Monday, April 26, 2010
Lazy morning, except for Tim trying kwana. He didn’t hate it, but I thought it tasted like a nasty pickle, so we just left it at the hotel.
We went straight to the Hamilton post office, and it was clear the lady was not only miserable that she had to deal with us, but that she thought we were insane for spending that kind of money on sending luggage. It took about 20 minutes, she had to lug or suitcases around to her side, and pull them up onto the scale on the counter, I felt super bad, then she had to deal with tagging them, which was quite a bit more work than it seemed it should have been. But now its done with. Dealt with. Yay.
A sidenote about this country’s bathrooms. No paper towels. Shocker. These people never have paper towels. Its so strange. Its like, they are so environment conscious. Lights are rare. Like, bathrooms will have one bulb in the big area and that’s it. And you are supposed to turn it off when you leave. Or no lights at all! No paper towels. Sometimes hand dryers. Some don’t work. And even half the time there’s soap. Its aggravating how green people are. Plus the whole, put the key in the motel lock in order to put power to your room. Aka, no charging anything while you are gone. Or EVERY electrical outlet having a switch to have to turn on. No heat in most buildings. Just kind of sick of it.
25 minutes outside of Auckland, Tim figured I should drive since it was easy road, and he didn’t think I would want city roads. But really, highway driving isn’t even weird since you are totally separated from the other direction. But I did anyway. It was totally fine, the hard part was keeping it under the speed limit. After 10 minutes, Tim was already bored, so I pulled off at the next exit and we traded again.
We got into Auckland, had really no plan, so we plugged in the War Museum first to go check out their gift shop again. On the way, we noticed that we were really close to one of the Yoga places I was interested in, so we got there and I poked my head in.
Tim bought the NZ flag, and after a Subway lunch, we also tried a Pinky bar for the first time. Chocolate around a marshmallow base (pink) with a nonstringy, more jellyesque caramel strip on top. It was delicious, I’m glad we just now found them, cause I would eat them all the time.
More random wanderings through the city, stopped at several stores looking for the “perfect” All Blacks shirt for Tim. We wanted to go to the store we found the first time we were there, but we couldn’t seem to find its exact location, so we circled for probably at least 20 minutes. We hit the same 6 block radius of the Auckland CBD at least ten times. It was ridiculous
I figured out today that gas is $US4.88 a gallon.
I was still nervous about Bikram, but I was determined to try it, at least once, and this was the best time. Tim dropped me off, and I headed up. It turned out that the instructor went to Augustana in the Quad Cities, so that was really super random. Stood around outside the door til someone else went in, he told me to be at the wall not at the mirror, so I did, but it was pretty full already. Little did I know that that was only about a third of the class. There were at least 25 people there, if not more. Everyone was laying down, so I laid down too and it felt like I was laying there for 45 minutes, but it couldn’t have been more than 10. It was also good that I was good to go on his American accent. The warm up freaked me out, it was this weird breathing exercise that involved back bends and throwing our heads back. It hurt my neck immediately. Plus there were lots of poses that Carissa would have freaked out on, it was techniques that went exactly against what we should be doing. Like the toes and heels together always. There was one drink break the whole class, and I thought I was going to die at a few parts. And with no clock, it felt like it was going on forever. He kept telling us to push past the pain and just keep bending or stretching or pulling. But when your muscles are THAT hot (105 for bikram) then you are totally going to pull or tear something by pulling that much, so that was weird. Also, we did split poses, and no one else seemed to be sliding at all, but I was all over the place, but they were sweating the same amount! I was literally soaked at the end of class. We did a bunch of poses, but did every pose twice. We did a group of 2 or 3 things, then repeated them, the next group, repeat, all the way through for 90 minutes.
After class, we found the camp, The sign on the shower said limited hot water to ¾ turn. I turned that sucker up to full heat. And then 6-7-8 minutes in, the lights kicked off. They must be on a timer. I hate this country. That’s so uncool. Im showering, soapy, wet, and the lights are ALL the way at the other end. I at least had enough glow from the mens room to finish the shower, and by the time those cut out, I was in a towel so I could go turn mine back on. Its just ridiculous.
We found a Subway for dinner (shocker) but right next to it on the GPS was a Burger Fuel, something I had wanted to be trying, so we made the trip. Another Subway right next to it, screaming at me to be healthy, but I said screw it. I had some sort of chicken sandwich that was HUGE.
My extended palm and fingers did not cover the size of the bun. It took us awhile to get our food though. But mine was killer. It was chunks of chicken, a bbq/ketchup/A1 hybrid, brie, bacon (the English thick awesome kind that Ihad tim eat half of), lettuce and tomato. I nixed the aoli like a smart girl would. I also tossed the top half of the bun and probably a good third of the bottom bun. We shared Kumara fries, which Wikipedia says it’s a sweet potato, and I believe its in that family, but that is no American sweet potato, it is DELICIOUS.
No comments:
Post a Comment