A lovely Saturday

Martin and I had a lovely day on Saturday.

In the morning, we went to visit our friend Andrea for breakfast at her place in New Lynn.  Getting there involved initially biking along Ash Street (which is pretty busy and not that pleasant) but then taking a cycle way through Ken Maunder Park.  That bit was really nice - biking along the edge of the Whau and seeing mangroves and ducks, and going across a fun bridge where they'd given the metal decking a grippy surface by embossing it with a repeating pattern of slightly cartoonish numbers :-)  We could have talked all day once we got there (although settled for simply making Andrea late for her next appointment...) and are keen to catch up again before too long.  On the way back we passed kids playing Saturday morning soccer at the the Lynn Avon club, then stopped at the Avondale library to pick up some more violin sheet music for me :-)

In the afternoon we went to the Hollywood theatre in Avondale to watch Inna de Yard, which was showing as part of the NZ International Film Festival.  It was a documentary about a bunch of reggae 'greats' getting together to record an album, and interspersed their music (both at someone's house in the hills above Kingston and at a theatre in Paris) with various of them reflecting on their lives.  The music was fantastic!  I don't exactly follow reggae, but one of my friends in Pittsburgh was from Trinadad and she introduced me to it, so I knew I liked it.  And there was a lot of joy in it, if also a lot of poverty and hardship.  These people live with so much violence - a particularly sobering story was one guy telling how horrified he was to see someone get shot in his front yard, only to have his friend point out that the 'someone' was his own sister.

I think the musicians were all also rastafarians, and Far-I and Jah-jah were referred to frequently.  I would like to have understood more of that.

And, going with the rastafarian theme, almost all of the musicians had impressive dreadlocks (although they don't seem that common in Jamaica as such - not that many people had them in the street scenes), creating a need that doesn't exist in my culture: very tall hats.  There was a wide range of capacious head coverings - from crochet slouch hats to head wraps to exceedingly tall baseball-style caps - to accomodate everyone's voluminous hair :-)

If you'd like to see more, there's stills and links to the trailer here.

All up I biked about 13 km that day (including heaps of up and down!) and managed fine, although I was struggling to stay awake during the second half of the movie - it was fascinating, but all the exercise had made me super-sleepy!

And apologies for not blogging for so long.  The Just Kai stuff has been very time-consuming recently, although that should calm down a bit from the middle of next week :-)