The Calm After the Storm

After the craziness of the pre-election weeks in October and the very start of November, more recently it seems like everything is in a giant post-excitement vaccum. There were of course the somewhat interesting (and eventually depressing) moments while we waited to see what the government would end up exactly looking like, but really in the past week it seems like there’s been little if anything particularly exciting going on in the world. Oh, an obvious exception to that can be the awesomeness of the New Zealand Rugby League team winning the world cup, a feat that has evaded our (supposedly) superior rugby union team for the last 20-odd years. That was definitely a bright spot, which nicely disguised the disappointment of another thrashing in the cricket.

So, in the absence of any particularly exciting news in the world of Auckland’s transportation, I think I’ll just describe what I got up to this weekend.

It was a fairly interesting weekend I suppose, if for the utterly weird weather as much as anything else. Saturday felt like summer, Sunday it was windy as hell and extremely rainy. I guess both days also had everything in between – typically Auckland perhaps. I think the heat on Saturday ended up giving me a headache and making me feel utterly exhausted, to the point where just after 9pm I felt like crawling into bed. Other than Amalia’s usual swimming lesson on Saturday morning, it was a fairly uneventful day I suppose. Sunday was a bit more interesting, as we went to the Elam Fine Arts open day at Auckland University – largely to check out the final version of Amber’s work which we’ve seen evolve in our lounge over the past few months (and it was awesome to see the finished product), but also to check out the wide variety of stuff that other people had come up with. Overall I found the quality of everything incredibly impressive, although I’m not a particular expert on modern art. However, I have visited the Tate Modern and the Pompidou Museum, so I do have some idea about what is considered “exceptional”, and it certainly felt like I was in the middle of an awesome modern art museum as we wandered around the place. I think that Amalia found it all quite interesting too, particularly some of the more complex ‘installation’ spaces.

Through some clever swapping around of Leila’s A Zone bus pass, which I used after dropping her off at Elam, Amalia and I managed three trips on the bus. She was really getting into it at the end and actually signalled down the bus driver on the final trip that we took. It’s pretty cool considering when I think back to my childhood I only really remember one bus trip I took that wasn’t related to a school trip – when my Dad and I caught a bus back home from town after going to Rangitoto for the day. Interestingly I was 4 at the time and still remember it pretty clearly.