Today I slept in while Dad went downstairs to breakfast. He brought me back a croissant so I think I won in the long run.
We had a leisurely morning in the hotel. Dad perused the local paper (full of ads bordered with snowflakes for Christmas party locations but all showcasing green lawns and beaches...). I made tea with our hot water heater and ate my croissant while reading some of my Stephanie Plum mystery.
We got rolling around noon and decided to walk down to the harbour (we missed the shuttle by about one minute). The walk was quite nice however. It wasn’t too far either, a little less than 2km. We walked past an interesting looking shop right as it started raining, so we popped in to take a look.
The shop was called Real Groovy. It was an eclectic mix of novelty bookstore, second hand clothing shop, and music shop. Upon closer inspection it appeared that there might be different people leasing different parts of the store to sell their goods.
Wandering through we found a biography of Lady Gaga’s rise to fame, sheet music for the Beatles complete works, a treatise on the philosophy of House, old cowboy boots, Stuff On My Cat: Volumes 1 and 2, and an entire room of used CDs. The guy selling the old cowboy boots was from Texas.
Our attention was eventually grabbed by a table of CDs for $3 each or 10 for $25. It rained long enough that we managed to find 10 CDs. Some of them were by artists we knew (Madonna’s Hard Candy and something by Sinaed O’Connor), a few were greatest hits collections, two were by New Zealand artists, and the rest were random impulse buys by groups that look like they’ll either be awesome or awful.
By the time it stopped raining we had 10 CDs picked out. We finished our walk down Queen Street (by this time there was no sign of any clouds anywhere). The harbour was pretty, but mostly geared toward shoppers, which we are not. Dad suggested we take a look at the University since we were nearby.
It was a short walk (albeit uphill) and we used our iPhones to find out where the International Office was. Anyuan Wang was nice enough to take a few minutes and tell me about their program even though she was in the process of moving her office!
The University of Auckland actually seems like it would be a really good fit. They offer classes in MedSci (medical science) that are the kind of classes Northwestern doesn’t teach (classes about disease, cancer, physiology, etc.). I hear rumors the program is cheap if you can manage to direct enroll. Campus is nice and seems like a good size, not too big, not too small. They also have a thriving film community and their Psychology faculty (department) is what they’re known for. They approach psychology from two different aspects, art and science.
After talking to Anyuan Dad and I realized we hadn’t actually had lunch. Neither of us was super hungry so we decided to just grab coffee and a snack at one of the numerous coffee shops on campus. We went to the Relax Lounge and ordered a scone the size of my head to split. Dad had a coffee and I ordered a small Chai latte.
IT WAS THE BEST CHAI LATTE I HAVE EVER TASTED. It was like happiness in a cup. It was like a conversation with your best friend and Christmas served up with warm steamy goodness and nutmeg and cinnamon and masala.
After one sip of that latte I didn’t care about any of the academic or cultural merits of the University, I just wanted to study there so I could have one of those lattes every day.
When I was done I wished I’d ordered a large...
We left the Relax Lounge and went in search of my first souvenir from the trip, a University of Auckland hoodie. We found a nice one in the Sports and Recreation center. It’s grey with three Kiwi birds on the front and the University logo on the sleeve. I’m quite pleased.
By the time we’d done that we’d almost walked back to the hotel so we abandoned the idea of taking the shuttle back and just walked to the hotel, where I spent the afternoon ripping all the CDs. I discovered the 41st Annual New Zealand Music Awards came with a bonus DVD of music videos that actually would play on my laptop.
New Zealand music videos are very different than American music videos... as in they’re good.
Not the best song discovered, but a good video.
Dad and I started discussing making a reservation at one of the restaurants downstairs for dinner. Just as we decided we should our phone rang. It was the front desk. Asking if we wanted to make dinner reservations. ESP Hotline calling...
After listening to some snippets of the CDs we bought my initial reaction is that I’m disappointed in Hard Candy but would like to look up Melanie C’s later work.
Melanie C - Northern Star
Dinner was very good. We actually went to Barolo’s (the Italian restaurant). We had a lovely waitress from the French Riviera named Lottie. We met our tour guide, Renee Whitecloud, who dropped off some paperwork for us.
The rest of the group (17 people in all) decided to dine at Barolo’s as well, but we didn’t meet many of them because their reservation was for much later than ours.
I’m excited to start our tour tomorrow!
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