Monday in the Museum
Apr. 16th, 2009 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringSunday, I flew into Wellington. A smooth landing despite the evil reputation of the airport, perched on a windy isthmus between hills and harbour.
Waiting for me after immigration – “No, Sir, you can’t get a passport stamp. We’re thinking of getting a kiwi one for the kiddies, so come back when you’re a little younger, okay? – were four BookCrossers.
Discoverylover always makes me feel young at heart. I first met her during the Wellington BookCrossing convention in 2007, when she was manning the welcome desk, handing out goodie bags and nametags. After a while of meeting up with my friends in the main room, I looked back at the door and wondered, “Why on earth is that beautiful young lady with the golden hair and sparkling smile sitting there all alone?”
So I plonked myself on the floor at her feet and fell in love. BookCrossers are renowned for their sense of fun, but I don’t think I’ve met someone quite so lively and bouncey and smiley as Discoverylover, who gained her screen name after she discovered a book released by Sherlockfan.
Beside her, k-j-h was waiting. Kevin was one of the first BookCrossers I ever met, way way back at my first BookCrossing Convention in Sydney, 2004. I came to the youth hostel with a bag full of books that I hadn’t quite gotten around to registering and labelling up, but Kevin was not only organised with a big bag of fully registered, read, labelled up and pre-released books sorted by title, he had them all on a database. With macros.
Not only is he organised to a degree that I find superhuman, he knows everything, he’s got some incredibly cool gadgets, and he points me in the right direction when I get lost. He’s also a single young man in the largely female world of BookCrossing, and you cannot believe how much this balding, tubby, middle-aged old marriedy envies him.
Alkaline-Kiwi runs deep in a different way. She doesn’t say much or smile much, though perhaps that’s just because beside Discoverylover everyone seems introverted. She’s the way I should be. She’s sweet, she’s from the wild West Coast of the South Island, she’s a voracious devourer of books, and she’s slowly but surely conquering the world.
Erik has fallen in behind the Alkaline-Kiwi banner of world domination. A happy convert, he’s another geek, and some of the best moments of my adventure so far have been when I see the two of them together, quietly content, quietly getting on with things. Erik’s also a computer game designer, and if you want a great “platform game”, go hunt up “Kiwi Tales”, download it and get stuck in. Some of the jokes hidden in the game world are well worth the effort, if you consider playing a computer game a chore.
I hugged them all. Including the blokes, and then we dragged my multiple bags of books across to a shuttle out to Discoverylover’s shared student house. Internet photographs give evidence of just how ferociously the place had been tidied and cleaned, but it’s still pretty much what you’d expect – a charming old wooden house clinging to a hillside, fittings from the 1920s mixing with internet cables, third-hand furniture, and house chore rosters on the noticeboard. Four occupants with weird sleep cycles cramming their food into a bar fridge. Lord, but it brought back memories of my student days, when my weekly grocery shopping was a side of lamb, a two kilo bag of frozen peas, a tub of Neopolitan, five paperback books and a computer game.
We had the best evening ever. Talking in the lounge, bouncing down the hill to the shop, dragging our purchases back up, cramming into the tiny kitchen to make pizza, consuming it hot and fragrant, washed down with French champagne in coffee mugs, and then talking some more, brainstorming through Erik’s next computer game design, snarfing bandwidth from the wifi and just having a great time.
Eventually it was time for sleep. Kevin got the mattress on the floor, and I had the couch, on the understanding that we’d swap over on the following night. No offence, Discoverylover, but the couch was a fraction too short and narrow, the blankets a touch on the scratchy side, and the only way I could get a quarter hour of sleep was to take a running jump of about six hours squirming and fidgeting.
I contemplated Tuesday, when we’d drive rental cars down from Picton along the narrow coast road and up into the mountains, and if there’s one thing that being a night taxidriver has taught me, it’s that safe driving needs solid chunks of sleep. Sure, and I could swap with Kevin, breathing deeply on his mattress, but as he was the only other fully-licensed driver in the party, that wasn’t a real solution.
When dawn arrived, far too soon, I got on the internet and booked a room in the youth hostel in Wellington, where I could punch out eight or nine solid hours of snores before the ferry ride and rental drive.
We grabbed the nine-thirty into town, wedging my big yellow bags full of books into a commuter bus. Wellington is such a beautiful city, set between harbour and hills, wooden houses climbing up through parks and huge old trees. Everywhere green that you don’t get in Australia unless you break the water restrictions with such flagrance that they just chuck you straight into jail. Distant vistas of far mountains and islands contrasting with the splendid government buildings and the bustling shopping districts.
Amongst convenience stores and internet cafes, my youth hostel offered a luggage room until I could check in later, and we trooped off to see the national museum of Te Papa.
I’m no slouch as a museum freak, and I’ve got the Smithsonians, the British Museum, the Louvre, the national and state museums of Australia, and a tonne of others under my global traveller belt, but never have I seen a museum which so comprehensively and easily delivers the soul of a nation as Te Papa. Beside this awesome institution on its harbourside platform, few museums can begin to compete, and our own National Museum of Australia is a sad embarrassment.
Having an in-guide such as Discoverylover was not just the icing on the cake, it was the cream, the cherry, the sprinkles and the candles. Forget the museum, the day’s photographs are all of Discoverylover smiling.
Beginning with Te Papa’s social networking area on the ground floor. There was a wall of photographs uploaded by visitors, and blowing in the random computer winds were photographs of Discoverylover smiling and laughing, photographs taken by Discoverylover, and photographs of Discoverylover’s houses, schools and universities.
Sheer random chance, she insisted before we went inside, plucked yet more photographs from the database, and projected them on a wall, using some nifty pointers to set them spinning and wandering, pulsating and jumping. We could take photographs of ourselves, and soon we had our smiling images joining the fun, including one of my little co-driver bear having a genuine New Zealand experience.
Then we moved onto the “Awesome Forces” exhibit. New Zealand is a place where hot lava and jolting earthquakes are everyday happenings. The entire country rides on a fault line. Whole mountain ranges appear, raw and fresh, in the morning headlines, and cities burn to the ground or are swallowed up in boiling mud and nobody bats an eye.
We rode an earthquake house, saw city streets washed downriver, threw lumps of the earth’s core to each other, and dodged lightning bolts.
Then there was a Maori creation story, presented in a darkend room, one of many mini-cinemas scattered around the earthquake-proof building, with sound and light and wooden carvings. The universe became light and alive and creatures, spirits, races and weather poured into the world.
We poured out into the natural history hall. You want a blue whale skeleton? Here it is, hanging above your head, stretching into the distance above kiwis and moas, giant eagles and great fish, savage pigs and gentle parrots.
A giant squid, pickled and mounted, was displayed in the heart of the hall. The calamari from hell, and we later watched a 3-D movie showing how it lived and died amongst weird fish and sperm whales far below the world’s edge.
Outside, to the bush and rock area, where native vegetation forms a series of micro-environments. Fun with the bouncy suspension bridge, more fun downstairs in the dark caves amongst simulated glow-worms, and then we ducked back inside for a quick look at the giftshop before lunch.
Te Papa, I’ve got to say, has one of the best gift shops I’ve ever seen. Quality goods, too, not plastic tack. Discoverylover found me the last coffee mug left in the shop and I bought it for home use. I drink coffee from a souvenir mug, and I’m reminded of past sunshine on a grey day in Canberra.
We made a quick trip to and through the supermarket across the road, before returning to a picnic lunch on a sheltered patch of grassland underneath one of the museum’s tall facades.
Then we bounced back inside to explore the remaining floors, describing the coming of humanity to these isles. First the Maori, sailing their great canoes over the vasty Pacific, then the Europeans in sailing ships, and finally people from all over the world in the modern clippers of Boeing and Airbus.
Too much to see and describe, but there was art and collections, history lessons, photographs, videos, a car made of corrugated iron and we finished up with an astounding multimedia show on the past century of New Zealand society, the wars and floods, politics and sports, everyday people and royalty.
Te Papa ranks amongst the great museums, not because it is a collection of artifacts and displays, but because it contains the heart of the nation. Come here, and you are a part of New Zealand forever.
We had a fellow roadtripper to meet at the airport. Alkaline-Kiwi and Erik peeled off to check out bookshops, and Kevin, Discoverylover and I went out to the airport, where we plucked MissMarkey off the flight from Auckland. She speaks in the English voice of Yokospungeon, she wears BookCrossing clobber, she’s got a big bag of books, and she got hugged all round.
I shouted for a taxi into town, driven by a recent immigrant in a black suit. Spotless cab, shiny silver floor mats, perfume diffuser and impeccable driving. He well earnt the tip I gave my brother cabbie, just for being a total class act.
Edwardstreet and Sherlockfan waited at a restaurant. Edwardstreet, despite the misleading screen name, is female, and what a woman she is! Her bold performance as a tour guide in a towering foam jester’s cap during the Wellington convention is a memory I’ll cherish for my lifetime. She’s off to a French BookCrossing gathering in Paris in a few weeks, and Oh, but I wish she’d cram me into her backpack to share the ride!
Sherlockfan is another BookCrosser close to my heart. I first met her at the Dunedin convention, when she arrived at my backpackers hostel with a group of BookCrossers just driven down from Christchurch. I gave hearty hugs to my old friends Wombles, Futurecat and Lytteltonwitch, and included Sherlockfan, much to her surprise as she wasn’t used to being embraced by random Australians.
But over the weekend, she worked out that I was harmless, and gradually warmed to me. Dunedin is one of my happy places, and I was happier still to share it with a bunch of BookCrossers.
Since then, I’ve met her again and again at BookCrossing conventions in England, Australia and New Zealand. Taking a moment or two away from the convention frenzy with Sherlockfan is a sweet delight.
Our pizzas were finished far too soon and our merry gathering broke up. Just for the night – we roadtrippers will take the ferry to the South Island at breakfast, and we’ll meet Edwardstreet and Sherlockfan (and all the rest of the BookCrossers) in Christchurch.
Waiting for me after immigration – “No, Sir, you can’t get a passport stamp. We’re thinking of getting a kiwi one for the kiddies, so come back when you’re a little younger, okay? – were four BookCrossers.
Discoverylover always makes me feel young at heart. I first met her during the Wellington BookCrossing convention in 2007, when she was manning the welcome desk, handing out goodie bags and nametags. After a while of meeting up with my friends in the main room, I looked back at the door and wondered, “Why on earth is that beautiful young lady with the golden hair and sparkling smile sitting there all alone?”
So I plonked myself on the floor at her feet and fell in love. BookCrossers are renowned for their sense of fun, but I don’t think I’ve met someone quite so lively and bouncey and smiley as Discoverylover, who gained her screen name after she discovered a book released by Sherlockfan.
Beside her, k-j-h was waiting. Kevin was one of the first BookCrossers I ever met, way way back at my first BookCrossing Convention in Sydney, 2004. I came to the youth hostel with a bag full of books that I hadn’t quite gotten around to registering and labelling up, but Kevin was not only organised with a big bag of fully registered, read, labelled up and pre-released books sorted by title, he had them all on a database. With macros.
Not only is he organised to a degree that I find superhuman, he knows everything, he’s got some incredibly cool gadgets, and he points me in the right direction when I get lost. He’s also a single young man in the largely female world of BookCrossing, and you cannot believe how much this balding, tubby, middle-aged old marriedy envies him.
Alkaline-Kiwi runs deep in a different way. She doesn’t say much or smile much, though perhaps that’s just because beside Discoverylover everyone seems introverted. She’s the way I should be. She’s sweet, she’s from the wild West Coast of the South Island, she’s a voracious devourer of books, and she’s slowly but surely conquering the world.
Erik has fallen in behind the Alkaline-Kiwi banner of world domination. A happy convert, he’s another geek, and some of the best moments of my adventure so far have been when I see the two of them together, quietly content, quietly getting on with things. Erik’s also a computer game designer, and if you want a great “platform game”, go hunt up “Kiwi Tales”, download it and get stuck in. Some of the jokes hidden in the game world are well worth the effort, if you consider playing a computer game a chore.
I hugged them all. Including the blokes, and then we dragged my multiple bags of books across to a shuttle out to Discoverylover’s shared student house. Internet photographs give evidence of just how ferociously the place had been tidied and cleaned, but it’s still pretty much what you’d expect – a charming old wooden house clinging to a hillside, fittings from the 1920s mixing with internet cables, third-hand furniture, and house chore rosters on the noticeboard. Four occupants with weird sleep cycles cramming their food into a bar fridge. Lord, but it brought back memories of my student days, when my weekly grocery shopping was a side of lamb, a two kilo bag of frozen peas, a tub of Neopolitan, five paperback books and a computer game.
We had the best evening ever. Talking in the lounge, bouncing down the hill to the shop, dragging our purchases back up, cramming into the tiny kitchen to make pizza, consuming it hot and fragrant, washed down with French champagne in coffee mugs, and then talking some more, brainstorming through Erik’s next computer game design, snarfing bandwidth from the wifi and just having a great time.
Eventually it was time for sleep. Kevin got the mattress on the floor, and I had the couch, on the understanding that we’d swap over on the following night. No offence, Discoverylover, but the couch was a fraction too short and narrow, the blankets a touch on the scratchy side, and the only way I could get a quarter hour of sleep was to take a running jump of about six hours squirming and fidgeting.
I contemplated Tuesday, when we’d drive rental cars down from Picton along the narrow coast road and up into the mountains, and if there’s one thing that being a night taxidriver has taught me, it’s that safe driving needs solid chunks of sleep. Sure, and I could swap with Kevin, breathing deeply on his mattress, but as he was the only other fully-licensed driver in the party, that wasn’t a real solution.
When dawn arrived, far too soon, I got on the internet and booked a room in the youth hostel in Wellington, where I could punch out eight or nine solid hours of snores before the ferry ride and rental drive.
We grabbed the nine-thirty into town, wedging my big yellow bags full of books into a commuter bus. Wellington is such a beautiful city, set between harbour and hills, wooden houses climbing up through parks and huge old trees. Everywhere green that you don’t get in Australia unless you break the water restrictions with such flagrance that they just chuck you straight into jail. Distant vistas of far mountains and islands contrasting with the splendid government buildings and the bustling shopping districts.
Amongst convenience stores and internet cafes, my youth hostel offered a luggage room until I could check in later, and we trooped off to see the national museum of Te Papa.
I’m no slouch as a museum freak, and I’ve got the Smithsonians, the British Museum, the Louvre, the national and state museums of Australia, and a tonne of others under my global traveller belt, but never have I seen a museum which so comprehensively and easily delivers the soul of a nation as Te Papa. Beside this awesome institution on its harbourside platform, few museums can begin to compete, and our own National Museum of Australia is a sad embarrassment.
Having an in-guide such as Discoverylover was not just the icing on the cake, it was the cream, the cherry, the sprinkles and the candles. Forget the museum, the day’s photographs are all of Discoverylover smiling.
Beginning with Te Papa’s social networking area on the ground floor. There was a wall of photographs uploaded by visitors, and blowing in the random computer winds were photographs of Discoverylover smiling and laughing, photographs taken by Discoverylover, and photographs of Discoverylover’s houses, schools and universities.
Sheer random chance, she insisted before we went inside, plucked yet more photographs from the database, and projected them on a wall, using some nifty pointers to set them spinning and wandering, pulsating and jumping. We could take photographs of ourselves, and soon we had our smiling images joining the fun, including one of my little co-driver bear having a genuine New Zealand experience.
Then we moved onto the “Awesome Forces” exhibit. New Zealand is a place where hot lava and jolting earthquakes are everyday happenings. The entire country rides on a fault line. Whole mountain ranges appear, raw and fresh, in the morning headlines, and cities burn to the ground or are swallowed up in boiling mud and nobody bats an eye.
We rode an earthquake house, saw city streets washed downriver, threw lumps of the earth’s core to each other, and dodged lightning bolts.
Then there was a Maori creation story, presented in a darkend room, one of many mini-cinemas scattered around the earthquake-proof building, with sound and light and wooden carvings. The universe became light and alive and creatures, spirits, races and weather poured into the world.
We poured out into the natural history hall. You want a blue whale skeleton? Here it is, hanging above your head, stretching into the distance above kiwis and moas, giant eagles and great fish, savage pigs and gentle parrots.
A giant squid, pickled and mounted, was displayed in the heart of the hall. The calamari from hell, and we later watched a 3-D movie showing how it lived and died amongst weird fish and sperm whales far below the world’s edge.
Outside, to the bush and rock area, where native vegetation forms a series of micro-environments. Fun with the bouncy suspension bridge, more fun downstairs in the dark caves amongst simulated glow-worms, and then we ducked back inside for a quick look at the giftshop before lunch.
Te Papa, I’ve got to say, has one of the best gift shops I’ve ever seen. Quality goods, too, not plastic tack. Discoverylover found me the last coffee mug left in the shop and I bought it for home use. I drink coffee from a souvenir mug, and I’m reminded of past sunshine on a grey day in Canberra.
We made a quick trip to and through the supermarket across the road, before returning to a picnic lunch on a sheltered patch of grassland underneath one of the museum’s tall facades.
Then we bounced back inside to explore the remaining floors, describing the coming of humanity to these isles. First the Maori, sailing their great canoes over the vasty Pacific, then the Europeans in sailing ships, and finally people from all over the world in the modern clippers of Boeing and Airbus.
Too much to see and describe, but there was art and collections, history lessons, photographs, videos, a car made of corrugated iron and we finished up with an astounding multimedia show on the past century of New Zealand society, the wars and floods, politics and sports, everyday people and royalty.
Te Papa ranks amongst the great museums, not because it is a collection of artifacts and displays, but because it contains the heart of the nation. Come here, and you are a part of New Zealand forever.
We had a fellow roadtripper to meet at the airport. Alkaline-Kiwi and Erik peeled off to check out bookshops, and Kevin, Discoverylover and I went out to the airport, where we plucked MissMarkey off the flight from Auckland. She speaks in the English voice of Yokospungeon, she wears BookCrossing clobber, she’s got a big bag of books, and she got hugged all round.
I shouted for a taxi into town, driven by a recent immigrant in a black suit. Spotless cab, shiny silver floor mats, perfume diffuser and impeccable driving. He well earnt the tip I gave my brother cabbie, just for being a total class act.
Edwardstreet and Sherlockfan waited at a restaurant. Edwardstreet, despite the misleading screen name, is female, and what a woman she is! Her bold performance as a tour guide in a towering foam jester’s cap during the Wellington convention is a memory I’ll cherish for my lifetime. She’s off to a French BookCrossing gathering in Paris in a few weeks, and Oh, but I wish she’d cram me into her backpack to share the ride!
Sherlockfan is another BookCrosser close to my heart. I first met her at the Dunedin convention, when she arrived at my backpackers hostel with a group of BookCrossers just driven down from Christchurch. I gave hearty hugs to my old friends Wombles, Futurecat and Lytteltonwitch, and included Sherlockfan, much to her surprise as she wasn’t used to being embraced by random Australians.
But over the weekend, she worked out that I was harmless, and gradually warmed to me. Dunedin is one of my happy places, and I was happier still to share it with a bunch of BookCrossers.
Since then, I’ve met her again and again at BookCrossing conventions in England, Australia and New Zealand. Taking a moment or two away from the convention frenzy with Sherlockfan is a sweet delight.
Our pizzas were finished far too soon and our merry gathering broke up. Just for the night – we roadtrippers will take the ferry to the South Island at breakfast, and we’ll meet Edwardstreet and Sherlockfan (and all the rest of the BookCrossers) in Christchurch.
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Date: 2009-04-27 04:10 am (UTC)