Day 9- January 30

So many areas celebrate but they are all in the Northern part of New Zealand. Going around to different shops and walking in the streets we can absorb the culture, ways of life, and see the history behind this historic day and get to be apart of a New Zealand celebration. Pack up after celebrating for a flight to the Southern island.

Today was an especially exciting day of the trip because it’s a New Zealand Holiday! The holiday is called Anniversary Day and it is celebrated by the Northern Islands in New Zealand and Auckland. In 1842, the holiday was officially created by Governor Hobson and has since then been celebrated the Monday closest to January 29th every year.

We walked around for hours buying things, eating new foods, and taking in the celebratory culture around us. As we walked around we saw the The 175th Ports of Auckland Anniversary Day Regatta(Holiday), which was a tug boat race that is highly competitive and is celebrated every year on Anniversary Day. The strangest food that we saw was Paua- a Paua shell that is commonly used for jewelry as well as being a dish for Paua fritters- Jackson was the only one with the gall to actually try it. “Tastes like mushrooms.” He said with a pleased smile- Jackson hates mushrooms.

After that, we walked around and went into several shops, buying things and tokens for our families and friends back home. We all bought t-shirts that said “I <3 NZ”, then we took a photo of us all in our shirts, and Jill put it on her Instagram with the caption “#touristlife”- because what else does Jill do on a once-in-a-lifetime trip?

It wasn’t awfully cold, so we continued walking around outside until lunchtime. We went to the Thai Village Restaurant, a beautiful restaurant in Remuera, Auckland. The place had a dim lighting, as well as the natural light filling in from the windows, and the place had a cheerful setting, as many people were celebrating Anniversary Day. Jillian, because she is vegetarian, got the Tow Hoo Pad Kapao, which is a stir fry dish. Jackson ordered the Guey Tiew Thai Village, which is a soup. Rachel and Alyssa ordered Kow Pad, which is fried rice. And John ordered the Pad Bai Ka Pao, which is ALSO a stir fry. We had never laughed so hard at John when he was ordering. He couldn’t pronounce the menu items right, and we’re pretty sure he accidentally swore at the waitress in Taiwanese- she got a really big tip at the end of the meal.

After we left the restaurant it was 2 PM and we decided to drive back to the hotel and pack up for our next flight into South Island. When we got back to the hotel, we all unpacked all the things we’d bought in the past 6 hours, and fit however much we needed for two nights in our smaller bags.

We arrived at the airport around 4:00 PM excited to get on the plane to be able to see the beautiful sites tomorrow. After we charged our phones for about 30 minutes the flight started boarding and we rushed to get onto the plane. We decided against sleeping on the plane because we thought we should wait to sleep at the hotel because the flight is only 50 minutes long. We all bought the internet on the plane and just decided to be on our phones the entire plane ride, John kept showing us all funny pictures he was finding on twitter. Once we landed we decided to just head to the hotel and watch some movies that we could by through the tv. We had to take a cab because our car was back at the Auckland airport, catching a cab may have been the hardest thing to do along this trip so far because of how busy the airport was and not many taxi cabs were taking 5 people. After spending 30 minutes trying to catch a cab we finally got a driver's attention and luckily he was very nice and gave us all free lollipops. After we got to the hotel we were looking through the movie options and we saw the Hobbit which is perfect because of our two sites were seeing tomorrow which were featured in the Hobbit and are main settings. The movie was amazing but after we finished we were all tired and decided it was time to go to bed and rest for tomorrows adventures.