University Clock Tower

We caught the local bus into the CBD of Auckland today to go explore the sights. The bus luckily dropped us off very near the tourist information centre, which was very handy for orientating ourselves for the city and the rest of the North Island. We came away with an armful of handy broachers, looking painfully like your typical bumbling tourist, especially with my big camera at my side. We then went for a walk along the marina front, checking out ferry times as we went as we are planning to head to a extinct volcano island for a hike. When we got to the ferry ticketing booth there were a couple of elderly gentlemen trying to plan their trip to an outlying island. As there was only one attendant we stood in the queue for quite some time, while we had a friendly discussion with a Russian guy in the queue behind us. We finally managed to get our information and headed off when the guy from the queue ran up to us and said 'I'm russian, here this is for coffee', shoved a $50 note (£30ish) into our hands and ran off. It was genuinely the most confusing moment of my life and we still cannot for the life of us understand why he gave us money.

We continued our exploration along the marina, next giving a wide birth to a man sitting on a bench shouting to apparently no one. We looked around to see who could be on the receiving end of such grief but no one materialised. Safe to say we hurried on. The city centre was gratefully a little bit less crazy. We went to Mexicali Fresh for lunch where we ordered burritos the size of our heads along with radiation coloured fizzy juice. Then we hiked up the high street, where I managed to grab some sunglasses to replace my broken pair and then we headed to Albert park, which was a delightful park in the middle of the city. The park was quite confusing to me as a brit as there were the typical vegetation you would expect in parks back home for example: oaks trees and roses, but then there would be a palm tree happily growing alongside. It was a great place to chill out before we headed back to the apartment.