i played at church this morning. it was a combined ‘family’ service in the school gym which was exciting. it meant i had a lot more space to play my bass (usually i’m squashed in a small space between the back of the stage and the back wall). so i took full advantage and did a bit of wiggling.
after pies for lunch we headed in to town to take part in a one off opportunity to walk along the new motorway bridge which has just been opened.
the bridge has been built using a clever ‘big blue’ crane thing which slowly crawls along the bridge allowing the bridge to be built underneath
i’m not sure i totally understand how it works, but it was very impressive !
what was really excellent was the sense of occasion. there were hundreds of people doing the walk
when do we usually get to celebrate big civil engineering projects in the modern age ?
whereas here it was a big occasion. there was a ‘gold coin’ donation to get in (ie a one or two dollar coin) and then you walked up the on ramp !
i think these are the spare bits they didn’t need
there were plenty of bollards which was nice
and plenty of portaloos but they weren’t nice
and the workmen had even left out diggers for the kids to play on
\
here’s a steam roller with a glove
of course it absolutely chucked it down when we were on the bridge for a few minutes
like real torrential rain for 5 minutes which then stopped and all was well (though a bit wet)
after that we drove over to the design exhibition thing i had a guided tour of the week before last. i was able to amaze and dazzle the girls with my knowledge of all the art/design features
we then went to an indoor market near where my new office will be, but it was a bit of a disappointment as it’s all seemed to be shutting down
but there were some nice hats to try on
this is me pulling a face
we walked up celebrity walk which has hand prints of famous new zealanders. we impressed ourselves by recognising some of them – peter blake and rachel hunter (!).
esther’s flippa ball wasn’t so good this evening so we’ll not speak of the result.
the only other notable point of the day was the ‘inorganic’ waste which is a service where the council come round and collect all your stuff which you’d normally take to the dump in the UK. instead you leave it on your verge or ‘berm’ (we didn’t know either!), and they come in the week and cart it all off to a landfill for you.
however, it’s really popular with scavengers who drive round picking up your quality stuff to either sell on or melt down or something. we put our old british telly out. we never meant to bring it with us, but ran out of time to take it to a UK dump before we left so it went in the container. we dragged it outside still in its wrapper from nearly a year ago. And it was gone within an hour ! We’ve still got the remote control though.