Auckland Trip

High-tech panoramic view of Auckland and Waitemata Harbour

Every year the Uuniversity organizes a trip for the international students. This year's trip was a bus tour through Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city, given by some of the university's international coordinators. Auckland has a population about about 1.2 million people meaning roughly a quarter of the entire population of New Zealand. It's a proper city with restaurants, shopping centers and tall buildings. In fact, Auckland is home to SkyCity, the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere. I did not get to see it though, or much of anything else in Auckland since we were too late getting started to do any of the things planned for our tour . Well, not any of it. We did complete the first item on our itinerary, which was a trip up Mount Eden, Auckland's highest extinct volcano. I hate to be an ethnocentrist but in America we would call it a hill. With lots of sheep on it. To be fair, it was high enough to be windy on top. unbelievably windy, in fact. I had a hard time keeping balance so I apologize for the poor quality of my pictures. The nice ones are probably my flatmate Lisa's.

There is a lovely monument on top of the volcano/mountain/hill but I can't tell you what it's about because it was too windy for me to read the plaque. Here are some pictures to prove how windy it was:

Perhaps even more exciting that the volcano was my first up close and personal interaction with sheep. And there were a crapload of them. My general impression of them is still that they're cute, but self-aware and very angry, like the one on the left. He baahed at me and strutted away rather pissily after I took that picture.

After Mount Eden the bus dropped us off in the center of the city. Joanna (Chinese girl in the top right windy photo) has lived in New Zealand for a year so she enthusiastically offered to give several of us a tour and take us to a "real" Chinese restaurant. I was quite excited to see what Marge Simpson would describe as sleeping, upside-down, inside-out ducks in the restaurant window because I've always wanted to try duck. Turns out it's almost exactly like the dark meat of turkey except greasier. Not bad, but I wish I'd been more adventurous and ordered the Eggplant with Salted Fish. Guess there's next time. I'd like to mention here that I did a respectable job eating with chopsticks.

Shredded duck, Pork Soup, Jasmine Tea and somewhat successfully using chopsticks

After we finished eating Joanna took us to the harbor. Once we got there we had to promptly leave in order to catch the bus back. This post isn't finished but I'm posting it anyway because I figure I owe you guys something. I have to go to class now.