I’ve spent the last two days sitting in a chair in our lounge staring at books and a laptop, all in aid of study for my MCSE bootcamp in a couple of weeks. I can say that I am truly beginning to hate, well, dislike strongly, text books on networking and active directory. However, it is making more sense now, and I am finding interesting parts, so its not all taxing. I look forward to our trip to Scotland in August, it’ll be good to unwind. We’ll be going to the various festivals (book, fringe, music etc) at Edinburgh and looking at a few wedding venues. Things are looking up in wedding terms, we’ve had some further, good, responses from a planner in Scotland. She’s given us a few really nice places to look at and they’re all cheaper than what we’ve seen in England.
On the weekend we went to the Flavours of New Zealand Wine and Food Festival in Richmond. We went with Jim and Gee, Jim was especially looking forward to having some whitebait fritters. The day ran from 11am till 8:30pm on Saturday and Keryn and I got there just after 11am to meet Jim and Gee and go in. There was a huge queue for the bank (food and wine had to be bought with ‘bucks’. One buck = one pound), so we got in the queue to get our money. It was good we did, the queue only got larger and was amazing long for a few hours. We grabbed some food and wine and sat down.
I meet a few people I hadn’t seen in a long time. Carmen Firth was by the food tent when we were there, she goes back to NZ this coming weekend. I didn’t even know she was in the UK, she’s just finished her two year stint. I also meet a guy I went to school with back at St. John’s. We only had a short talk, not long enough for me to remember his name… that could have been awkward (that doesn’t look right but the spell check says it is…oh well). The food and wine was generally good, if massively overpriced (1 buck for 2 buzz bars, for instance. Or 3 bucks for a glass of wine…that racks up quickly). The best wine I had was a Te Kairanga 2001 Sauvignon Blanc, really nice. Oh, you know how I said Jim wanted the whitebait fritters, turns out they didn’t have any – they were still stuck in a container in Auckland, something about customs trouble. After a while we had to move as the mass of people was encroaching quite badly. Everyone was packed together and we were getting trod on and kicked. Gee even had a cigarette tip down her back, which wasn’t a pleasant experience
So we moved around the back where there was space, much nicer. Dave Dobbyn was playing a couple of sets during the day and I managed to get really close for a couple of photos, I’ll have them up sometimes. We spent most of out time lying around talking and being visited by people. It was funny watching everyone heading off for the loos, there were so many people that the queues quickly got long. Many guys headed off over the field to the far fenceline and just faced the trees to do their business. The strange thing was the number of woman who started going off to the fence, though generally they went behind trees to do their things.
We eventually started getting a little bored and a lot sunburnt so we decided to leave. We left at about 6pm and headed off to the train station for our trip home. It was all very nice, just a little bit cramped, a lot overpriced and not enough to do other than stare at people and spend more money – other than Dave of course, he was great.
