We went straight from the airport to our hotel, St Martin's Waldorf Hotel, in the central business district (CBD) of Auckland, which took about 30 minutes by bus. After the desk clerk (a nice guy from Pearl City in Hawaii) did some switching around of rooms, we were able to check into a room at about 7:00 in the morning- and he even said that we could have complimentary breakfast that morning (in addition to our breakfast the next morning), so we went upstairs and dropped off our bags in our room, and went down for breakfast #2 of that day. There was muesli, yoghurt (they spell it with an "h" over there), canned peaches, toast, cereal, and an espresso machine. We had all of it- and we tried a little packet of Marmite (the yeast spread, similar to Vegemite in Australia, and of 80's pop music fame), which we didn't care for. It tasted really salty, like spreadable soy sauce...I thought it might be good in a stir fry, but not for breakfast on toast!
Our hotel room was nice- it was a self-contained apartment with a balcony, full kitchen, and a living room. We were so surprised to see our dishwasher in the apartment, then we remembered the Fisher and Paykel is a New Zealand company. This one only had the one drawer though.
We took a quick nap, and then we walked across a big park nearby (The Domain) to see the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which sounds like an awful name for a museum, but it really was a good museum, not one devoted to war...memorial...stuff. It had a comprehensive collection of Maori artifacts- including a war canoe and a marae (meeting house). It also houses Sir Ed Hillary's Ice Axe that he used to summit Mt. Everest, and some Kiwis -- birds, not fruit, but stuffed.
We walked to the CBD and the wharf, stopping at a cafe- I tried a feijoa juice, which looks kind of like a lime, but tastes like strawberry and pineapple- yummy! The cashier had no idea what I was saying when I ordered the juice because I was pronouncing it like "bourgeois" as in "feh-jwa", but it is actually pronounced "fee-joo"- wouldn't have guessed that.
Also, down by the wharf, they had a big clock counting down to the beginning of the Rugby World Cup. Rugby is kinda a big thing down there.
We went to a Countdown grocery store near the wharf to buy dinner supplies; we cooked battered fish in the oven along with sweet potato fries and canned corn in our kitchen, and then we crashed.
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