Auckland: The City of Sails

Flew in to Auckland on a Thursday after leaving from LA and losing a whole day flying over the dateline. Didn't really get any good sleep while on the plane, so needed to find a place to sleep for the night. we wound up staying at a great hostel (Nomads hostel) in downtown Auckland. The first day we walked around the city to get our barrings. Auckland is not all that big only 1.3 million people and had somewhat of a Boston feel to it. There were many other backpackers in the city going who knows where. We did a lot of our errands; bough a phone; a couple phone cards; some food; researched more about buying a car and bank accounts. Nothing really exciting happened during the day just a lot of walking around to take everything in the first night we roomed with two guys from Canada, one who just started traveling and his friend who had already been to Australia and heard that New Zealand was more beautiful and had to check it out. the next day woke up early probably because my body was used to LA time and went out in search of breakfast. we bought some food at a mini mart to save some money and started out to buy a car. there was a car fair down the road for backpackers which had all types of vehicles from vans to sleep in the very weathered cars. Rachel and I found the cheapest car we could find and took it for a test drive. Let me tell you a little about this car, it is a 90 Nissan Bluebird. (which I have never heard of before) It has 265,000 km on it which if my math is right is about 176,000 miles. It is standard and the driver sits on the right side (which made it a lot of fun to test drive and Rachel doesn't drive stick so i would have to drive everywhere). Doesn't have a radio so there will be a lot of conversations between Rachel and I. Finally if you go to fast, the roof will make a huge bang (which has scared us numerous times already). I'm not really sure what we were thinking when we bought it, but it was only 1200 New Zealand dollars ($800 US). In all seriousness the car is a station wagon so if we need to we can sleep in it and it has really good "petrol" mileage. The registration and warrant of fitness had just been done, which means a garage has taken a look at it and is if to drive (no mechanical problems). Did I mention it only cost us $800.
After that was taken care of we made our way up to the sky tower to have lunch. the sky tower is the largest building in the southern hemisphere. We were very interested in going up to the observatory to see out over Auckland and New Zealand. It cost admission to go up so we decided it made more sense to eat lunch up there where admission was free and we got to go to the observatory anyway. I was excited for Rachel because i have had dinner in the CN tower in Toronto, Canada and knew that the floor would move 360 degrees to see the whole city while we ate. It was a great experience and would do it again. The last thing we did before we left Auckland was the - 5 bar. what makes this bar so great is that it is actually - 5 degrees in the bar. They give you jackets and gloves and everything is made out of ice. Glasses are made of ice, tables are made of ice, walls, you get the idea. we stayed there for a couple drinks and then left Auckland behind.