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Published: April 21st 2010
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I’ve been getting some great travel tips from my roommates here in Auckland, unfortunately (or fortunately) most McGagburgers do not have WIFI free or otherwise. Many of the libraries in larger towns will have a network that you can connect to for free, but it can be difficult to access at times because of the number of people like myself looking for a free connection. I’m in the Auckland Central Library as I write this but cannot seem to access the network due to traffic. There’s a café attached the boasts internet for $3 an hour and $6.50 for a day, if I am forced to convert to coffee for my caffeine fix, then this may be the place to go.
I was pretty badly jetlagged yesterday and was turning in at 7pm my time (midnight back home) but was convinced by my two roommates from Israel (Freddie and Alon) to go to a local Irish pub called Father Tom’s. There was a special on for half kilo steaks and a large plate of fries or mashed potatoes for $10NZ (7CDN)! The pubs own draught beer was pretty good, but it would seem that about 80% of the beer brewed
in New Zealand is 3% alcohol which feels weird after you’ve had your 3rd or 4th beer and you still feel like you’ve just walked in. I also taught them the meaning of a few Canadianisms such as the meaning of the word hoser and tried to explain just how important it was that Canada won in men’s gold medal hockey (I‘m still not certain if the weight of it sunk in).
Over breakfast this morning they told me that after having be traveling in New Zealand for 2 months, it was well worth joining up with a hostel organization called BBH (www.bbh.co.nz). I’ve been told that all the hostels in the organization are rated by the people who stayed there, and that they are usually smaller than BASE hostels (Auckland having 10 floors including the reception and lounge floor). BASE is not bad by any means, but it can be difficult to interact with the people around you as a whole because there are so many of them. BBH costs $45NZ to sign up but you also get a $20 phone card that lets you call overseas land lines for 9c a minute, $3 off your stays every
night in their hostels, and free online booking (usually $2). I still have a mailing address at any BASE hostel and the BASE jumping is still a fairly good deal, but I’ll probably be looking into BBH in the future.
I’ve only seen a little bit of the city so far, but the parts I have seen are very hilly. If Saskatoon is flat in comparison to Vancouver, then Vancouver is Saskatoon-like in comparison to Auckland. I guess that’s what you get when your city is built on over 50 semi active volcanoes (sorry no surface lava flows). Tomorrow I’m probably going on a bus tour that was included in my starter work pack, it’s supposed to take us around all the sights of Auckland so I’ll make sure to get a lot of pictures.
It turns out that despite the fact that I even paid for a legal copy of Microsoft Office and activated the sample copy that came on this computer with the CD key (which it happily accepted) it now displays a message when I open Word telling me that I need to register a valid CD key! Of course something had to go wonky
today, everything else was actually working out. No real matter, it just means that I have to use the cheapo Microsoft Works word processor that came with the computer an belches ads at you from the sidebar.
I’ll be cooking dinner for myself for the rest of the week (I know big shock get over it) since I stopped by a grocery store and picked up some fruit, Coca Cola, pasta, and sauce fixings. The public kitchens here look pretty decent and they’re big, which is good because they seem to get a lot of use. If I post again it means that I survived my own culinary genius.
Thursday I go on the big job hunt, and the early results with determine how long I’ll be staying in the city. There is still a large amount of work in the Bay of Island area in fruit picking and in the vineyards, so heading north sooner than later may be the way to go.
Talk to you later.
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anonymous
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Lots of interesting pics! Leslie