Sunday, June 18, 2006

Welli Weekend

Haven't written about the AR conference weekend in Wellington yet. All in all: it was fabulous! I met so many people, was stuffed with vegan food, didn't get more sleep than 5 hours per night, an learned a lot about Animal Welfare / Animal Rights in New Zealand/Australia.

I went there by bus. Left Hamilton Thursday evening at 10. Unfortunately the bus was crowded, and I only got one of the seats in the middle. I was hoping to have 2 seats so that I cold get some sleep. But no.

Anyways, I was in the bus trying to find a position where I could at least doze a bit - which was really hard. The bus stopped every now and then, either to stuff more people into the bus, or to give the crowd a chance to go to the toilet and buy some refreshments. The man next to me was so kind to change seats for the last 2-3 hours, and so I could at least lean my head against the window for a while.



I finally arrived in Wellington at about 7am, Friday. I had some time before the conference started, so I walked to the venue and took some dawn photos. It was just great. Dawn is a good time to arrive in a nice city :-)

Finally at the conference venue, I was asked to be the official photographer (after they have seen my cam, hehe). I still had to prepare my 5min talk, so I used the rest of the time before the official start to do that. Went fine in the end.

The 2 days of conference were full with a tight programme, only interrupted by tea and lunch breaks. Which meant a lot of cakes, cookies, and all the other food (I'm still impressed as you might see ;-)). I got a lot of information about NZ Animal Rights groups, about the current situation in the country (visualised with really sad and shocking video/photo footage).

The conference was also good for me because I am currently working on a NZ version of the "Why Vegan?" booklet by VeganOutreach and I could contact people to get photos and other resources for it. Didn't succeed in finding someone who would support the project financially. But it is too early to ask for funding anyways..

I knew that OdESSA was playing in Wellingon on Friday, and those of you who have read my blog will know that I kinda had to go there :-) Actually it was 4 of us going to the concert where 3 bands were playing. The OdESSA people still recognised me, and they even wrote me a message on mySpace the next day (hihi).


Saturday evening, the conference people had dinner together at an Indian restaurant, and we went out after that. So not a lot of sleep that night eigher. Which was ok because the hall where some of us slept was not too fancy. We didn't have running water Sunday morning, the toilet was not that nice then I must say..

Sunday was the day where different Animal Rights groups had their member meetings. I attended the meeting of SAFE, the group I am mostly working with. Good meeting, nice to see that there are activists in all the small rural places around the country. One woman went vegan this weekend. She is living on a farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere, she will have a hard time telling her husband about it I guess..

After the meeting we went to a farm sanctuary outside Wellington. The weather was not too good, but I still enjoyed it a lot. I am a big fan of the pigs I must say. Really friendly and easygoing animals :-)

On the way back to Hamilton I had 2 seats and could actually sleep a bit. And we arrived half an hour earlier, so I could manage to walk home before it started to rain heavily. Yay!

Oh yeah, big thanks to Wolfgang for commenting my photos :-)

1 Comments:

At 12:36 PM, Blogger njyo said...

You're welcome! Doing what I can (or atleast think that I can...) and since I should not comment on the conference, I at least can do it on the pictures. ;)

Hope you can enjoy the last weeks down there... my time here is also ticking out and it's a really weird feeling.

Anyways, take care!

 

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