Wednesday was rather a strange day. The tour manager was still not feeling too well but she is made of stern stuff and so we went into Gisborne to look for a dress for her to wear to Raffles on Christmas Day. Unfortunately she was quite up to it and after about a hour we returned home. Illness on a tour like this is dreadful and we were all a bit concerned when she took to her bed again in the afternoon.
The result was that we spent a quiet afternoon doing very little.
Gisborne is an intriguing town built on a block system like any town in America, but at some time in the past somebody decided to plant palm trees along all of the major roads in the city centre. The result is that you feel that you are in a seaside town but it is hard to see the sea from anywhere in the city centre.
The world is becoming a global village with many of the shops in New Zealand being the same as you might find in Australia, as commerce on a large scale replaces small independent shops it is harder to find interesting little shops.
We went to a large department store called Farmer's which could have been any department store in any city in the world. The tour mangager did find some clothes she liked, which is never really a problem for her, and our "guard" as she as trying things on told us that if we put items on hold until the following day we would get thirty percent off, as they were having a sale on Thursday. We were not sure if she should have told us this, but it was too good an offer to miss and so that is exactly what we did. It seems to me that all shops across the world are still struggling to sell and the result is a large number of sales, in fact they are in almost every shop you look in. The problem for customers is determining whether or not these are genuine sales. It also appears that the centre of Gisborne is not particularly busy and that everyone is waiting for the sales that inevitably follow Christmas.