Yesterday’s weather blew away (literally) leaving us with one last beautiful day in New Zealand. Having fairly thoroughly explored the city, we kept things pretty low key. We decided to go check out the art museum because it just received a huge private collection as a donation. There are apparently many paintings that haven’t been seen in several generations.
We walked over to the art museum, which is near the university. It was very breezy! But beautiful and sunny.
The museum staff was very friendly. Dad got a map. He tried to hand it to me to chart our course through the museum, but since I’m only luke-warm about art museums to start with, I told him he should do it, since he actually cared about what was there.
It’s not that I don’t like art. I do, but I’m the first to admit that I know nothing about it. Certain periods (back when things were representational) intrigue me and every once in a while I find a painting I absolutely love, but I have no use for anything after impressionism and I think paintings by chimpanzees and elephants have more artistic merit than most modern art.
The museum turned out to be a fairly eclectic mix of all styles and periods. There was one gallery dedicated to New Zealand art, but most of the upstairs was for the new stuff. It was sort of haphazardly arranged I thought. There was no unity of time period or style, just a bunch of paintings hung together with statues in the middle of the room.
I found one artist I liked. His name was Edmund Blair Leighton and he painted things inspired by Arthurian legends. I loved his compositions. They all told stories. My favorite was one of a woman sitting on a window ledge tying a scarf (as a love token) around a knight’s helmet. The mounted knight is outside the window, leaning down, reaching out for the helmet. The look on his face was difficult to interpret. Was he impatient or did he love her back? Was he going jousting or was he going off to war? Did he think he’d ever see her again? I guess that’s what I think art is supposed to do. Make you ask questions and spin stories in your head.
After the art museum we walked over to the University again to go to the Relax Lounge and get another Chai Tea Latte. It was just as good as I remembered. I think what makes it better is the powder they put on top. My educated guess based on smell and taste is ground cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and sugar. I’ll have to experiment when we get home!
We had a lazy afternoon at the hotel and went to Eight (the hotel restaurant) for dinner because everything (literally everything) else in the city was closed on Monday. Eight didn’t disappoint. We decided it would have been Mom’s favorite restaurant on the trip because the papadums were less than 10 feet away from the sushi...
I had: salad (honey mustard dressing), vegetarian hoisan stir-fry, butter chicken and garlic naan.
Dad had: salad (Eight dressing), sushi assortment, a variety of Indian dishes and garlic naan.
Dessert is the only thing Eight doesn’t seem to get. Consistently the best thing seems to be pineapple dipped in the chocolate fountain. I did manage to get a slice of pretty good chocolate cake and Dad and I discovered that we sort of like Turkish Delight (although it get’s stuck in your teeth...).
Tomorrow’s wake up call is before the crack of dawn (5:30am... 3:30am Sydney time yuk!). I mostly packed before bed so that leaving in the morning will require minimal brain power.
I sure will be sad to leave New Zealand! I had no idea how much I’d end up falling in love with this country!
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