I wish I’d been wearing a pedometer today – I walked from Kilbirnie to Lyall Bay to Newtown to Kelburn to town and back to Kelburn. The Maranui Cafe and Surf Club continues to be one of the most interesting cafes in Wellington, although the wooden interior and nattering hipsters are a deafening combination. Once you enter the Lyall Bay Warehouse, time effectively stands still. Annoyingly I didn’t find what I was looking for, like travelling to Disneyland and not going on any of the rides.
In the evening I went to Ready For Takeoff at Bodega, a well-performed burlesque show. I hadn’t realised that Bodega has changed hands… I assume that the previous owner took the famous horseshoe-shaped chunk of the original bartop with him. Things seemed much the same, although the service was appallingly slow, and Mac’s Gold, (the barely-one-up-from-student-beer beer) now costs $6.50. The young crowd was pleasant (well-dressed girls being careful not to compete with the burlesque performers, and the usual scruffy guys) with a discrete smattering of lesbians and heavy-breathing camera holders at the back. The performers’ concept of exotic seemed to begin and end with the Middle East… one of them actually started off in a full burqa which made me go “Ha ha, oh God”, and Eva Strangelove (the closest thing Wellington has to Her Holiness Dita Von Teese) performed, which was like watching a Simon Morse character come to life. The terrific One Night Stands sang as well – somewhere The Beat Girls are gnashing their teeth and consulting their lawyers!
