From Grads to Nomads

We have finally been able to see a bit more of the city as jet lag slowly wears off. Yesterday I was the only one able to rise in the morning, so I spent the early morning exploring, discovering a park overlooking the city and then heading over to the Auckland city museum on my own. It ended up being a long walk over hills and through a construction zone, so in retrospect the bus may have been a smarter choice....anyhow....the musuem was huge, the white building in the picture is of the museum. There was a floor on Maori history, where I saw an old Maori war canoe that held 100 warriors; a section on natural history where I saw stuffed albatross's and were amazed at the size of them; and a floor with New Zealand's war history where I learned that Kiwi's apparantly did fight in WWI and WWII.

Today Rob and I took a free shuttle over to Kelly Tarltons Antarctic Adventure, which I thought was very cool! It started off with replica huts of Shackelton's group when they were exploring the Antarctic, and all sorts of stories about their journey. We then got to see lots of penguins (large grin from me at this point) and rode a "snowtram" through the penguin area, which was extremely enjoyable. Picture penguins running around flapping their wings and waddling to and fro! Upon exiting here, there was a manta ray feeding, and these beasts were 450lbs!! We watched them for a while, I learned how to distinguish between a male and female manta ray, and then we moved onto the underwater tunnel with a moving sidewalk to watch fish, sharks, eels, and other such creatures.

Tonight, we decided to be real backpackers and try to cook dinner in the kitchen which was a bad bad idea! Our ceasar salad had the worlds most disgusting lettuce, as it is some strange variety of romaine which has the flavor of oversweetened vegetables. The toaster oven for our pizza was defective so we had burnt cheese and uncooked bread. Chris's ichican replica smelled like rotten seaweed, so needless to say, we brought pizza in from the outside world!

Tomorrow we have all intentions of buying a car, so hopefully the next post includes pictures of the beauty we will undoubtedly find.