Auckland

Well the first day was a little rough. After the 14 hour flight and 9 hour layover in LA, it was hard to tell where one day had ended and another began. I spent about 6 hours laying around the hostel lounge waiting to checkin and struggling to stay awake. The rooms are decent enough: 6 bunk beds (some have more or less), a mini-fridge and a chair with storage lockers. After checking in I just hung out in my room reading/napping/hoping my bag still existed. That's when I met my first roomate: Phil from Newcastle, England. He's a cool guy who is taking a year to see the world. He began backpacking in SE Asia, then Australia, then NZ, and just last night he flew off to Chile to backpack around South America. To summarize, Phil is my hero. Since it was still midday and I had nothing to do I decided to take a stroll around Auckland, or rather Queen St, which is the main tourist and center of hubbub, akin to Delmar near WashU, State St in Madison, or Michigan Ave in Chicago. There's been extensive Southeast Asian immigration here over the past umpteen decades, and the influence of those asian contingents is massive, with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai restaurants everywhere. Most stores have things written in one or another Asian language, and at least half the people around are clearly Asian. Anyway Auckland is nice enough, but it's a big city (the largest in NZ), and people generally don't visit NZ to see big cities, so it really isn't that appealing, and virtually every other traveler I've spoken to feels the same way. So I can't wait to get out of here.

We had an intense NZ orientation the next day which covered just about everything you could possible want to know about traveling here. So I need to take the next few days to just regroup and get a hold on all of this information to plan my trip. Right now I'm strongly considering settling down for awhile in either Wellington (the capital) or Christchurch, the 2nd largest city in NZ and largest on the South Island, which is known to be more beautiful than the North Island. But on the way I'm considering taking a 'hop-on hop-off' adventure bus. It's designed to take travelers off the beaten path, showing things that aren't necessarily advertised in all the guidebooks and which aren't major tourist stops. Some places are only accessible via these buses, and you can get off the bus in any city you want and stay as long as you want, hopping back on another bus whenever you want to leave (within a year). Expensive but I have no doubt that it will be worth it.

Beneath the hostel is the Globe Bar, which offers some sort of free or discounted attraction to travelers every single night, though usually at 8pm, meaning you sit around for 4 hours drinking waiting for the party to show up, but it's a nice place to unwind.

I've mostly been spending time with my roomates. Besides Phil, there is Kenny from Glasgow Scotland and Christi from Minneapolis (the dorms are co-ed) on the first night. Then Ian from England moved in for the second night. After that came Hiro from Japan, Basil from Switzerland, and Anastasia from Essex England (apparently known for having slutty girls, just saying). They're all great, and it's a huge luxury that everyone speaks English, kinda makes me feel guilty that I speak nothing else. Even Hiro communicates pretty well with broken English.

Aside from my roomates, I've met a variety of people. Apparently a group of 15 students from Germany all came here together, unfortunately they haven't really split apart from each other yet so it's hard to get to know any of them. During a speedpool tourney at the Globe Bar I got to meet folks from Denmark, another from Japan, England, Germany, Canada, and a couple girls from the US.

Some things I've noticed:

• virtually all the music I've heard is American, or dance remixes of American music.
• NZlanders don't just drive on the left, they customarily walk on the left side of escalators and stairs. I learned this through the experience of near collisions on a couple staircases.
• showering is not necessarily expected of any of the backpackers, nor is changing clothes from day-to-day.
• I love accents.
• If you don't make your own food in the kitchen, you'll lose money pretty quickly.

Until next time blogfans, cheers mate!