Wellington

You know, when your staff leave a child with second degree burns you’d think you could at least, I don’t know, proffer an apology to the parents and the kid and not, say, delete the negative review from a supposed restaurant review site (which makes me wonder; if Ernesto can get a review about them crippling a customer yanked, what else will DineOut pull? If you aren’t allowed to say bad things, what’s the point of the site?[1])

I don’t think I feel like playing Russian roulette with Ernesto any more; we’ve been there in the past, but when your response to leaving someone burnt enough to need morphine is to... attack the victim for posting a negative review, I don’t have any confidence that they give a shit about the safety of their staff or customers.

Since they’re next to Espressoholic and over the road from Scopa, that’s not too hard.

[1] Hoovering up donations from people under the misapprehension they provide a useful service, I guess.

Crane on the Dock

Autumn has begun to feel like autumn; for the first month or so we enjoyed a late summer of cool (but not cold), crisp, brilliantly clear days; that particular spell of the closing of summer and the opening of the colder season which is perhaps my favourite time of year.

That is rounding to a close now; the weather is closing in with early nights, pitch black by the time I trek home from work; enlivened by the lights of the harbour, perhaps, but during the working week the only glimpses of sun are those of a morning walk or time snatched from the office during the day; not yet, though, closing me in the suffocating period where the day is black when leaving the house as well as when arriving back at it.

Red Leaves of Autumn

There are pronounced pleasures, though; the ducks at the Botanic Gardens have not grown fat, as they do in Spring, on the offerings of the people rushing to offer bread to ducklings; they’re eager to enjoy the ministrations of a small girl and her gifts, and my heart soars as my spring enjoys her autumn.

Foggy Autumn Morning

With autumn comes thick fog, rolling in from the sea over Rongotai and up Hataitai.

Putting the Queen on notice

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.

Peacock Costumes at the Sevens

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.

Last night I uploaded an old picture of horrid fog over Hataitai. A couple of hours an even worse one descended. Airport closed to 10:00, it’s like it’s 2005 all over again.

My bad.

Please send ark.

Donuts, Espressoholic Style

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.

Went to see Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years at the City Gallery, and came away appreciating it as the most child-thrilling art I’ve been to in the last nearly 3 years. Starting from the gallery being covered in guant multi-coloured spots (which led to quoting of Put Me In The Zoo) through to the Narcissus Garden full of mirror spheres, the firefly exhibit of mirrors, water, and handing lights, and the favourite of the trip, the mini-maze of convex mirrors which lead to a yellow room with black polka dots and inflatable sculpture at one end, and a black room with yellow polka dots at the other end, it was a smash hit.

The only bummer was that photography was, as typical for exhibits, verboten, which means I wasn’t able to get photos of Ada’s near-unrestrained joy as she trotted from inflatable sculpture to inflatable sculpture in the polka dot rooms.

We're All Go. Going to Ruins.

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.