Auckland impressions

Auckland:

City has a nice feel. I was quite surprised how close New Zealand is to the east coast. The flight over only took 3 hours or so. (Sydney is closer to Auckland than it is to Perth – Perth to Sydney normally takes about 5 hours!)

Hilly. Some streets are quite steep (good exercise) walking around.

Many interesting buildings – combination of old and new.

Lots of Asian restaurants in central Auckland – Japanese, Korean, Indian. We had a very nice vegetarian thali at a nice restaurant called Rasoi, on K’Road. K’Road is a long road in the city. We asked someone on the street if there was a supermarket nearby where we could buy a few groceries – she gave us directions to “Kay Road”. We walked and walked and when we weren’t sure if we were going in the right direction, asked another passer-by, who said we were indeed going in the right direction – for Karangahape Road – K’Road, of course!

Burger King is Burger King in Auckland – not Hungry Jack’s.

The hotel:
TripAdvisor has some really bad reviews for the hotel we’re staying in, but I don’t think it’s bad as some others have found it. When we checked in we were given a room with two beds, and we’ve now been moved to a larger room – a room with two separate bedrooms. It’s clean and pleasant enough, if not particularly inspiring. The staff are… interesting, shall we say. I’m not sure how I would describe their attitudes, except perhaps to say that they are not falling over themselves to be helpful. It’s also very centrally located, and just down the road from the conference venue, which is good.

There’s wireless access here in the hotel, which is available at a quite reasonable NZ$40/1gb/week, but unfortunately it is somewhat flakey (technical term). There doesn’t seem to be much free wireless around the city, which is a pity.

I haave some photos but I don’t know if I want to use up all my bandwidth – might try and upload the shots using the conference terminals tomorrow.