Meanwhile, good old Palmy is a comfortably small town of 70,000 people or so, many of which are students, and has a relaxed semi rural, semi academic feel to the place. Without the two tertiary institutions the place would be a complete hicksville. It would, in fact, be Levin. But it managed to escape that awful fate and is instead fairly charming in it's own way if you're willing to overlook things like the horrendously embarrassing Christmas parade that took place last weekend, for example.
I was meeting up with a friend in town when it took place, so we got ourselves some noodles for lunch and sat down on a grassy knoll to watch the parade. Now, I've been to the Wellington parade, which was an event. Many thousands of good natured spectators thronging the streets, huge and elaborate floats with everything from UFO themed neon displays through to wonderfully choreographed, costumed dancers of all nationalities, to huge brass bands and everything in between. It went on for ages and there were accompanying fairground rides and clowns on stilts and beautiful mime boys and girls who blew kisses to the audience.
You can probably already see where this is leading.
The Palmerston North parade, which I have on good authority was ten times better than last years, was largely a turnout of local businesses who wanted to advertise themselves to the general public. There were, perhaps, half a dozen decently put together floats of various Christmassy/pop cultural themes. Then there was another couple dozen vehicles that were just cars and trucks with some branding on them with maybe a bit of tinsel thrown on for good measure. There was, and I'm not even joking here, a completely unadorned coca-cola truck in the parade. It was a black Coke Zero truck, with a guy in it. No tinsel, no holiday message, just a dude in a coke truck, driving along the street in a parade. I suspected maybe he'd taken a wrong turn somewhere and was now just waiting to sneak off down a side street.
The army put in a showing, which was kinda cool, if weirdly off message. Nothing says holiday cheer like an armoured truck that has a uniformed soldier sticking out the top, leaning casually on his roof mounted gun and waving at the kids. Maybe they were following the dude who'd stolen a coca-cola truck and were playing a slow motion game of cat and mouse through the parade. I think the people I feel most sorry for in terms of the parade members are the poor sods who got drafted into lip synching along to I Gotta Feeling by the Black Eyed Peas. They were all done up in bad rocker outfits and the song was on loop for the entire parade. I watched them go past from my grassy knoll and reflected that no matter how bad things may get, they won't ever get that bad.
