New Zealand, Auckland- Introduction

We took another mini vacation! We wanted to get away and we debated various locations but decided we might as well stay on this side of the globe. As B would not be able to take more than a week, we decided to plant ourselves in Auckland for the week. Nice temps: highs of 12 C - 18 C with a mix of sunny, cloudy, drizzly- early winter weather for Auckland.

There was a lot of construction going on near our hotel. They are building additional public transportation systems and that has spurred additional construction as well. They had workers at most corners to help folks cross the streets as it would have been difficult to navigate without help. Interestingly, at many intersections they stop traffic in all directions simultaneously so you can cross diagonally.

Our hotel was located on the end of Princes Wharf, right on the water. Here's an old photo of our hotel. From our room we had a 270 degree view of the water and city.

We enjoyed the quite varied views depending on time of day and weather.

We were sitting out on our balcony and it started sprinkling just a bit and out came this rainbow. The rainbow then seemed to travel away from us off towards the horizon and disappeared.

This view looks towards Queen Street Wharf- the next one over from us. In the right corner is more of our hotel where they were doing construction. Allegedly, only between 9 and 4. Let us just say that 9 is not the same as, say, 7:15 or 8:00. Yes, that's right, they began much earlier than 9 and also worked on Sunday- the day the hotel told us no work was to be done.

On our first night we walked to Queen's Arcade and located a yarn shop recommended by a friend. It was a small place. We bought some fat quarters. It was at that point we realized the shop hours had ended 30 minutes earlier. There was another customer in the shop after "closing" also. They were very nice to stay.

The view was pretty good at night!

 One of the many ferries.

Only two  cruise ships came in during our stay. We only saw one because the second one came the day of our 13 hr "day trip"- more on that later. This one pulled in on the far side of Queen Street Wharf.

Off in the distance we could see (right to left) North Head, Mt. Victoria as well as Rangitoto Island. It is located the furthest away. All three were active volcanoes at one time. Rangitoto erupted most recently, about 600 years ago. New Zealand is full of inactive volcanoes!

My friend had recommended we stop in at a very special ice cream shop in Auckland. The first time we walked there the queue was huge! It was on Sunday afternoon. We opted not to wait in the huge queue. On a day during the week we returned to find a very small queue.  The shop is called Giapos. They originally began their shop hosting a wide variety of flavors but business wasn't too great. They decided to change their shop to an ice cream experience shop. They take small groups- a few people at a time- and do a tasting of their 8-10 flavors. Once you select a flavor or flavors, their "ice cream chef" prepares your ice cream. The flavors are a little different but the presentation of the ice cream is their gimmick. You can get the ice cream in a cone shaped like a giant squid among others. We opted for the simple paper cup. I opted against the "toppings" which are predetermined by the chef. This was B's :

I had one flavor on the bottom and feijoa-lime ice cream on the top. The feijoa-lime ice cream was delicious but they put way too much in the cup! Don't know what a feijoa is?  It's a relative of the guava and it is everywhere in New Zealand. You eat it by cutting it in half and scooping out the flesh. Juices nicely too.
Not that much to look at, but very tasty.
All in all, it was sort of interesting, but way too expensive for ice cream.

While near the ice cream place we found an area called Britomart. It's a pedestrian only area filled with restaurants. One evening we walked back and enjoyed a really nice Italian meal at Amano's. We sat at the counter where we watched pasta being made, one guy squeezing countless lemons and more. The guy squeezing lemons was also responsible for shucking oysters which were served up on little piles of salt. This was the view directly in front of us. The place was extremely busy. One other note- they served and refilled a very nice sparking water from pitchers instead of an ordinary tap water or individual bottled water you need to purchase.

While in New Zealand we also caught the final episode of The Big Bang Theory. Very well done.We will miss that show!

Around Town:

We made good use of our feet and also jumped on the hop-on/hop-off buses when needed.

One morning we visited Bastion Point, Mt. Eden and Mission Bay and located lunch -just to name a few. We managed to stretch our legs quite a bit and got to enjoy some pretty nice views.

Bastion Point was one of many fortified spots in and around Auckland.

Stairs up to Mt. Eden

Mission Bay

Considering this was early winter, it was a pretty nice day!

Since the last post in March...1/3

Once again, time has gotten away from me, but I will attempt to catch you up with some brief snippets...

B spent a week in France, having left just a couple of days after getting our passports back (visas) in late March! Whew!

Easter came and went. There were decorations at some local malls. Here is one: neon bunny heads!

The rainy season is finally ending- very late May into early June this year. We just had heavy rain yesterday again! This is very late compared to the last couple of years. Usually during the rainy season, the heavy rains have kept the air cleaner than when it doesn't rain, but not this year. As examples, here are two photos taken April 18, the other is June 4.

On the other hand, early in May we had massive storms one day and the air was really nice for part of one day. That's our apartment building peaking out- the taller building ! This sort of sky is indeed rare!

I have been incredibly busy with the American Women's Association. I am still training our latest President, handling the social media, being secretary and so on.  I have facilitated amending our Constitution and Bylaws and have split the job I was doing across 2 positions. I am no longer officially on the Board as of June 1. I will be training my 2 replacements who are both new to town and new to AWA but I will continue in my role as "special adviser to the President." We shall see just how fast I can fully step away.  It has been extremely time-consuming so I am need of a break. I will need to do some great training and our current President must accept the fact that the newbies will not do everything as I did. The majority of the Board members will take on their role once again for the new fiscal year and that will hopefully instill some stability which has been difficult to achieve with so many different people coming and going. I personally have worked with at least 7 different AWA presidents! Amazing! I will still volunteer when I can!

I was also involved in planning our spring charity bazaar. We tried a new approach for our bazaar raffle in April for AWA and I helped "decorate" the wheel we already owned. It was in storage. We discovered it when we did inventories of all of our publications and all items in warehouse storage. You paid the price for one spin, and you won either 1, 3 or 5 raffle tickets. You then could put your raffle tickets in small boxes for the prizes you wished to win. The drawings were held throughout the day. It was only somewhat successful as the wheel wasn't located in a good spot. I won a dinner for two. I know the manager so I will arrange with her when we want to go for our special dinner!

Did I mention before that I am taking bridge lessons with AWA? We haven't been able to meet very often lately so I am not making much progress but I am trying.

I have no idea what this is about but at least 100 men were living for approximately 2 weeks on the roof of this building we can see from our apartment. It is within the police station compound.

Here's a new spot in one of the local malls. There is a "snow" machine and there is even a small slope. The "snow" appears to be more like crunched up ice, but still fun for the kids. There is actually an indoor place that opened outside of the city that claims to have skiing and snowboarding, sledding, ice skating and other snow related activities. I can't imagine how it could be large enough to accommodate all of that and I don't know anyone who's actually been there yet. It's really set up for the kids just as this mall spot is set up for kids.

Practically no one buses their own tables at quickie food locations. Some say it would eliminate jobs so they use that as an excuse to just walk away. However, we noticed this sign somewhere. It basically says clean up after yourself- start a trend.

A friend from Norway returned to her home in April and another one of my friends is leaving July 11. Here she is with her finally finished tuffet! It was truly a group project to help her finish it! She returns to her native Austria.

I am still planning and collecting fabric for my second tuffet. I finally finished a scarf I was working on. Meanwhile I am still working on a wall hanging quilt with 9 blocks. Six are completed so far. This is very time consuming with so much embroidery. I have completely changed most of the embroidery patterns and am learning all sorts of new stitches. I am working on block 7 now!

Here is a acrylic painting I completed a bit ago. We will have it matted and framed but I did this digitally when I was playing around with a photograph of it so I thought I would share it. I have no idea what we'll select when we actually get to the framer shop but I will try to share the actual framing once it's done. We tried to go last Saturday to the framer but they were already closed for Idul Fitri. Ramadan ended June 5 and 6 so many small shops are closed for a couple of weeks. The banks were closed all this week. ATMs were still open unless they ran out of cash.

Since the last post in March...2/3 Construction Updates

Construction site#1 hasn't really changed much in a long while. 

Work is slowly continuing but much of it is on the inside now. At least part of this appears to be a restaurant. This photo was taken on May 10. We hope it isn't a night club on the upper floors but it looks like an outdoor circular bar on the top level.. Hmmm.  One day there was a lettered sign on what appeared to be white plastic on the side of the building. The next day it was gone. Another hmmm.

Construction site #2 is a complete mystery but we believe it is some sort of "controls" building.
This set of photos was taken between March 27 and May 10.

Based on the size of the crane, this building won't be more than a couple of stories tall. They do work on this during the night,  but it's on the other end of the apartment so while it is bothersome during the day, it doesn't disturb my sleep.

You may remember previous posts including photos of the work to pour 100 or more concrete pilings  on this site (the pilings seemed to fill the area, side-by-side). They poured these pilings over several months. Then the site work stopped for quite a while. Once work began again, they dug a big hole and broke up every single piling and hauled them away. That was noisy work. Hmmm.

Once they got this floating sort of foundation in, they installed what looks like a temporary roof. The roof is incomplete in this shot, but it covers the entire site now. The roof itself is still below ground.  ?????

Since the last post in March..3/3 Food and drink!

I mentioned we had a bit of a wait for our passports (and residence visas) back in late March.We spent a few days in Singapore in order to facilitate the process. While there, we visited the zoo again as well as the craft store for a few essentials, but practically no photos were taken. We have been to the Singapore Zoo quite a few times so I suppose we have covered it photographically.

We were fascinated, however,  with the dessert spot in our hotel. Just read some of these descriptions:

The green dome is called a Moscow. It's candied exotic gelee of mango, passionfruit, and banana with a toasted almond sponge and vanilla bean mousse. The one to the left of the Moscow is called a Cassis Puffy. It is airy choux puff with rich cassis cremeaux combined with cassis marshmallow and coated with chocolate.

The royal hazel is rich chocolate paste with a combination of premium dark chocolate matched with crispy feufetine.

The Pomme is green apple whipped french creme with fresh green apple cubes with dill and jelly gel.

Merrily Cherry is cherry confit, creamy cherry cremeaux with dark chocolate and a vanilla sponge.

Forest is light french chantilly with morello cherries soaked with kirsch merging with dark chocolate.

You get the idea- super fancy desserts! All sorts of layers with a pretty outer shell. We tried two. One was pretty good. The other one was so so, but they sure look pretty.

I think I took a photo of this pizza because it wasn't just plain cheese- a huge departure for me as I am a cheese with extra cheese gal. This was kale and something...

I baked again for the bake sale for our Social Welfare Committee during our (AWA) spring bazaar held in April. My salted caramel bars were a big hit once again. A couple of people even texted me about them later!

I think it was 3 years ago when I first saw this type of date cookie. It was during Ramadan. Haven't seen them since until this year! There are only 12 cookies in a box but they are good. Maybe I like these because of a similar family cookie filled with dates.?

 Here is another little item I just don't understand- cheese brownies? Yuck!

I took a couple of classes involving cooking with AWA recently. One was Indian cooking where we learned how to make choleys and parantha. Apparently, you really need a pressure cooker to cook chick peas in Indian cooking. I will try it just slow cooking on the stove, but the Indian ladies insist it is so much easier and better with a pressure cooker. This is the choley. Yum! I took home all the fixins' to match a batch myself.

I also took another bread making class. I signed up because signups were slow in coming and the teacher was getting nervous. It turned out that many more people signed up at the last minute and the class was sold out but I was already committed. One of the ladies went out and bought a whisk for the class. (It was on the recommended items to bring.) We all assured her she would find other uses for her brand new whisk.

Oh dear, these are not green drinks! We went in a different direction on this day.
On the left we have a sweet poison and on the right a Basilico punch.

 I think this one is called a coco dragon - coconut and dragonfruit.

Finally, yes, a green drink. This is a pandan and ginger. It was quite gingery! I think it would be better with slightly less ginger. Just my opinion.