CHAPTER II - The First Days (12.-15. July)

After having overcome the Jetlag and passing through all the red tape at UNITEC it was finally time for taking a look at the city. But this actually isn´t as simple as it sounds - public transports in Auckland are not worth talking about, so it looks like the one and only solution will be buying a car. Good luck that Stephan had done this before. So it came on Friday that he showed up in my room and took me to have a look at what he had just bought: A brand new (12-year-old) LADA... Even though it´s not looking like it would, it does run quite well and we were off for the afternoon to see what´s up downtown...

As Auckland is quite large (1 million inhabitants, 80km from one end to the other) our expectations about downtown were big. Walking up and down Queen Street - the largest street - we found that besides the huge scyscrapers the inner city looks quite ugly and has a rather chaotic flair. But it seems a good place for doing some shopping, with a large number of smaller and bigger shops spread across the streets. Later we decided to quit downtown and cruise a little along the shore eastwards to a place called Mission Bay. There you can find a lot of small cafes, bars and restaurants as well as this seems to be the place where the better situated people live. It was quite ok there but must be much nicer in summertime...

Cruising along the coast the LADA turned out to be a true racing machine, making funny sounds when taking a bend too fast. Accelerating very well, it is no problem to shake off all those Honda Preludes (a sports car  you can find here quite often) at the crossings. A really cool car when you like Vodka...

Quote of the Day:
Patrick mumbles something about Stephan´s new automobile.
Stephan: At least you are calling it a “car”!
Patrick: Err...sorry, but I said “crate” not “car”...

That night we went out with the Swedish and some guys from Norway. There are quite a lot of them here and it turned out they are really all right. They seem to like Irish pubs (a thing I do appreciate) and so we went to some that night. It was a lot of fun and so it was not before 3 am we made it home. I guess we will have a good time here the following weekends...

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- Hot wheels! Stephan´s LADA Samara... -