More from Auckland...
Auckland, July 26th AM, 57 degrees and blindingly sunny
I had a chilly breakfast on my balcony overlooking the pretty harbor (kiwi fruit here has essentially the same green taste per home) and now await the arrival of our friend, super-agent Sam Porter to romp someplace for lunch.
I have had good peaceful times, a great deal of them spent in the world class Auckland museum, a rather stolid (it looks like the Albert Pike masonic temple in LR although is vastly larger) Auckland Museum.....in the city's DOMAIN, the equivalent of other brilliant city parks such as Central in NY and Stanley in Vancouver. Knockout Maori stuff....maybe too much of it...an enormously touching pantheon for all of those New Zealanders lost in so many wars...in the now almost forgotten Boer War (why in God's name these locals were pressed into action there defies logic) onwards. The exhibits all start with the civil wars with the Maoris in the 1850s and 60s...for those English emigrants, often "second sons" as opposed to the early settlers of Australia (it shows today) who arrived with their own feeling of manifest destiny. The Maoris were fierce warriors, more bellicose than their rather more languid polynesian cousins and even today one sees amazing physical types. There honestly seems to be a working biracial society if I can judge by that most key factors: school kids and the peers they choose to hang out with....seemingly color blind here.
Later, just for the hell of it and just because I love trains, I rode the commuter line south for an hour or so from Auckland's dramatically modern new rail-centrum.....a few miles of ticky tacky houses, suburbs which seemed largely Maori, then that brilliant green countryside with the oh-so-bright skies which almost blind. NZ seems to be a paradigm of good ecology. Visiting with the conductress (Maori)and the brakeman (Punjabi) I am struck by another lovely part of life down here: I believe the New Zealander is the gentlest of all English speaking people. He is famous too for being the best read and a remarkable number of passengers had serious looking books. The English used is a treat...and we so often forget that great gaps in our language have gone into desuetude in America.
So it is off to an oyster feast with Sam...then an 11 hour flight on Air New Zealand to Singapore....and a few days in a well run dictatorial turkish bath. Singapore does have the one plus of being utterly safe (like dictatorships usually are)...as I am sure Pyongyang is.
-FRED
I had a chilly breakfast on my balcony overlooking the pretty harbor (kiwi fruit here has essentially the same green taste per home) and now await the arrival of our friend, super-agent Sam Porter to romp someplace for lunch.
I have had good peaceful times, a great deal of them spent in the world class Auckland museum, a rather stolid (it looks like the Albert Pike masonic temple in LR although is vastly larger) Auckland Museum.....in the city's DOMAIN, the equivalent of other brilliant city parks such as Central in NY and Stanley in Vancouver. Knockout Maori stuff....maybe too much of it...an enormously touching pantheon for all of those New Zealanders lost in so many wars...in the now almost forgotten Boer War (why in God's name these locals were pressed into action there defies logic) onwards. The exhibits all start with the civil wars with the Maoris in the 1850s and 60s...for those English emigrants, often "second sons" as opposed to the early settlers of Australia (it shows today) who arrived with their own feeling of manifest destiny. The Maoris were fierce warriors, more bellicose than their rather more languid polynesian cousins and even today one sees amazing physical types. There honestly seems to be a working biracial society if I can judge by that most key factors: school kids and the peers they choose to hang out with....seemingly color blind here.
Later, just for the hell of it and just because I love trains, I rode the commuter line south for an hour or so from Auckland's dramatically modern new rail-centrum.....a few miles of ticky tacky houses, suburbs which seemed largely Maori, then that brilliant green countryside with the oh-so-bright skies which almost blind. NZ seems to be a paradigm of good ecology. Visiting with the conductress (Maori)and the brakeman (Punjabi) I am struck by another lovely part of life down here: I believe the New Zealander is the gentlest of all English speaking people. He is famous too for being the best read and a remarkable number of passengers had serious looking books. The English used is a treat...and we so often forget that great gaps in our language have gone into desuetude in America.
So it is off to an oyster feast with Sam...then an 11 hour flight on Air New Zealand to Singapore....and a few days in a well run dictatorial turkish bath. Singapore does have the one plus of being utterly safe (like dictatorships usually are)...as I am sure Pyongyang is.
-FRED
posted by ultimatetraveler at 6:23 AM
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