Close but no d'oeuvre

A little while ago a colleague of mine got invited to the opening of Darby Street (a new shared space street in the centre of Auckland) this was partly due to the fact that she was an Urban Designer who had been working on another ‘Shared Space’ project in the Auckland CBD. Anyway, she asked me if I would like to tag along, and I of course agreed. Later on I heard that Len Brown (our current mayor) would be also be making an appearance, I thought to myself…this is great. Last time I was at an event with Len Brown (the Ground breaking of Wynyard Quarter’s Gateway Plaza) the food was pretty decent, probably due to his VIP presence.

But then I found out closer to the date that this opening was not going to be like a regular opening, there were not going to be waiters topping up your wine glasses and bringing around bite sized portions of deliciousness. Firstly, it was open to the public to attend, this means no catering. Naturally I was a little annoyed, but because I heard that there were going to be live bands playing, such as ‘Kidz in Space’, I thought what the hell.





The portable 'sculptures' and Kidz in Space doing their thing

We decided just to pop in in our lunch hour to see what was happening. ‘Kidz  in Space’ was doing their thing on a temporary stage that was erected at the Elliot Street end of Darby and portable ‘sculpture’ things were placed around (refer to photo). It was a pretty good atmosphere.
 

Luckily, the radio station ZM had their ice cream truck there and they were giving away free soft serve. Although it wasn’t a mini herb encrusted chicken breast roll with a cranberry relish, it was ok. Later I was given a free mini can of Coke Zero. They got the mini portion sizes right, but not the type of freebie!

The Soft Serve Truck

 The music was good and the ice cream ok, but I was still a tad disappointed at the lack of mini morsels of food. To top it off, I had recently had two wisdom teeth removed and today was going to be my big come back to the world of solid food, the Darby Street Opening was going to usher this in.

 Also to add to that, our receptionist was away today and yesterday, which made me question the likelihood of decent Friday night snacks. I was happily surprised at the presence of Sal’s pizza tonight though. So all in all my first non-soup meal after the removal of my back two teeth was greasy New York style pizza.