Date: 25/12/2000 Views: 15
I assume this is yet another set of buildings the NZTA are deliberately running down so the Wellington City council can pave over more of the central city, which annoys me, but it’s pretty funny seeing The Queen getting a rude letter about the state of her properties, nonetheless.
This was easily the best Sevens costume, originality and cool-wise, I saw from the gaggles of people walking past work and our local coffee spots: Four women dressed as peacocks, with backs covered by a tail of real feathers. Nicely done, and something a bit different.
They’d also spent some time getting the noise of peacocks calling down to a fine art.
Friday night was The Veils at the stupidly-named San Francisco Bathhouse, but more of that later; first I come to praise the re-opened Espressoholic and their delicious parcels of deep-fried dough.
Many moons ago I used to spend plenty of evenings in the old Espressoholic, and then I started visiting it again; shortly thereafter, it closed in a rather public fashion after the landlord refused to renew their lease. The appearance of a new cafe with the same menu and some of the same kitchen staff was NOT AT ALL SUSPICIOUS, of course; I have been waiting to see the new ‘holic re-open in Cuba Street for some time, and finally got a chance to swing by. It is largely the same place; the food is mostly the same, the prices are the same. It’s all pretty good, really. There are even some improvements: the toilets are a great deal less terrifying, for example.
There’s one delicious addition: the donuts. They’re done kind of like churros; chunks of dough deep-fried and coated with deliciousness, and served with maple syrup and marscapone. The first time I tried them I got four small ones, and on Friday I got a pair that were, as I later estimated for the folks at the Southern Cross on Saturday, about a handful each.
Continue reading ""About a B-Cup"" »
One of the downsides of market collapses is the scars on the city; this used to be the old Wellington market building; while it had faded from its hey-day, it was still worth nipping into. Predictably enough it was swept up by the wave of apartment madness, scheduled for demolition, to be converted into yet another pile of generic apartments.
Had the international financial and property markets collapsed 3 months earlier, that would be the end of the story; instead, they did so in time for the builders to demolish the building, leaving only the foodcourt mural as a remnant of what once existed, along with hopelessly optimistic claims of continued liquidity and activity.
When I moved to Wellington the most obvious mark of the '87 market crash was on Courtney Place, where a vast, gravelled wasteland interrupted the main strip, testimony to a failed development; when I started working at Wellington Newspapers I was next to an ugly carpark whose upper deck was sprinkled with thick concrete columns, a mute testimony to the failure of another building project—this time after the basement had been completed.
I'm assuming this rubble will become another of the scars left by this round of collapses.
Spring has arrived early in Wellington; I saw the first magnolia blooms over a month ago, and daffodils are out on my lawn weeks ahead of last year; along with the early flowering has come the flight of young birds. When I saw these guys in my garden I initially called Maire out to look at them, since they were so tiny; smaller than sparrows, sleek, lean. At a distance I'd not noticed their eye markings and assumed they must be something unusual, perhaps from the Karori Sanctuary.
While I was a little disappointed to discover they were tiny, young, and decidedly common waxeyes they were most obliging subjects, both for my camera and for Ada to enjoy.
The idea of visitors from the Sanctuary, incidentally, doesn't seem so unreasonable; the Sanctuary seems to have been a huge success not only in terms of its own breeding programs but in terms of seeding surrounding areas with bird life. I had never seen a Kaka in Wellington until around two years ago when I saw a solitary bird in the Botanic Gardens while taking Ada for a walk; last month we were heading up to the Cable Car through the same area and saw three tumbling through the trees. All of them were skinny, young birds, and it was a delight to have them buzzing us.
My new office (as of a couple of months ago) has a number of drawbacks, not least of which is that, being on the port side of the railway station, it's miles away from most of the good bits of central Wellington when compared with my previous location on Willis Street.
On the other hand, there are some compensations. This is the view from the meeting room I spent the day in. It could be worse.
There's something about this sign that I love; I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's that the language is less imperative than most signs of this sort. There's something about seeing the word "inadvisable" in a context where I would normally see "forbidden" or some more prosaic variation thereon that appeals to me.
