I’ve had a pretty nice weekend. It started out Friday afternoon with the
end-of-week drinks at the office. After
that, I dropped my stuff off at my apartment and took the City Link bus (which
is free for holders of the Auckland Transit HOP card) downtown to get an HDMI
cable for the TV in my apartment. I’ve
been without TV since I’ve been here, and keep wanting to get it working. Our building (I’m told) automatically has
FreeTV in each unit, and all I needed was a cable. Well the HDMI cable didn’t do anything, so
next try is a standard coax cable to THAT wall connection.
Saturday was the best day.
After a failed attempt at getting a City Hop car (this will be discussed
in a separate post), I again took the
City Link bus downtown to the Auckland Anniversary Day festival. It is the 175th anniversary of the
city. There was lots of stuff to do and
see. I took a self guided tour of the NZ
warship Otago, watched the hipster white boy music duo perform, including a
couple of Michael Jackson songs, went through “Shed 10” where they had a few
displays, short films, and oral Maori history performances. And had a hot dog – what we Yanks would call
a corn dog. Regardless of the name, it
was still tasty. I walked down to the
end of the pier to see the beautiful bay water with the sunlight sparkling on
it.
After leaving there, I hit the downtown Warehouse discount
store. Still working on getting the
apartment set up. Picked up several
things – cooking utensils, laundry detergent, trash cans. I can only do small loads each trip. I’m currently getting around via bus and
train and foot, so I have to be a little conservative with whatever I’m lugging
around.
Today, I slept in til after 11:30. I had a pretty bad case of insomnia last
night, which lasted until I took a benedryl around 4:00 am. This afternoon, I went to the local bike shop
to start looking at and pricing bikes.
Biking will be yet one more way of getting around. Plus it will be a good way of shedding some
of these ugly unwanted pounds. I expect
when I start I’ll be doing a lot of walking the bike uphill in order to ride it
on relatively flat areas and downhill.
But eventually I’ll be able to build up to riding up most of the streets
around here. Did I mention that the
entire area is basically extinct volcanoes?
After the bike shop, I caught a different bus to the Westfield St. Lukes
mall. Yay – a bus that goes directly
from right outside my apartment to right outside a mall. And that mall has a Kmart, a Farmers
department store, a Countdown grocery store, a food court, a movie theatre, and
lots of specialty shops. At the Kmart
and Farmers I got, you guessed it, MORE stuff for the apartment. But the list is getting shorter. Oh – I got a coax cable at Kmart. But the type of cable it is fit great on the
TV port but not the wall port. The wall
port requires the screw on kind, and the cable I have is the slip on kind. So I still need to get an adapter – or
ANOTHER cable. I WILL have TV!
From there, I took a different bus to the Target Furniture
Hypermarket to browse a bit. I
definitely need a desk chair, but I’m also considering getting a two-seater
sofa and a night stand, if I can find things that will fit in the space I have
(the bed frame is affixed to the wall, so there’s no moving it).
I got home, and after a quick nap, reheated leftovers from
some take-away I had for dinner a couple of nights ago. And then took a long walk. I probably walked between 45 minutes and an
hour. I want to keep doing that, at
least 3 or 4 times a week.
Now tonight, I’m just sitting in my apartment, waiting for
the fireworks that will be fired from the Sky Tower, of which I have a direct
view from my balcony. And tomorrow is a holiday!
