Waitangi Day 06/02/2012

No official celebrations at Waitangi this year - it's a day of protest these days.
We spent a couple of hours at Porirua wandering the park, listening to Japanese drummers, Samoan singers  and a Persian cooking demo. There were kids jiving and Sri Lankan dancers and  little kids banging great drums (big Resene plastic paint containers, old bike tubes for the waist and circles cut from boogie boards as drumsticks). We entered the 'how many worms in the wormfarm competition', checked out the clay sculptors, ate some yummy Persian chicken skewers, and enjoyed the sun.

We'd parked alongside the park and walked in just before the Governor General  Sir Jerry Mateparae, was introduced to open the day's festivities. He gave a  casual salute to the crowd, then apologised for his wife who had just 'shot through'. Love that. Thought he was going to say something interesting when he began with '152 years ago 40 people gathered to sign a document; one of them represented the Crown and the other 39 were there voluntarily'. But he petered out after that, hightailing it out of there to do a citizenship ceremony.

High school boys onstage did a very energetic haka;  there was singing (always with Maori, nice) and we wandered off to check out the stalls.