Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty

This afternoon, driving home from the Coromandel Peninsula, we stopped at a roadside cafe for a snack. It turns out we had stopped into a royalist cafe for a snack, where we read pamphlets provided by The Monarchist League of New Zealand while eating chocolate banana cake. You can read some of their delightfully innocuous propaganda at www.monarchy.org.nz. Here is a particularly tasty morsel: "Like most monarchs, the Queen receives no salary for serving as New Zealand's head of state. She is a volunteer. . . She does this, not for personal glory or accolades, but out of a great personal respect and admiration for New Zealand." As a New Yorker, it was hard for me to believe that this cafe and all its memorabilia (commemorative cookie tins for the wedding of Price Charles and Princess Diana?) wasn't displayed ironically, but Aldo assures me it is in earnest.