when you drive in, oh, and the Lions Clubs meets every third Wednesday) until you realize that the City of Wellington was only made a city in 1842 (the Treaty of Waitangi was signed between the British and the Maori in 1840).

Anyway, this Lockwood house may well have been built on the same plan as the one Chris and I visited up in Whiteman’s Valley — it certainly has the same tiny bedrooms. The living areas were fairly sized, though, and the indoor pool (with spa and sauna) they added, all under glass, is just *begging* to be made into a lush green conservatory, or possibly a hydroponics house, or both.

Finding my way from Karori to Newtown to pick up Chris and Nick was quite the adventure. Roads in very hilly cities (and their boroughs) just don’t work the way roads in flat cities do — even cow-path towns like Boston. You may know, for instance, that you want to go downhill, and generally to the right. But if you pick a road that seems to go down and generally rightwards, it may well drop you into a gully that will bend you around to the left and keep you going that way for several kilometers, because there’s some natural barrier — a sharp ridge, or a park or something — that hems you in on the right. If you want to go down and right, you must first actually go up and left, which will put you on a bridge *over* the gully, and set you on another ridge which will allow you to go along to the right, and eventually let you take a little hairpinned thing that no one in their right mind would dignify by calling it a “street” down the face of the ridge to another road, in another gully, which after a series of reversals will get you more or less pointed in the right direction again. Mind you, at every turn you will be presented with stunning views down into valleys of houses and parks and down to the harbor, none of which you can stop and photograph for your blog, because in between the drive entrances (some of these houses have parking on their roofs, the hills are that steep) are parked cars, and the street isn’t really wide enough for one car, let alone two to pass and a parked one, and there’s no telling whether some sleep-depped Victoria U student in a battered old Hyundai isn’t going to come barrelling at you from around that blind corner…

At any rate, I made it to Newtown and found the Kendo meeting — and just in time, too, since the meeting was just wrapping up…. Okay, no it wasn’t. I got to listen in on some of the local martial arts club politics before driving back out the Hutt to drop Nick in Pinehaven (Nick’s dad, I suspect, would give Bill and I both a run for our Geek credentials) and take Chris and myself home. So, kinda pooped here. Wish I could say I was looking forward to work.

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.

Do you know what would be a really dumb way to die ? I mean really dumb and pointless ? (But with the possible side-effect of skyrocketing my Geek rating into Legendary territory.) To be crushed to death by a box of Oracle manuals while trying to find the box that has the copy of Baldur’s Gate in it. I can totally see it. Chris, because he is the conscientious sort, would become concerned that he hadn’t seen me since dinner and come down to find an avalanche of boxes and bins, with maybe an arm or a braid sticking out from under it. He and Stephen would then try to piece together just what I had been after, digging through 50+ pound boxes three columns deep, in stacks higher than my head. And Stephen would consult the manifest and see Box #346 (“Last minute boxes, router, CDs & Baldur’s Gate, garb, bathroom trashcan” — definitely packed in the final What-is-it-never-mind-throw-it-in-a-box stage of the packing process) and, shaking a fist at the heavens, shout “Damn you Baldur’s Gate! DAMN YOOUUUUU!!!”

Or not.

We’ll never know, thank your deity of choice, because I have FOUND Box #346, three columns deep, and I have liberated it (also containing, incidentally, the kick-ass Desert Blues CDs I wanted to play for Chris). And I did not drop a box on my neck, and I did not throw out my back, and I did not, when I found myself in the MIDDLE of the stack completely surrounded by boxes to shoulder height with nowhere to put the ones I still needed to move, howl for Chris to come rescue my sorry self.

Go me !

So since today was a holiday and I wasn’t going to class more or less after work, Chris let me take his car in. Nobody died, so I count it a success.

I knew I was off to a shaky start when I almost got into the wrong side of the car (Hmm. No steering wheel. That ain’t right.) But seriously, it wasn’t too bad. I *did* make *one* turn into the wrong lane, but the headlights coming toward me tipped me off, and I neatly swooped back over to the correct side of the street before the concrete median came up. The oncoming cars had all been stopped at a light a couple hundred yards away — if there had actually been traffic, I wouldn’t have missed the turn in the first place. Still, nothing like a little adrenaline to get you going for dance class.

Class was a hoot. This week was “BellyD Meets MTV”, which is to say, we learned some bellydance/hip-hop choreography to a Shakira piece. Fun !

…completely different. Today, I just cleaned. And organized. (I say “I”, but Chris supplied much-appreciated hoisting power, shifting boxes around in the garage.) Tonight, dance class. Whee !

Sunday morning was dim sum with some of the kendo people, except that here they call dim sum “yum cha”, or something that sounds like that. This place was pretty good, and could easily have been in the Boston Chinatown somewhere. The little egg tarts were indistinguishable from the ones we had at China Pearl, and just as delicious.

After dim su– I mean yum cha, Chris and Natasha and I drove around the southern coastline, through all the little southern coastline suburbs that I’ve been seeing advertised in the Property section of the Saturday Dominion Post. Places with names that all end in “Bay” — Owhiro Bay, Island Bay (has an island in it, appropriately enough), Houghton Bay, Lyall Bay, Worser Bay (“The Worser the Bay, the Better the Sailing !”) — and other places, too, like Seatoun, Miramar, Roseneath, Kilbirnie. Some of them are proper little villages, with maybe valleys behind them. Others seem like little more than a row of houses backed up against the steep green cliffsides, with maybe a cafe. Backed up against, or else hacked into or somehow bolted to the sides of. I look at some of these steep hills and gullies — not just on the coast here, but in parts of the city as well — and it astonishes me that anyone would actually attempt to hang a house there, or even whole streets full of houses, with their back feet gripping some chipped-out bit of hillside, and their front feet on stilts or brackets looming over nothing, or over the roof of the house below. NeverMIND doing all this in a place known for its regular earthquakes. Madness. But then, this is the country that popularized bungy jumping. We passed a couple of houses that — and I am swearing this absolutely on my honor — had little inclined cable elevators to get you from your garage up to your house. Madness.

I failed to grab my camera as we went out the door, but Chris and I both took some shots with Chris’, so when he gets his PC rebuilt, I’ll maybe post some good ones here.

[And here they are.]
First up is just a nice bit of coastline, followed by a scene a bit farther round the curve, so you can see the hilltop crusted with houses like barnacles. This hill is actually pretty reasonable, in that the houses are mostly on the top and at the bottom, rather than clinging to the sides. Check out the color of the water. Next up is a closer shot of some of the houses — every single one of these houses is unique, and some of them display some pretty nifty architecture. The older ones were just built as little beach houses (which they call baches), but I think they’re probably all lived in year-round anymore. The next is a shot through the haze at Wellington itself. I think that house-studded hill in the front is Mount Victoria. Finally, the sunset from C&N’s place. I mightily resisted the urge to touch up the saturation in Photoshop, so this is right out of the camera (Chris’ camera — Chris took this one).

After the drive was mostly just flobbing back at C&Ns, with the 2002 BBC production of Hound of the Baskervilles in the evening. Australian Richard Roxburgh, who will be Mycroft Holmes in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, was Sherlock in this, with Ian Hart (Professor Quirrell in Harry Potter) as Watson, and the ever-delightful, ever-smarmy Richard E. Grant as Stapleton. It was reasonably good, actually — apart from the atrocious special effects on the Hound — although the sound work, editing and lighting, more than the casting or the creative decisions, were really what made it work. And with all the fog and miserable lashing rain you definitely found yourself wondering just what anyone would want to be doing wandering around Dartmoor, Hound or no Hound.