Day 4 – Sunday 7/13

Auckland: 10:04 PM; Boston: 6:04 AM

Many things that I still need to get used to here, of which they range in importance and therefore order in which I will focus on. On the lesser end, the fact that Sunday is just beginning for you all where it is ending for me (as noted above). Also, it is kind of weird that I am putting on long-sleeves, jeans, and jackets on July 13^th…and that I can see my breath at various points during the day. Then again, for being the middle of winter, it’s pretty nice to see palm trees and green grass. As I was describing to one of my suitemates, they could always have daytime highs reach 32 if lucky and 6 feet of snow—wait, that is actually 0 and approximately 2 meters—on the ground; that reminds me of how bad my knowledge of the metric system is, and how essentially I need to learn it – fast. The supermarket this afternoon was a good example: my approach I’ve decided is going to be honesty and humor (humour?); I went to the deli counter and just said that I had arrived from the U.S. and therefore my metric skills were horrible, what is half a kilo of sliced ham? I figured that a kilo was greater than a pound – unless the NZ economy had gone into utter freefall overnight (on a Saturday, nonetheless…), one could expect a lot of meat for $14 (a kilo of ham). I was better reminded when I got to the cheeses, and saw a large block of cheddar which was 1 kilogram – in the states, that same size would be around 2 pounds.

As soon we get internet access in the apartment, I’ll look for a more accurate conversion. No big deal – I’ve realized for all the time I spend(t) on the web, how much of it was really superfluous. I went to an internet café this afternoon with two of my suitemates, checked my email for the first time since Wednesday night in VT (all of it was spam and stuff like the daily headlines from the New York Times), looked at Facebook for about 30 seconds, and then read some of the papers from the states – all in all, I was done with what I wanted to do online in about 30 minutes. I will concede, part of my quickness was that the computer I happened to be on must have been loaded with spam or other crap because it keep freezing. I just went out to the “café” part of the internet café and bought a cappuccino.

I think I’ll be getting plenty of exercise while I’m here – the rest of the campus (which I’ve yet to see) is about 20 minutes away, and the main shopping district where I get my coffees and internet (for now) is about 10 - 20 minutes away depending on what I want. Also, Auckland’s main park – Auckland Domain – is right outside my window: I want to go for a run through there just to check it out.

I think my jogs – at least for now – are going to be without any musical accompaniment, such distractions will cause me to get run-down much easier, and I’m having a hard enough time without the iPod. First, New Zealand drives on the left, so when I approach a crosswalk, I automatically look left then right (or just being in Boston I don’t bother sometimes). Two problems there: one as stated (left side driving), I have to start looking right then left. Second problem – although cars are supposed to yield to pedestrians (as my native suitemate said when I asked), no signs are posted stating this, and apparently, pedestrians actually wait for the all clear or when a car stops for them, not the other way around (pedestrians enters crosswalk at reasonable point and cars stop). The exception to this is some crosswalks every few blocks (not only along intersecting roads) have lights and signals that when a pedestrian pushes the button, the light turns red, and a green walking man comes up for me. For my last thought, I will probably continue to look like a moron when I cross: the signal noise (which I can’t describe, I’ll have to just bring my camera along sometime and try to record it), causes me to smirk in an attempt to hold in outright laughter.