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Published: December 29th 2008
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Hey everyone!!
My blog for Auckland really wont be very long… mainly because I haven’t done very much here apart from work! I started work the very first day I got to Auckland after my Canadian roommate Jen told me to come along and worked everyday apart from maybe 2 or 3 days where I finally got around do doing some sightseeing….or just sleeping etc.! :o)
Work was hard work - on our feet all day (days were usually 11 hours long!) unpacking boxes (which were very heavy!), putting up tables, selling all the dvds, cds and books etc, but im really glad I did it as I managed to earn over $900 which will help as New Zealand is, unfortunately, not as cheap as South America! And all the customers were really really nice and chatty which helped the boredom!!
I met up with Esther and Steve a few evenings for dinner in their new flat which was really nice….i cant even describe how nice it is meeting up with people again who already know you so you don’t have to start all over again with people as usual with the whole “where are you from, where
have you been, where are you going next etc etc”! So it was really nice to catch up with them!
One of my sightseeing days off wasn’t very successful….i wandered around Auckland with a lovely Irish girl who was staying in our room - we tried going up the Sky Tower but it was way to expensive, then we wanted to go to the Ice Bar where everything even your cup is made out of ice but that was too expensive too so we decided to go to the bar next door where we could peak in but that was closed as they were having a staff meeting so in the end we just gave up!
However, my day sightseeing with Steve was a lot more successful…we walked from his flat to Mount Eden which is Aucklands highest cone at 196m and a much prettier and cheaper (obviously free!) alternative to the Sky Tower! The 50m deep crater is known as Te Ipu Kai a Mataaho (the Food Bowl of Mataaho, the god of things hidden in the ground) and is considered very sacred! From Mount Eden you could see the whole city, including One Tree Hill (Maungakiekie)
where you can find the grave of John Logan Campbell who gave the land to the city in 1901 requesting that a memorial (an obelisk and statue above the grave) be built to the Maori people. Up until 2000 a Monterey pine stood at the top of the hill, which was a replacement for a sacred totara that was chopped down by British settlers in 1852. Maori activists first attacked the foreign tree in 1994, finishing the job 2000. There are no plans to plant another tree at the moment as locals cannot agree on what type of tree belongs there. So One Tree Hill is currently without tree, which I found slightly amusing!
Auckland has a population of 1.2 million and is made up of lots of volcanos, all of which you can see from Mount Eden. Auckland has a very large Asian community along with the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world! I stayed in Queenstreet Backpackers, just off Queensstreet which is the commercial heart of the city - the location was really good and the hostel owner, Tom, is the lovliest hostel owner I have ever met, soooo helpful and always feeding us
chocolate and sweets! :o) The only downside to the location was that there are a few rowdy clubs in the area and we occasionally woke up in the middle of the night to screams of “IM F****** GOING TO RIP YOUR HEAD OFF” as another fight kicked off! New Zealand reminds me so much of England - from the countryside to the houses and food but also, unfortunately, the drink culture…there seems to be a lot of binge drinking here too, girls are tottering around wearing nothing early on in the evening and whenever ive walked home from work late (about 9/10ish) everyone already seems wasted and the fights start! We’ve also had the pleasure of walking past people still out drunk and throwing up everywhere on our way to the bus station to go to work at 8am in the morning….NOT what you want to see when you’ve just had breakfast! Hehe!
One evening when walking home from work, I bumped into Sandra and Andrea, 2 friends from Munich who I met through Michi, which was sooo random (I knew they were coming to New Zealand sometime soon but wasn’t sure when and we hadn’t made any plans
to meet!) but really lovely - we went for dinner together and spent the evening chatting and catching up! They were the first people I have seen in 7months who I knew before I came traveling so it was really cool! :o)
Muchos amor xxxxxxxx
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