Wellington II

The phone booths are red here. The buses are yellow, the dairies are yellow, the bulwarks are yellow, the tugboats are red. There are canyons downtown. I accidentally sheltered in the foyer of Mojo's headquarters while waiting for the portrait gallery to open. There were stacks of sacks of coffee up to the ceiling and huge espresso machinery, likely for antique and aesthetic purposes. It smelt so nice. I swear I will destroy my camera by taking photos in the rain. But Wellington in the rain is ravishing. It shines. (The relevant photoparagraph is far below and it justifies this rambling one).

I went to an exhibition opening night and on the way there some athlete woman was like 'seal in the harbour!!!' and I followed the people to see it and I managed to photograph it's tail or something. At the exhibition I randomly joined the band with their tambourine and made art and music contacts and ate cheese but not wine.

I will never run out of galleries here.

This is a city of poetry. It is perfectly acceptable to have abstract and unnecessary words inscribed in commonplaces, and for graffiti to be philosophical.

Modern art got the better of me yesterday. There was a fountain down on the docks, a rigid black tube reared like a cobra spewing water. It moved incrementally but froze again. We were enchanted. Then we saw the rest of it lying on the other side, and some sensible person found the tap and turned it off. It was just a broken hose.

I moved to the top of a different hill. This one has a view of the whole of the hutt valley.

I get up early to observe the four planets, and am slowly becoming sleep-deprived again. Here I have a desk and a GARGANTUAN chest of drawers that all my clothing cannot fill (the first of it's kind i have ever encountered; needed I any excuse to buy more clothes?) and a shelf where my books fit PERFECTLY and flatmates who are not particularly permissive of my self-neglect (I have been frugal of late in apprehension of the mechanics bill....) HA the mechanic, that's a story...I got the cash out for him last night and walked back but he wasn't there and it was getting dark and he had locked my car up so I headed back up home past the Beehive and ended up walking up Glenmore St past the gardens (it is a dank and creepy street; trees at night have always freaked me) with $600ish cash in my wallet going "I JUST hope the rapists don't check my wallet...." (Luckily the universe was not eavesdropping on my brain at that moment) so once I got home safely there was the adrenaline euphoria. Apparently I'd arrived in the 5 minutes the mechanic was away.

I realize now that I trusted him because he was scottish and he looked like my scottish brother-in-lore and I am biased toward accents of the homeland. He seems to have been trustworthy though.

I can see the observatory from the lounge. I asked them, but they are not open at 5am, for me to go and see Mercury. How can they call themselves Astronomers??? Never mind, I shall become one of their astronomers in time for Jupiter's return in a few months....

I moved from a flat in Vogeltown. I was there for a month. I was generally cold and hungry and sleep-deprived and fleabitten while i was there. I had bread and jam and butter in my room which was fine as the wooden floors meant it was frigid, but also noisy from drunken small-hours footsteps so i didn't sleep much, also because of the biting things (i was so sure they were bedbugs, as they bit me in rows and columns on my torso, 17 at a time...)

They must have been dogfleas, that got stuck under waistbands and hemlines and socks...I had welts on my ankles.

I loved the lanky black quiet old dog though, I do not blame him.

I found where the pianists gather. there is a Welsh Dragon Bar on a large traffic island on the one ways. It used to be public toilets, and has domes on the roof. It is red and green and white, like the welsh. We collect there on a sunday night and play each other music on a total honky tonk. Dave pulled some chopins out of his head for me.

canyon

mojo

canyon

yellow yellow red yellow red