So today we asked on Twit­ter for people to tell us what’s going to be open and what’s going to be closed over East­er. This is our list so far, please feel free to add more in the com­ments. 

• Leuven is “open every day over East­er”. They get away with it because they are a res­taur­ant.
• The Malt­house is open Sat­urday and Monday and sur­charge free all the way. They’ll be clos­ing at mid­night on Thursday and the Sat­urday, how­ever. 
• Read­ings Cinema will be open. We kind of figured that, but since they took the time to reply, we thought you should know. 
• The South­ern Cross will be open “for din­ing only” all week­end. Which means they will put cut­lery on the tables and you can drink as usu­al. 

Des­pite my frivol­ous title, it seems that most people loved the Kusama install­a­tion “Dots for Love and Peace”, and are sad to see it removed, dot by col­our­ful dot, from the front of the City Gal­lery today.

The Gal­lery have been help­fully answer­ing ques­tions on Twit­ter, and unfor­tu­nately for souven­ir hunters that includes the news that the dots will be “very care­fully dis­posed of”. On the plus side, the Hotere/Culbert install­a­tion Fault will be soon be mak­ing a glow­ing return.

…well the stage itself will be lit up like a Christ­mas tree but the bar and exter­i­ors will be lit by candles for Earth Hour.

 Sat­urday is the clos­ing night for Pick of the Fringe at Down­stage, if the whirl of Fringe and the New Zea­l­and Inter­na­tion­al Arts Fest­iv­al has passed you by this year you can still catch two out­stand­ing shows at Down­stage. 

Theatre is an exper­i­ence to be shared and both shows on offer are really access­ible as well as being ‘Fringe’, so you could take you sis­ter or your boy­friend or your work col­league.  You can see both shows for $40 which is very reas­on­able.

back/words is a piece of doc­u­ment­ary theatre with per­form­ances that focus on being com­pletely faith­ful to the source of the story.  The source being in this case, filmed inter­views with people that have been loosely framed around import­ant ‘firsts’.  Out of hours and hours of foot­age they have shaped a theatre length show full of humor and emo­tion.

 Those clev­er folks at Clem­enger have a nifty pro­ject on the go called Watch This Wall. They’ve cre­ated a huge paint-by-num­bers, and are invit­ing friends and cli­ents (includ­ing Vince Mar­tin, Vince!) to col­our it in. All pro­ceeds are being donated to the Wel­ling­ton Sculp­ture Trust, when it is even­tu­ally fin­ished and auc­tioned on Trade Me.

This Sunday 28 March there is an inter­na­tion­al cel­eb­ra­tion of the beau­ti­ful game going on at Mar­tin Luck­ie Park, Ber­ham­pore 9am – 5pm.

Cul­ture Kicks is a multi eth­nic foot­ball fest­iv­al with five-a-side teams from Wel­ling­ton rep­res­ent­ing coun­tries from around the world bat­tling it out on the pitch for a chance to take home the 2010 trophy.

There will be Columbi­an dan­cers, Afric­an drum­ming, music from Matiu Te Huki and Lion dan­cers from the Chinese Sports and Cul­tur­al Centre.

The day kicks off with Bella Kalolo singing the New Zea­l­and Nation­al anthem (the woman has some pipes!) and prize giv­ing will be at 3.45pm.

With around 40 teams rep­res­ent­ing over 20 coun­tries you don’t have to pick just one team to sup­port.  A few team names to give you the fla­vour of the day: Havana Hust­lers, Tartan Army, Unity Arabs, Somali Eagles, Los Dec­ad­entes, Korean White Angels, West Afric­an Kiwis. 

There will be healthy food­stuffs on offer from the Hari Krish­nas, so all you need are your chants and some sun­block (well let’s face it, you should prob­ably bring a rain­coat too, this is Wel­ling­ton after all). 

So, right now there’s a whole lot of really good stuff being exhib­ited in Wel­ling­ton’s gal­ler­ies.

City Gal­lery

After the hugely suc­cess­ful Yayoi Kusama exhib­i­tion turned the gal­lery into a magic­al won­der­land, the main gal­lery space has now been giv­en over to three also won­der­ful artists.

More after the jump. 

I’m more likely to write about night­life than wild­life, but I do like urb­an obser­va­tions in gen­er­al, so Pro­ject Noah caught my eye. It’s a web­site and shiny new free iPhone app that lets people track, record and find out about the spe­cies in their envir­on­ment.

Not sur­pris­ingly, I’ve mostly recor­ded very urb­an spe­cies (that’s not quite what Baudelaire meant by “the bot­an­ist of the pave­ment”), but it could be very use­ful for map­ping rare plants, spiders, invas­ive spe­cies or even neigh­bour­hood cats, if you were so inclined. It’s all pretty new in this neck of the woods, so there’s only my lightly-informed spot­tings of scrappy road­side cab­bage trees and frightened little pen­guins to look at, but if more Wel­ling­to­ni­ans get involved it could become a really use­ful guide to loc­al flora and fauna.