St Andrews Day

It was a very windy week in Wellington - well the whole of NZ really. While walking to meet Jo and Noel for lunch I saw some tourists in their campervan waiting to cross the Strait on the ferry. They were smiling and I wondered how long it would be before they stopped. Some Aussies asked me if it was always windy? I said "Nooooo". Gina arrived on Monday night and we've spent the week catching up which has been great. Harry went to Nelson and Dunedin and I stayed in town (I really get quite envious with his travelling around the countryside). The weekend was busy catching up with Jill and Graham and planning our outfits for the Art Deco weekend, having dinner with Sharon and Aaron and then going to the panto with them. As per normal the Christmas show was written with a bit of poetic licence and lots of local innuendos. It was election night so lots of references to the characters of the 'political' show we'd been seeing over the past few weeks. Aladdin was written by a famous NZ playwright Roger Hall and after seeing it will have to read the real story to see how close it was to the truth (all I can remember is the magic lantern, the flying carpet and the genie).   We came back to a recorded version of the election, which was great as a 4 hour show could be reduced to about 1.5 hours. On Sunday we went to the celebrations for St Andrews day. Lots of pipers and Celtic music - the stage was battered about by the wind but the crowd sat sheltered by the food and gift caravans and so we had a great time listening to Robbie Burns music and watching people attempt to dance. We didn't know much about St Andrew and so when we got back I did a bit of googling. He is the patron saint of Scotland and also Romania, Russia, Ukraine, bits of Italy, Malta, Greece and Portugal. The day is also celebrated in Austria and Poland.  Its a holiday in Scotland - but the banks don't have to close (like other bank holidays) and employees don't necessarily get the day off but students at the uni of St Andrews do have a day of leisure.  The day has some superstitions surrounding it and I was intrigued to find that most had a marital theme - it was a day of magic where a young woman could find out some info about her future husband eg:

• In Poland they pour hot lead into water or hot wax through a key hole into cold water - the shape that comes out at the end says what the future husband's profession will be.
• In some areas in Austria, young women have a glass or two of wine perform a spell and kick a straw bed - all this while they are naked - I guess this could magically attract a husband or two if the bed kicking was a public affair! 
• Others throw a clog over the shoulder: if it lands pointing to the door, the woman will get married soon.
• In some parts of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the names of potential husbands are written on little pieces of paper and are stuck to a piece of dough.  They are cooked and then put into water and the first one to float to the surface of the water would reveal who the lucky man was.
• In Poland, some women put pieces of paper (on which they have written potential husbands) under the pillow and first thing in the morning they take one out and that's the lucky man.
• In Romania, it is customary for young women to put 41 grains of wheat beneath their pillow before they go to sleep, and if they dream that someone is coming to steal their grains that means that they are going to get married next year. 

What do you think of the kiwi version of a deck chair in the photos?