Late post #2 Pinch me, I'm dreaming

Friday July 2, 2010
We landed In Auckland about 5:30 in the morning. I slept most of the trip, even through “How to train your dragon”  After a long wait for customs, and a biosecurity officer giving me the third degree because I live on a farm- it was off to explore Auckland with all of the Arcadia Students.

We started with a short walk about the city, learning about a few things here and there (they’re extremely proud of beating the Americans in the American cup!) then we separated and went for lunch. My group chose a tiny café that was down a kind of shady alley, but the food was fantastic, and the staff extremely friendly-as are most Kiwis’s I’ve met so far! Auckland is the largest city in NZ- and you can definitely tell. While it’s 1.5 million inhabitants doesn’t seem like a lot of people compared to some American cities. However, it is incredibly diverse-Japanese, Maori, Kiwi’s from European descent etc. All of this diversity means you can feel the city vibrate with energy. After lunch we were off to the North Shore to explore bunkers that had been built during WWI. We climbed a fairly good sized hill (not easy when fighting jet-lag!) only to find that the bunkers were overshadowed by the expansive view of almost the entire city of Auckland. This gorgeous view was what cemented the fact that, yes; we were actually in New Zealand. Everyone’s jaws dropped, and the cameras were quickly pulled out.

Once we finally got over our awestruckness from the view we headed back in to Auckland to head up to the top of the Sky Tower. This is the tower that many people associate with Auckland/New Zealand. One quick ride up a glass bottomed elevator and we made it to the top! I’m not sure how tall the Skytower actually is, but, in my opinion, with the glass sections in the floor, that looked straight down, it is plenty tall enough! The Sky Tower also offers bungy jumping, so we were able to watch a few people’s rather fascinating expressions as they jumped off this tower.

Finally we all grabbed pizza together for supper. By this time all of us were ready to drop-and I even fell asleep before we were done eating. Oops! So with that note, it is only 7:30 here, but I am off to catch some much needed sleep!



(P.s) Pictures will come, it's hard to upload them because you have to pay for internet based off of megabits used. So uploading will eat up a lot of them. They are worth the wait though!