Today begins the second half of our trip. We said good-bye to Lauren and Jen last night and today we have some time before we're due at the Auckland airport for our flight down to Christchurch, on the South Island.Auckland is a pretty nice city -- really, it looks a lot like Providence because it seems very new and there's a strong connection to the waterfront (because, like Providence, it looks like they just recently figured out how to harness the city's proximity to the water for urban-renewal purposes).
It's a beautiful summer day and the weather is perfect. We are really lucking out on this trip, in terms of wea
ther (and will continue to; the only rain we end up encountering is as we pass through an actual rain forest on the South Island a few days later). We do a little touristy shopping (I bought most of my souvenirs this day, including a plastic tomato-shaped ketchup bottle for myself, at this souvenir shop called "From N to Z") and enjoy the day. Did I mention they pronounce the letter "z" as "zed" there? So European.We get to the airport early, have a really great bowl of
noodles and a pint or two while we wait. In NZ, the frequent Air New Zealand flights between cities operate much like if you were taking a train between say, New York and Philadelphia here. And it's really inexpensive.We get to Christchurch, rent our car (a nice big Mitsubishi that I don't think they have in the US, which we'll have all week, drive all over the South Island and ends up being only US$300) and get to our hotel around 10 p.m. Christchurch looks like a nice city, but we won't have time to explore it till we return on Saturday. Tomorrow morning we going to be off bright and early for a long drive to the west coast in order to make our 2 p.m. glacier tour.
