Wellington details

So now that we have been in Wellington about three weeks, what kinds of things have we done?

Our second night here we discovered that every Monday both of the Irish pubs that are in the nearby Courtney Place entertainment district have Irish music sessiuns (their spelling) with musicians coming in to jam together informally: fiddles, accordions, pipes, drums, singing. It was lovely to sit and listen to. We just went back last night; it is a nice option for a Monday night. We were sitting near enough to the musicians today to find out that they all sounded Irish when they talked too.

There has been an International Film Festival here during these three weeks, so we ended up going to 2 documentaries and 2 American films that we had not seen at home. First we saw Burma VJ, about the demonstrations in Rangoon in 2007, particularly by the monks, and the underground journalists filming them and smuggling the footage out of the country to BBC and CNN. Then we saw Synecdoche, NY, which is a strange movie with a great performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Now that I am writing a journal and posting a blog, I can kind of understand the self-referential and spiraling nature of the story, but the mood was too depressing. Later we saw Youth Without Youth by Francis Ford Coppola, which although also a strange movie, we liked much better. Both movies are about growing old and dying, but very different. Youth Without Youth was not depressing, I think partly because there were places were the main character took the chance to do what he thought was right. In the other movie the main character was very passive, except for turning everything that happened to him into the theater piece he was working on, ad infinitum. Finally, we saw Trouble The Waters, about one family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. I won’t try and describe it, but I would recommend both documentaries if you can get them on Netflix.

We have been to the National Museum, Te Papa, a number of times. It is just a short walking distance away on the harbor, so we can go and not get tired from trying to see too much. They have a program every Thursday evening, plus other lectures. Their big exhibit at the moment is Monet, which we have not gone to yet. We are waiting to time it with a floor talk. We went to a lecture about Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, and the Large Hadron Collider by a professor from Oxford. The main new thing I learned is that when Einstein was first working at the patent office, technology to synchronize clocks, particularly for trains, was a big deal, which is probably part of what got him thinking about his thought experiment with time relativity. The lecture also included talk about Einstein’s appreciation of music and violin, so there were interludes of violin playing built into the lecture. We have also been to one Monet/Impressionism themed evening, with a floor talk in their art gallery about the influence of Impressionism on New Zealand painters and also English and Scottish pictures in their collection, two other lectures about New Zealand and Impressionism, and one about Katherine Mansfield’s use of Impressionist imagery, and finally a pair of piano duets. We don’t have enough data yet to say that all NZ lectures incorporate music, but it seems like a great idea.

Live music has definitely been the most prevalent art form for this month. We have been to two performances by the NZ School of Music. One was a combination program with their Gamelan Orchestra and their Jazz Choir. Some of the gamelan was by itself and one piece included a song translated from the Indonesian. The choir sang 2 pieces a cappella but with a gamelan beat. It was a very interesting program. Later we heard the school Symphony Orchestra play “Romantic Masterpieces” by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, and Dvorak. We also heard the Bach Choir perform Jesu, Meine Freude by Bach and the St. Nicholas Mass by Haydn.

We have also been to the Museum of Wellington. It is a small museum but very well organized. It is the kind of place where I want to read and look at almost every exhibit, so I have not gotten very far though it yet. It has a spooky but cool hologram show about some Maori myths. It is on a small but real stage where these foot tall hologram people recreate the stories. They are very real looking which is the spooky, yet cool, part.

We took a tour of their Parliament Buildings, which was neat because we had just done a tour of Congress before we left the States. New Zealand has just one legislative chamber, and also most administration is under Parliament. What we think of as the Executive, I guess would be the Governor General appointed by the Queen. Although he signs off on laws, I believe his function is mostly ceremonial and very little functional.

There was a quilt show at the Fine Arts Center which I enjoyed very much. It was part of a Biennial Convention that one of our guests was participating in. It was fun each morning to find out what her workshop had done the previous day.

And the neat thing about all of this is that all these activities were within easy walking distance from our house! I suppose we could be doing as much stuff at home, but we would have to be driving or taking the Metro. Of course, if we were home there would be a lot more to do around the house. Here the living space is small, so even though we have to clean between guests, it doesn’t take very long. There is frequent laundry, of course, and New Zealanders are very into using solar/wind technologies for drying clothes – known as a clothes line. I have bought some lettuce, spinach and chard plants for a winter garden, and there is a composter to tend to. We still get to harvest an occasional winter squash, tomato or strawberry from the summer garden, which is nice.