look pippa! visitors!

yesterday jason and kelly arrived from seattle. i got up at 3:30am to go pick them up in auckland and was still late getting there. getting to the airport is a pain in the ass. nevertheless, contact was made and we all made off for a day in auckland because, as jason pointed out beforehand, after spending 12 straight hours on a plane, driving an hour and a half in the car is about the last thing they'd want to do.

first, we went to sky city in downtown auckland. sky city is a large complex at the base of sky tower, which is the new zealand version of the space needle but with more observation decks. sky city has a number of restaurants and two casinos. kelly turned 20 NZD into 29 NZD before breakfast was over. jason pointed out that he is a walking statistical anomaly because he has never, ever won at the slot machines. we had breakfast at a nice buffet to kill the time until the observation decks opened. however, when we went to go check, we were informed that you could go up if you wanted, but visibility was, shall we say, poor. apparently, you could look straight down, but that's about the only direction in which you'd see anything other than gray cloud. i imagine this to be what limbo is like. so instead we set off for kelly tarlton's underwater world.

kelly tarlton's held massive appeal for us because it is indoors. the forecast for the day was "nonstop rain for the entire north island". pretty succinct. anyway, they have exhibits about the antarctic explorers, with lots of gear from the era. let me tell you, those first guys were bad asses. i don't think i would have had the cojones for the antarctic exploration of 100 years ago. the place also has lots of penguins, which are always amusing (they walk like they are continually stepping on sharp rocks) and a number of aquarium tanks. it's not as fancy as the baltimore or atlanta aquaria, but it's pretty cool. jason had bought two memory cards for their new digital SLR camera and had calculated that they could take, without having to transfer off, about 3,000 pictures, so the event was well documented.

next we went to the auckland museum, which is sort of like a mini-smithsonian for new zealand. the first floor is all about maori/pacific islander history, with many artifacts on display. the second floor is all natural history with a focus on new zealand-specific flora and fauna. no, there were no sheep. they did, however, have a full skeleton and model of a moa. for those too lazy to go check the wikipedia link, moa are extinct 12 foot tall flightless birds. imagine an ostrich twice as tall as i am. they were friggin' huge. as were their feet. of all the things in the museum, these made the greatest impact on me. i mean, i'm tall. there is a certain life experience that comes with being tall. you get to see where people don't dust in their homes. you get to use all the upper cabinets and curse the lower ones. airline flights suck. but in all my tall experiences, i've never had to look up at a bird that is standing on the ground. it is highly unusual and somewhat disturbing. anyway, the third and final floor of the museum contains historical displays of new zealand's involvement in all world wars and conflicts starting with the boer war. the largest section is, of course, devoted to WWII. one of the things i realized that i had never thought about before was how the war and the war effort affected people in new zealand. especially the constant fear of japanese invasion. i have no idea how close that threat was ever to becoming reality, but they took it very seriously here, complete with their own propoganda posters of a caricature of a japanese soldier stepping over the world towards NZ and australia with "he's coming!" underneath. was stayed there until an alarm was set off, sending us scattering to quieter parts of the museum. jason thinks it may have been he who set the alarm off. the reports, however, remain unsubstantiated.

after the museum we left auckland to head to hamilton. kelly fell in love with pippa and wants to take her home. we hung out here for a bit and jason and i went to my last intramural soccer game, where he played despite having originally deciding that he didn't feel well enough. i could have had a heart attack from the surprise that he ended up wanting to play. really. we all crashed pretty early because it had been a LONG day. the next two days will be in hamilton and then i'm taking the rest of the week off from work so we can go travel around and see stuff to the south.