Auckland

I won’t bore you with the 36 hour tale of making our way to Auckland. I will tell you only that Mom and I had a wonderful time together and became slaphappy around the same hour of our journey, cackling audibly amongst other drowsy travelers. I had a sore throat scare during our layover in Los Angeles and Mom became fixated on and obsessed with a giant decorative screen that rotated moving images from falling water to the working insides of a grandfather clock. “Look at it now!” she said every few minutes, pointing as though I hadn’t seen it yet. Our thirteen hour flight to Auckland was not too terrible and our aisle-mate found it amusing when we added sound effects to our meal times and were laughing so hard that no noise came out.

As we made our way off of the airplane and over to Customs we noticed that the Auckland airport was full of threatening signs. They allow absolutely nothing into their country. The signs were huge and written in red. “DISPOSE OF ALL FOOD ITEMS OR PAY!”, “DECLARE, DISPOSE, OR PAY!”, “$450 FINE”. There was one every thirty feet. I immediately pitched an apple I had bought back in Houston. Mom had a bag of almonds. “I’m not throwing away my almonds. They were expensive.” she said unwavering and she ignored the signs and carried her little bag of almonds right up to the Customs agent. “I have these nuts.” she said confidently and extended the bag towards the uniformed woman and held them there for a long time. 

The woman ignored Mom and her bag of nuts as asked us other questions related to illegal weapons and the purpose of our visit. While she spoke, she glanced at Moms nuts, still suspended there under her nose and interrupted herself, “You can put those away.” Mom seemed confused and a bit let down as she tucked the baggie back into her purse.

Auckland is a big busy city and it is wall to wall full of Asian people. Most signs are written in English and again in Asian script. It didn’t occur to us until we got there that Asia isn’t that far away and it makes a lot of sense to find a large Asian population in the biggest city in New Zealand. In my notes I described Auckland as an Asian city built by the British and placed in the Caribbean, if that makes sense. I’ve not been to a legitimate big, busy city that has palm trees and tropical plants growing next to metro tunnels and bus stops. There are tons of different ethnicities and even more complex accents. People move there from all over and learn English. So they have their natural English speaking accent, say French or Korean and they’ve added on the intonations of the New Zealand accent. Most sentences end in a question sound? Like valley girls? But less annoying because you know it’s actually how they speak?

Mom and I spent our time in Auckland doing some hardcore trinket shopping. All day everyday. It was chilly there as it is currently wintertime and some days would sprinkle some light rain. This never stopped Trinket Mom who dragged me all through the city center looking at mugs and prints and tea towels. I did not complain about the trinket shopping because I was mentally prepared for it. Mom and I are very different travelers. Mom likes to go to a place and see what’s available for purchase, though she will not usually buy things for herself even if she really likes them. I like to go to a place and explore the landscape. Where our traveling preferences overlap are wonderful areas such as people watching, mid-day ice cream, and an affinity for eating breakfast out somewhere. It’s the clinking noises we like. Other meal dishes are noisy. Breakfast ones are small and delicate and make The Breakfast Noise.

One day we took a ferry to Davenport, a Mediterranean looking island in Auckland’s harbor that has a hiking trail leading to the best view of the city. Finally, something up my alley. I encouraged Trinket Mom as we stood at the base of the hill. “It’s going to be great Mom! And good for us! And there are no snakes in New Zealand!" That’s a fact. I wasn’t lying this time. 

Perhaps it was the small change in altitude for our dehydrated and sleep deprived bodies, but I imagine we ascended about 60 yards before we both felt really sick and turned around. Instead we had lunch in a little French café, treated ourselves to tea and dessert, and then continued trinket shopping. We really liked the souvenirs here and were elated by such interesting finds. We later decided that a lot of our souvenir store thrills were due to jet lag. 

In Auckland we visited a lovely park and had a number of tasty meals. We perpetually ran into this boy named Tom who stood on street corners giving information about and taking donations for UNICEF. The first day we met Tom he wiggled all ten of his fingers at us and said, "Ello Ladies!" with his thick accent. We smiled and walked past him without listening to his spiel. Though we worked a different section of town each day, so did Tom. He recognized the two of us each time and would try to talk to us though we would giggle and politely move by. One day Mom and I were walking along and I saw him standing in the distance. "Oh no it's the fingers boy!" I shouted and it struck both of us as so funny that we busted out laughing, catching Tom's attention. He turned to us, put his hands on his hips, and gave us a devilish smile. "It's fate!" he shouted happily and so we finally stopped to meet Tom and we decided he was a pretty good guy.

We thought Auckland was interesting but we don't feel like we need to go again. Though it was different in greenery, it was in fact just another big city full of hurried people with things to do. There were very few leisurely walkers stopping for ice cream and photo-ops. In fact, all but two photos were taken in Davenport and one of the city parks because the streets were too crowded and busy to take pictures. Also, I tend to not find a lot of appeal to city photos or building clusters. That's my own preference I suppose. I apologize. 

Perhaps in the summer Auckland feels less commercial somehow but after our four days Mom and I were happy to head south to the capital.