But what about the children?
There are hundreds – nay thousands – of possible venues in our fair city for children’s parties. Today I bring you one that I have recently used and enjoyed.
The YMCA on Tasman St is available for hire at a very reasonable rate. It is pretty rough, which actually is nice and relaxing when you have 20 under 4s hooning around. There are crash pads, a huge foam pit, beams, balls and lots of opportunities for kids to run themselves ragged.
You can take your own food and there is chilled water on site.
No alcohol allowed, so I’ll be rethinking it as a venue for my own birthday. A martini in that foam pit seems very appealing.
I didn’t spot a single Young Christian Man, nor did anyone perform YMCA. We had a goodly dose of the Spice Girls though.
YMCA of Greater Wellington INC
69 Tasman St Wellington 0-4-385 4091
The Player and the Advocate
Oscar is a hotshot young actor in the bustling Elizabethan Wellington theatre scene, loved by the Publick, but resented by the authorities. When he is kicked out of his theatre company for ‘improvising’, he must fight, not only to get his job back, but also to stop the Queen from pushing the country into all-out war…
What if Wellington were the centre of the Elizabethan world, pioneering an explosion in theatre, fashion, new music and coffeehouses at the birth of the modern age?
Awesome. The short pitch is ‘Whale Rider meets Shakespeare in Love’, but the above is the longer synopsis of the plot for The Player and the Advocate – a new film being written by Wellingtonian John Parker.
John’s having a public reading of the feature film treatment on…
Sunday 1st October, 4:00pm
@ Katipo Café, 76 Willis Street, Wellington
Duration: 1 hour (45 minutes for reading, 15 minutes feedback session)
Cost: free!
Featuring: Erin Banks and James Stewart, two of Wellington’s finest theatrical talent
…so feel free to head along and help shape what will hopefully be one of the next great pieces of Wellington film-making at its earliest stages.
Tiptoe Through the Tulips
Well… around them anyway, if you don’t want the gardeners getting medieval on you…
What:
Spring Festival, Sept 23 to Oct 8.
Where:
Botanic Gardens & Otari Wilton’s Bush
The Botanic Garden and Otari Wilton’s Bush will host two weeks of family orientated events.
Activities include:
- glow worm tours
- live music
- petting zoos
- plant sales
Brochures outlining the events will be available from both gardens and all Feeling Great stands from 1 September. PDF files here:
Spring Festival Brochure
Stamp Your Name on the Stump
Spring Festival Photo Contest
More reasons to moan about the buses…
The fares have gone up! Well, for some of us they have. The new zones do make things a little simpler, but one gets the feeling the 1, 2 and 3 stage price hikes will generally outweigh the discounts the more rare 4 stage traveller will be making. Don’t know about you train users. You can fend for yourself.
If you’re a little confused about it all MetLink have excellent online info about the new zones and fares.
And to the bus-driver who looked stroppy at me this morning when I presented my brand new (but old-school $20 three-stage ten trip), and griped that I should be using one of the new cards, and made his decision to let me on regardless seem as if was the greatest show of magnaminity shown by a single person across the Wellington region this year, might I now say (having checked the rules): “Get stuffed! It’s valid to the 17th!”
Waterfront update
Last night, I once again forced myself to sit through a Waterfront Development Subcommittee meeting. While it was full of enough procedural tedium and political pigheadedness to make sitting in broken glass during a Celine Dion concert seem like a pleasant alternative, it was worth it to get the latest updates and to see an inspiring presentation from UN Studio‘s Holger Hoffman (since Ben van Berkel had to miss it due to illness) about the processes behind their design for the transition building.
Here’s an update on progress and plans, mainly based upon reports from the meeting, but with a few other tidbits.
[read on…]
Celluloid architecture
These days it seem like there’s a specialist film festival for every taste and interest: human rights, vegetables, silent films and even Phoenix dactylifera. There’s even one for architecture buffs, and the Wellington season starts at the Penthouse this Friday.
[Read on…]
Dear Fellow Bus Passenger,
…if you find yourself halfway down the bus, during rush-hour, with the entire rear of the bus’s aisle not only empty, but with half a dozen seats still there for taking, please don’t just stand there, acting as a dam against the ever-increasing human stream forcing its way up against your inconsiderate arse.
Moving back, and up that one small step is all that divides you from a possible seat, and from allowing another ten or so people onto this bus, instead of causing them to wait 10 minutes until the next (probably also overcrowded) bus arrives. Arsehole.
Newtown words
Tomorrow night, the Newtown Community and Cultural Centre hosts Newtown Spoken Word Winter 06, an open mike event organised by the Word Collective, the people who brought you Sk8board Poets, Karaoke Poetry and the Word Festivals. It starts at 7:30pm at the corner of Rintoul & Colombo streets, and entry is by koha. For more information, call Craig on 027 242 3453.
Snakes! On a plane! In Wellington!
Not that long ago, the London Time Out ran a feature on pirates in London to celebrate the release of Pirates of the Caribbean 2. Way to be hip, Time Out. Everyone who’s anyone knows that the actual most important movie this year is Snakes on Plane – or as some like to call it “Motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane”. So, in tribute to this movie that opens on Thursday, the Wellingtonista is proud to present this very special activity guide to recreating snakes on a plane in Wellington: