Weekly Round Up

This week was shockingly short on mileage. Mostly this was due to the adverse weather, the first week of our true winter here. Here we go:

Monday       3.78 km
Tuesday       0 km
Wednesday  Nil
Thursday      None
Friday          4 km
Saturday      2 km
Sunday        0 km
         Total        9.78 km

Okay, now for the list of excuses - Tuesday, cold and wet. Wednesday, business planning. Thursday, Study. Sunday, Temple. Yes, temple. Not my temple.

My wife had 'made a friend' while she was waiting for a bus early in the week and this friend invited us to have lunch with her and some others on Sunday. We thought long and hard about buying a bottle of wine to take with us - we decided not to, although we could have done with a bottle after the main event. On Sunday morning we were duly up, showered and ready to go at about half nine in the morning, our first hint that this wasn't exactly our thing: A half nine a.m. starting time. We were then told that a friend of her's was coming to pick us up from Uni, which is right next door. This friend turned out to be a somewhat tattooed Maori gentleman, and he was indeed a gentleman, nice manners and a navy blue blazer with shiny golden buttons. On a side note his four wheel drive vehicle was festooned with tino-rangatiratanga flags. He then drove us to Newlands, a suburb in Wellington, where we were welcomed into a 'holy house' for a ground blessing ceremony.

It turns out that we had been invited to a Taoist Temple's blessing of a new temple ground ceremony. Neither my wife or myself are particularly religious and she watched the ceremony with a rather noticeable grimace on her face. We then told the religious folk that we had a friends birthday lunch to go to and refused the offer of vegetarian sushi before walking back into Wellington. Pretty thankful that it was a nice day on Sunday. The walk back in town was the most fun I had had all week. I also think it's not too bad that I missed Sunday's run as we walked for around two hours to get back to town.

Things I notice: Today it comes from my wife and myself - Seeing a Taoist religious ceremony taking place in what is essentially someones back yard felt rather 'cultish'. Now, this may or may not be fair to Taoism but it certainly did have that feeling for both my wife and I.

Oh, and last of all... The goal for last week is apparently well above my abilities, so this week my goal is to run 5km's further than last week.