Slept for a solid 11 hours. It was amazing. We both woke up at 7:30 refreshed and feeling good. I was happy about this because I think that means that we are going to be pretty settled in time wise from here on out. 7 hours time difference, handled! It took us forever to figure out the lights the night before, because you have to put your key in a slot next to the door in order for your lights to turn on, and to use the switches, you have to flick a switch next to the plug in. Very interesting, and hopefully we get it figured out easier eventually. We left the room around 9, and found the War Museum that was Tim’s number one on the list.
We kept walking and walking and walking, we weren’t lost, but there were plenty of points where we had no idea where we were headed, but we finally got to where there were signs and we made it to the park.
Up the longest, and steepest hill ever. Longer and just as steep as the one to our hotel yesterday. But the path was absolutely gorgeous, lined with super unique trees and green grass. Beautiful. Top of the hill, and across a park was the great big war memorial. Very picturesque. Lots of Maori things, pretty much the entire history of everything New Zealand. Tim really liked the World War II exhibits. And penguins. 
We headed back down the pretty hill and started walking towards the bank for our 2:30 meeting since it seemed like a long ways away. We had gotten the GPS working by then, so we at least had that to tell us how to get there. We arrived around 1, so we had a lot of time to kill we had planned on wandering the area while we waited, but there was really nothing there, so we went in and asked if we could have our meeting early. The bank lady came, we signed the forms, picked our account, and got our cards. After 45 minutes of slow itouch internet at the attached cafe, we started walking towards the transit place to see if we could use a payphone to order the haunted walk tickets. No luck, but we found a bunch of transit maps and decided that tomorrow we had nothing to do and we really wanted to get out of Auckland. Not that there is anything wrong with Auckland, we were both just bored of it already to be honest. It sounds awful, but there really isn’t that much to do here. Museum wise or other wise. And walking anywhere takes a really long time and is a hassle. So we were both excited at our decision not to live here.
We saw this awesome gelateria and just couldn’t pass it up since it had been a few hours since our light brunch. We shared a double scoop of Italian cookies and cream, which was awesome, and the NZ favorite, Hokey Pokey, which became our favorite too. They also had mango and grapefruit, which would have been awesome. We walked back up Queen Street to double check the Aotea place and the Victoria Market. We even bought a loaf of gorgeous ciabatta from the place we saw last night for dinner tonight. Aotea still was nowhere to be found, and then we walked a long, long LONG way to the Victoria Market, finally found it, and it was a huge huge piece of trash. It was old creepy people selling their crap. But there was a really pretty park across the way that was having some sort of production going on, so Tim looked for grocery stores on the GPS while I watched the shoot from a bench over looking the big soccer field.
There were no grocery stores in under a mile away, and our feet were hurting already. We looked in every convenience store between Victoria Park and the hotel. All of them were small, gross, and Asian. Most had gross looking produce. After many failed mini marts and the nasty smelling Asian super store, we went up to the hotel. We had picked up a brochure at the airport and found two decent looking restaurants close by the hotel. One was Elliot Stables, which was very cool. It’s a U shape of very small food stalls, but the stalls were big enough to have a few tables in chairs in them, with menus at the door, and then tables inside the U. So you picked a table, and then went to the different stalls to order. After much debate, we picked DeNiro, and yes, it had his face on it.
I picked the DeNiro salad. Tim got the white wine risotto. The waitress kept asking what we wanted to drink, so finally Tim got wine. After a very disappointing meal, we went a few doors down and ate at a Creperie with this super charming French man as our waiter. He convinced me to add ice cream to my caramelized apple and cinnamon crepe, and Tim got the honey, banana, and almonds crepe. They were delicious. A perfect end to the lack of a meal. And the charm of the guy was adorable. One thing we have learned at all the restaurants though, they don’t come back and check you after you got your food, until you are done, and they ask if you want dessert, and if you say no, they walk away and never come back. You have to ASK them for the check. Which is really weird and annoying, but I guess we will just have to get used to it.
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