Tiffany and Greg Around the World
Enroute San Jose, CA, USA
It provides us with endless amusement that after all the places we’ve sailed to, all the countries we’ve travelled around by boat, that we’ve flown into and out of Auckland, New Zealand…the “City of Sails.”
Sometimes we just enjoy being contrarian because we can be.
There comes a moment of truth in every long-term traveler’s trip when they are forced to confront a simple question with a heck of a lot of implications:
“Is this worth going home for?”
Auckland, New Zealand
Since the topic of drinking came up a few times over the past few entries let’s let Greg share with you a little story about something that happened to us in New Zealand and an important lesson he learned from it:
Greg: Remember how we got this amazing invite to have Christmas with a Kiwi MasterChef contestant and his family?
So yeah, duh, we did that. This dinner lasts several hours. Several. As we’ve said, Kiwis are really nice people and if you befriend a really nice person and they invite you over for a feast…well you should expect to be there a while. At the very beginning of the afternoon I had 2 glasses of wine with everyone. After that, I called it quits because I was the one who was going to drive us home that evening and you know, better safe than sorry right? Besides, they had Coke Zero so it’s not like I was deprived or anything.
Like I said, we were at this dinner party for a long time. We had hors d’oeuvres, we had dinner, we had dessert, we talked, we mingled, it was great. Everything you could possibly want as a traveler invited into the home of a local for Christmas. Hours flew by. Tiffany even made key lime pie from scratch, or perhaps I should say from crumbs, as you previously saw I was involved in that.
So it’s pushing midnight before we’re ready to leave. My mother, who has joined us for the holidays, asked if I’m Ok to drive. It wasn’t a reflection on how I’m was acting or anything, it’s just my mom. She asks. She’s proactively safe and good like that.
“Yeah mom, I’m fine, I haven’t had a drink since before we had food and only 2 glasses then.”
Continue reading “Breath Test FAIL!”
Auckland, New Zealand
So when you’re done eating ridiculously good food and celebrating the holidays by watching explosives detonate over the main business district for New Years or just strolling around and being overtly assaulted by the beautiful scenery and cornucopia of pleasant scents …what do you do for fun in Auckland? What would an Aucklander do if they were bored and looking for something to do on, oh say, a given Thursday evening?
Continue reading “Looking for a Good Time”
As promised, here is the first installment of our adventures in international drinking! Anyone wanting to join us as we taste our way around the planet need only click on the “grog files” tab in the navigation bar.
Auckland, New Zealand
Come on, how often do you get to call first on New Years? Well, if you’re a Kiwi probably about once a year but still, we’re American so it’s cool!
Sydney claims first and the world gives it to them but that’s hogwash. Auckland is closer to the dateline, so they have lawful first claim.
Also, Sydney has fireworks off a bridge over water (weak) while Auckland launches explosives off the Sky Tower which is right over their main city buildings…way more dangerous…which means way more cool!
Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland just smells good.
Being people who grew up in cities, we got used to the smells that are a normal part of urban life: car exhaust, cleaning chemicals, in San Francisco the smell of cable car brakes is fairly common. Millions upon millions of people living closely together are going to generate smells. Most of them are not overly pleasant.
Auckland hasn’t yet hit that people to landmass ratio and there is an abundance of vegetation throughout the city. So as we walked around it was not unusual to stop suddenly, look at each other while sniffing the air and say, “wow, that smells amazing!”
Like we said, it was early spring when we arrived and while it was way too cold for Tiffany to think anything it its right mind would grow, apparently no one had told the Kiwi plants that.
Auckland, New Zealand
With a population of about 1.3 million, the city of Auckland is the major city of New Zealand. It’s considered so truly massive that recent legislation has consolidated all the suburbs under one city government which is referred to as the “super-city.”
To give you some perspective on this Auckland is the largest city, by far, that we have encountered in the South Pacific. It makes the major French Polynesian city of Papeete look tiny (to be fair, that would be because it is by our standards). Even for Kiwis, Auckland is huge. As many people live in the city as live on the entire bottom, larger, island of the nation. The Auckland area contains a full quarter of the national population of New Zealand, a nation that by islander standards completely dwarfs everyone else out here. Heck, the number of people in this city alone dwarfs many of the countries we’ve visited. Remember how Niue has a national population of 1300? There are more Niueans in Auckland than in their entire home country! So by islander standards, this place is huge.
On the other hand, in the US Auckland would come in as the 9th largest city in terms of population, somewhere between San Diego and Dallas.
… and we’re fairly certain that if we picked up the city of Auckland and just placed it into the San Francisco Bay area no would notice anything unusual. One because the city is not all that big compared to the rest of the Bay and two the city and its people would just fit in that well. Continue reading “Eating Kiwi Style”
Auckland, New Zealand
You’ll be happy (or envious, probably both 😉 to know that by the time December rolled around down here we managed to get full swing into summer.
And while it’s not exactly Florida temperatures, the added sunshine mixed with a stubborn defiance of the weather that the Kiwis must have inherited from their British ancestors makes for another warm-weather festive season.
Auckland, New Zealand
Kia Ora means hello in Maori, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand.
A plane flight brought us from Tonga to Auckland where we planned to spend a week or two with friends before returning to the US for a little while.
Right up front we want to make something clear about New Zealand. It’s not like we’ve ever claimed to be completely objective in reporting to you our findings during our wanderings of the world. Though we do our best to see things from different angles and explore the cultures that produce different ways of thought from our own we also understand that we are outsiders looking in and we may not grasp everything we see in all its minutia. We are human after all. Overall though we do our best to at least give you multiple points of view. This was very difficult for us to accomplish in New Zealand for one key reason:
New Zealand is about the most awesome country we’ve ever visited in our entire lives.
Enroute Auckland, New Zealand
Before entering New Zealand we really should take a moment to recognize something we have grown to realize in our travels.
Play this while reading:
When people ask us what we think of USA & UK relations, we, without fail say the same thing:
“Britain and the US have exactly the same relationship as Greg and his sister. Allow us to elaborate: During times of peace, no one fights more with each other than the US and the UK…but the second someone else steps into the fight to attack either side, both siblings immediately turn and jump the new threat, providing each other their full and unequivocal support. Once the interloper is decimated and we’re both sure the other is alright, the two immediately turn back on each other.”
