Al's Bar - Night 115

Honestly, I didn’t do a whole lot today. The morning was spent updating journal entries and trying to get photos to upload to the internet. I’ll be very happy once I’m back in Australia where the web operates at above

The Center of the City

phone modem speeds. In the afternoon I wandered down to the Canterbury museum, which turned out to be just like the other major museums in Auckland and Wellington; a few rooms of Maori art, some Greenstone artifacts, a section on seafaring and a mock street scene from the 1890s. I suppose there really isn’t much history in a country that only been settle for 700 years, and Anglicized just 150 years ago. If you sense a pervading tilt of negativity in my prose today, I would acquiesce to that supposition. I’ve sort of come to the end of the road in New Zealand and am ready to move on….but first Al’s Bar.

Nikos, one of the volunteers from my Wellington days arrived in town today, so I made plans to meet him and a few of his new volunteer friends out for a drink. While having a few drinks at the hostel beforehand I befriended my roommate, Karla, from Newfoundland. As later this week Karla is headed to Antarctica for 13 months of cultural artifact preservation, she was keen to spend one last night amongst civilization and agreed to come along. We also met Richie, from England, who had developed a thirst on his flight in today and thus we were rolling down to Al’s Bar three deep.

dDub at Al's Bar

On tap at Al’s was dDub, a local band. I thought that cover charge was a bit steep ($20) for someone I had never heard of, but then again, I don’t know any Kiwi bands so the price likely indicated their popularity. The place was full, but not overly-packed and we had no problem eventually working our way up to the front. The best way to classify dDub’s sound is that it is like Sublime, but without any drug or prostitution references. The leader singer looked like a healthy Keith Richards, the bass player a dead ringer for Cousin Boerst, and a good looking blonde girl in a fedora played the flute. Karla thought the sound could be considered Calypso…not knowing the definition of Calypso music (nor the spelling) I was in no position to refute her theory.

What I Learned Today: I may have some sort of illness. At the bar, listening to live music and steadily drinking I found myself thinking about spatially weighted hedonic modeling.

written by

exumenius on February 2, 2008 from Christchurch, New Zealand

from the travel blog: Kiwis and Kangaroos

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