Palmerston North

 Hi there

Last Thursday I went to Palmerston North for the night.  It's only a couple of hours up north from Wellington.  I went up there to see the show "Matilda-the Musical".  I love the musicals put on at the Regent Theatre.  The shows are always so vibrant and exciting.  The actors seem to love their roles and their happiness just radiates around the theatre.

"Matilda-the Musical" was wonderful, from start to finish.  I couldnt get over all the people I met who were related to the actors on stage.

Proud grandmothers were everywhere, pointing the fact out to anyone who would listen that their grandchild was, wow, up there on the stage.

This show had two full casts, mostly children, taking turns every other night.  By sheer luck, I was sitting right next to a grandmother who had come all the way from England, just to see her granddaughter playing the part of Matilda.  

Matilda's dad was also there.

"Are you a stage daddy?" I asked.

"Absolutely!" he said.  He then went on to tell me all the roles his offspring had played or had coming up in the future.  "She's signed on to be the young Elsa in "Frozen".

This talented little thing was all of eight or nine years old.

I enjoyed this version of "Matilda-the Musical" better than the version I had seen in Australia a few years' back.

I had travelled to Palmy (as the locals call it) from Wellington by Intercity bus.  It was nice not to worry about traffic jams and road works.  I stayed at Kiwi Suites Motel, a very, very, very tired-looking place but it was only a minute's walk from both the theatre and The Square.

The town's shops border The Square which is a green space, with the Intercity bus stop in it's centre.

If I remember rightly, when a football team were accommodated recently in Palmy for the Women's World Football Cup, the team snuck out of Palmerston North, with the understanding that the town was a dead place, with nothing doing in it.

i went to the mall, on one side of The Square.  I was overjoyed to discover that the place had a - wait for it! - candy floss machine!!!!  I got myself a stick of candy floss, and happily ate it walking around the mall.  Yummmmmmyy....  Of course, I had to find a ladies' room afterwards to wash my hands.   And my mouth.  What - ?  I pick at candy floss with my fingers;  I'm not a candy floss amateur.  If I buried my head in the stuff I would have to rush to a salon for a hair makeover, just to get all that pink sticky muck out of my not-so-golden locks.

Right across from the candy floss machine was a healthy option.  An orange drink machine that picked out an orange from rows of them, peeled it, poured the juice into a cup, then passed the cup out of the machine to the buyer.

*Candy Floss = cotton candy in USA.

above:  the candy floss machine.  I put in $10 (and worth every cent, both in the watching of the mechanical arm wafting the fresh candy floss into a ball, and in my eating of the stuff).

Note the orange machine opposite.  I can just imagine people standing between the two machines pondering whether to go for the healthy option or the sugar-y one.  No angsty decision-making for me.  Candy floss, of course, won hands down.

above:  Inside The Square.  The Palmerston North i-Site Information Office is also in The Square. When I was a child, living in Palmerston North, the construction in this photo had a big very obvious  cross on the top of it.  Decades ago, I read that non-christian people didn't want the cross there, but the christians won out and the cross was kept.  But, whoops, where's it gone nowadays?  Oh wait - if you look real close there's a sort of image of a cross on the new top block.