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Published: April 3rd 2006
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Three blogs in one week?! You lucky things! This is liz here busy blogging whilst waiting for tom to finish work. My new job has rather varying hours so have finished today at 3pm whilst tom will still be slaving away untill 5.30 (tee hee) but more on the job front to come.
First of all let me just say that we have been in Auckland for about one month now, and very nice it is too! We arrived from a wet and windy Fiji to find that NZ is really rather tropical (at this time of year anyhow). We arrived very early one sunday morning (of course) and shuttled it into town. It is always strange arriving in a new city/country but to arrive in a place that you have told everyone that you are going to live in for 6 months but know very little about is even more odd, "lets just hope they like it" I hear you cry, luckily we did.
As i was saying we knew very little about Auckland before we arrived, other vistors (and lots of Kiwis) had told us "Oh well its not REAL New Zealand but its ok", thats appart
Skytower, Auckland
Being brave and looking down.. from people who live anywhere outside Auckland who say things like "how are you liking Auckland? Horrible place isn't it?". Understandably these impressions make you think but we were determined to discover for oursleves so booked into a downtown hostel for a week to get to know the city before deciding wether to stay or to head down to Wellington.
Interestingly when we arrived on the shuttle (bus thing from the airport) we ended up at Aucklands most famous landmark, The Skytower, something we were going to become very familiar with in the coming weeks as you can see the tower from EVERYWHERE in Auckland, not that this helps you get around in any way but it is certainly v comforting, like the castle in good old Edinburgh it constantly reminds you where you are and that it is somewhere cool. Even more intresting was the fact that we hadn't intended to be at the skytower at all but at our hostel so we lugged our rucksacks down a few blocks (down Victoria Street, along Queen Street, it was all strangly Edinburger, later we were to discover that Auckland also shares with Edinburgh a Meadowbank and a Morningside, and
we thought it was Dunedin that was supposed to be the Scottish one? It was only when we had to cross over Shortland Street that we were sure we were heading in the right direction). Once at the hostel sleeping and eating were the order of the early morning before back to the Skytower to get a proper look at the city. After traveling up in 2 very Willy Wonka esk lifts (no Johnny look alike unfortunatly) we arrived at the highest observation level (thas 220m off the ground) and had a good look around. We attempted to walk across the reinforced glass floor, as you can see i managed it whilst tom could only stand on it when a) not looking down b) holding onto the handrail... considering some people where enjoying a base-jump (on wire) outside then i thought this was particularly brave!
On a clear day (aparently, according to their website) you can see approximately 82 kilometres (51 miles) from Sky Tower and this probably accounts for our first impressions of Auckland from the air, gosh isn't it big? Couldn't help worrying that we were going to end up living in some extremity of the city
Tawharanui Regional Park
Our tent is the small blue one, the first on in the middle field, can you spot it? miles from anywhere, perhaps that is where they put all the vistors? Luckily we didn't have anything to worry about as we soon found ourselves a lovely little room in a cool flat in Parnell, which is the centre of the latte scene apparently. We had booked into the hostel for 7 nights but in the end we only stayed 2, now this isn't because it isn't nice sharing a room with 9 other people or a kitchen with about 300 but rather that we saw an advert for our flat - ok it was the shared pool and sauna that first caught our eye!
So after visiting the flat one night and meeting our new flatmates we moved out of the hostel and carried our stuff up hill to our new neighbourhood - must point out at this point that moving house tortoise style would no longer be possible as we have managed to accumulate an impressive number of excess belongings, not longer the backpackers we once were i am afraid, who knows what will happen when we have to move on? We arrived in our new place with high hopes that it would be a wonderfully relaxed
place to live (which it is) with a rather lenient approach to flat rentals (which it isn't). oh no we had to sign a contract and pay a deposit blah blah, after the horrors of loosing so much money on our last flat (in Edinburgh) this came as a bit of a blow but fingers crossed will get it back. For a complicated reason that i won't go into now we have to pretend that the 4 of us who signed the contract each have our own room so had to convince the landlords that we had never met before which was pretty amusing, for some reason however they decided Tom was Irish which made a nice change from me being accused of being a kiwi - as happened far too often in Edinburgh - on the other hand there is a place callled Winchester in NZ, yes i am going to go there and check it out don't worry, so maybe they go the wrong end of the stick after all?
So life in Auckland is pretty good, we are both working. I have been doing various temping jobs around the city but now have a 2 month
position working for a company that hires out accademic regalia for graduations which is good. Tom is planning away for a consultancy out in the suburbs and although the job is not too exciting - planning is not as interesting in NZ aparently, but the pay is great, wooo hooo! Trying to save up for rent food fun and the rest of our trip is a little bit tricky but at least we both get paid weekly so cash flows pretty well.
Other 'highlights' (if you can call work that?) include a couple of camping trips north of auckland, one to a place called Orewa which is a town about 45mins north of Auckland with a massive beach and another to a place called Tawharanui Regional Park which is an amazing state run park with beautiful beaches and countryside. There is also camping - but it gets booked up quickly at weekends so call them first all you kiwi campers out there. The park is surrounded by a fence with just one gate so that predators can't get in. In the park they have mananged to get rid of all the predators such as cats, rats and mice so
Liz Andrew and Meridith
Our two flatmates Liz and Meridith with Meridith's boyfriend Andrew who is involved in Auckland rugby and managed to blag us some free Super 14 tickets, score! birdlife is thriving. they are even talking about reintroducing the kiwi which would be great! Aparently NZ only has one native mammel and that is a kind of bat so i am not sure that REALLY counts, which is why it is so important to look after the bird species, especially the vulnerable flightless ones like the kiwi. A bit futher north of the park is a marine reserve called Goat island where fishing (or goating presumably..) is not allowed, we visited on a horrible grey day but still went snorkelling and saw some HUGE fish (2 ft long? I don't know exactly, big anyway) not quite a pretty as the ones in the last blog but there are some whoppers out there.
One weekend we went with our flatmates liz and meredith and our friend Andrew to watch the Blues, the Auckland rugby union team play as part of the Super14 competition - this is made up of teams from Nz, Oz and South Africa. The Blues were playing at home (Eden Park) to an ozzy team called the Brumbies, and we won, yay us!
More recently we have been on a saling course on Auckland harbour.
It was made up of 4 lessons with Penny Whiting who is an Auckland legend, especially in the sailing world. She takes people out on her 50ft yaught Endless Summer and teaches you all that you need to know really quickly through a combination theory and practical. I have sailed before but leant SO much, it was tom's first time and he was loving it. Offiicially the course has finished but Penny is taking us out again after Easter because the weather was a bit rubbish on one of our lessons. Can't wait and also going to try and befriend people with yachts and offer ourselves as crew so watch this space....
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Caz
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thanks for all the blogs, and the birthday pressies, made it a really nice start to the week! sounds like you having v v cool time, london is ALRIGHT, at least the sun keeps popping out every now and then will chat soon x x x x