WINDED IN WELLINGTON

Wellington has hills.

And wind. Hills and wind. OMG, the wind. I guess that's why they call it Windy Wellington.

The sunny spring weather would be lovely and warm, if it weren't for the wind. And the rain. Because of the not-so-welcoming weather, I did a lot of indoor activities. Fortunately, the city has some excellent museums, art galleries, restaurants and bars. 

(And please take note, governments,....the museums are FREE !!!)

The Te Papa National Museum is one of the best I've ever seen. Six floors of amazing, intriguing, hands-on exhibits housed in a stunning new building on the waterfront. You can even go down to the basement and get a close-up look at their Quake Breaker system, the pads that the building glides on during a quake.

The fourth floor is devoted to the history and culture of the Maori people and I spent most of my time there. I was blown away by Maori creation stories and their ideas of divinity and the supreme being. The symbol below is a representation of what they call Tekore - 

the place where all things began, where all things are beginning, where all things end, are ending. It is the great, unknowable void, the ultimate, unanswerable question. For the Maori, it IS The Supreme Being, so unknowable that one needn't waste one's time trying to figure it out but rather focus on Mother Earth and Father Sky. I love this idea. No wonder New Zealand has such a powerful green movement.

I did manage to take advantage of a sunny (though windy) afternoon, by taking the cable car up the hillside for some stunning (though windy) views of Wellington harbour and surrounding neighborhoods.

I was struck by the fact that many of the stories in the museums were personal accounts of historical events, a couple of them involving animals that became icons of the city. There was a dolphin at the turn of the century that would welcome every single ship into the harbour by performing acrobatics alongside it. For twenty years or so, people came just to be welcomed by the dolphin. I also found the story of Paddy, below, very bittersweet.You'll have to clic the pic to enlarge and read.

I wonder, would this happen in 2011?

In an effort to stay indoors, and see as much theatre as possible, I went to a sort-of-a-performance-art-thing called "Wakeless". The advertising promised a mutli-media escape from the every day world. *sigh*. Alas, what I got was part improv, part comedy, part mask tragedy, part performance art, part clown show, part wank-fest that mostly just left me bored and wishing I could sneak out for a pee. I'll admit that I had a few good laughs, but so did the soldiers in the trenches of WWI.