Auckland, New Zealand

Arrived here a few days ago.  First on the agenda was to go to the top of the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, The Auckland Skytower, which is just around the corner from the hostel I'm staying at so I did that in the afternoon, when the weather was pretty good, a few clouds but no rain.  The view was very nice and they even have a glass floor in the lift and at different spots around the viewing area, I of course could not walk on them, cause I'm a wimp!

That evening I went to Commerce Street to look for a pizza store, which my dad's mate in NYC's financial adviser's brother owns (did you follow that connection?)  The street luckily isn't that long & in amongst lots of Chinese restaurant's is Sal's New York Style Pizza.  I walked in & asked for Kieran.  "Yes, I'm him" the man said.  So I went on with the explanation of how I knew him and that his brother had sent me to say hello.  He smiled and said that was a first!  I got a slice of pizza, to test out how authentic it really was.  Amazingly it was spot on!  Come to find out, he imports all of his ingredients from America, WOW!

The next morning I went to Kaiheke Island, which turns out to be the 3rd most populated island in all of New Zealand.  It's a 40 minute ferry ride from Auckland.  Many people commute to Auckland for work from there.  The island also has a lot of artist living on it.  The weather was not fantastic, cloud covered and on the ferry back to the city it started to rain.

The following day, I was schedule to go sailing with my dad's mate from university, but the weather here in Auckland has not been working in my favour.  It poured with rain and pretty strong winds, so the sailing race I was going to participate in got cancelled.

Yesterday I thought I would spend the morning doing laundry and packing, but the dryer here at the hostel is so bloody old that it took forever to dry my clothes, and it's not like I had that much, but I had my jeans in there and they took a long time to dry!  Turns out my laundry wasn't ready till 2.30pm!  Then I spent a bit of time on the phone with my parents, since once I leave New Zealand, I'm not sure when I'll have phone access again.  Followed by packing up since check out is 10am and I didn't want to do it last minute.

Finished packing and noticed that 3 new girls in the room, but we only had 2 beds free.  After dinner I came back in and they were all drinking and eating smelly fishy food in the room.  I decided I wouldn't say anything until 10pm, when guests are suppose to leave and I'd have an excuse to kick one of them out.  But at 9.30pm, Nicole came into the room and couldn't stand the smell, so she asked them to leave.  I realised now that these girls were sooooooo drunk, they could barely stand up!  I was glad they were leaving the room and sorta hoped they'd pass out on the couches in the lounge area and never come back :-)

No such luck, at 11.30pm, all three came stumbling back into the room.  Two climbed into their beds and passed out, the third sat on a chair and sorta didn't know what to do with herself, she kept falling over and sliding off the chair, so I finally got off my bunk bed and asked her to leave (aka escorted her to the lift).  I thought all was fine, Nicole and I were joking about how drunk they were and how badly they would feel in the morning, when all of the sudden the girl on the lower bunk sat up and started to puke all over her bed and down the side by the wall.  Nicole and I, grabbed our purses and run to reception.  Announced what had happened and they upgraded us to a twin room for the night, so we went back to the smelly room, collected our things and headed to our new room.  All I can say is how glad I am that this happened on my last night of my NZ hostel staying or I might be worried about future repeats of this.

I am heading to Santiago, Chile this afternoon, but after last night had to go and get a Dunkin Donuts Coffee Coolatta for breakfast cause we weren't able to get to bed till nearly 1am and then Nicole had to wake up at 6am to catch her bus, so not a lot of sleep was had!