We stayed in bed pretty late, using the last of the internet I'd purchased the previous night. We also took full advantage of the fact that we had the same room for two nights and did not need to check out at 10am. Alyssa stayed in bed until 11 at least, I think. Then, we ventured out into Auckland.
Only to find that freaking everything was closed for Good Friday. Why the hell is everything closed for Good Friday?! Whose idea was it to make Good Friday a federal holiday?! It's ridiculous. We walked around downtown, which is a huge shopping district, and found the streets to be largely empty and nothing was open except for convenience stores and a handful of restaurants. We found one place that was open that touted itself to be a tattoo and body piercing place. The front door opened into a staircase (a fairly common setup for businesses in large cities in New Zealand, I've noticed. Even Burger King in Wellington was like that) which we climbed. At the top we found a sparse lobby where there were about eight people and a dog. Why would you have a dog in a tattoo and body piercing shop? Public Enemy had a dog there while I got my eyebrow and first tattoo done in 2005 and it struck me as not good. I don't want to say unsanitary but that is what I'm thinking. Somebody said, how can I help you? and I said that I just wanted to check out eyebrow rings, but I didn't see any there. The dude said that they don't do piercings anymore, just tattoos. So we left. At the bottom of the stairs, we saw a dry erase board which said something to the effect of "Body piercing and ring combo $35" or something. Makes you wonder. Why turn away business, especially on a day when just about nobody has left their homes?
We passed some musical instrument stores and some used record shops that were closed and it made me sad.
Then, we found Real Groovy.
They were open.
Alyssa said she had never seen so many CDs in one place in her entire life. They also had a massive selection of DVDs, music-related clothing, books, many racks of magazines, and other stuff. We were there for four hours while I paged through seemingly endless racks of CDs. NZ$125 later, I had 85 new CDs in my collection. Some of those are 2disc sets so it's actually a little higher than that but I'm not sure exactly. 40 of those cost me only fifty cents. Add in the ones I bought other places on this trip and I'm carting home nearly 100 new CDs. Some of it is stuff I already owned, but they're Australian versions with bonus tracks and such. Then there's the confusing issue of Dubstar. I have Dubstar's album Goodbye at home, or at least I thought I did. I had thought that this was Dubstar's only album. I found one in there with a different title, Disgraceful, that looked to have the same track list as my copy of Goodbye but different artwork and, obviously, title. I grabbed it. Later on I found Dubstar's Goodbye, but it was in a cardboard box rather than a plastic jewel case, so I inspected it, expecting bonus tracks, and instead found that the track listing was completely different than mine at home. So I bought that, too. I could probably yammer on and on about the stuff I bought in there, but nobody wants that except me. Some of these CDs I intend to make gifts of.
We returned to our ramp, which was once again under the Sky City tower, and we discovered that the tower was open, so we went up in it and watched the sun set over Auckland from 220 meters up. The Sky City tower in Auckland is the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere, by the way. Auckland's pretty at night from up there.
We stopped at Hell for some dinner and tomorrow's breakfast, and tried like hell to pack all of our shit. There's so much more of it than there was, but somehow, somehow, we did it. It was truly fucking amazing. I cooked a bowl of spaghetti in the microwave, just to use up the sauce and some noodles, since we're fairly certain that transporting unsealed food products is not allowed. We left two cans of macaroni and cheese out for breakfast (yeah, I know) and packed three more cans of food, a plastic jug of instant pancakes, a jar of cheese sauce, and a bag of uncooked elbow noodles. All of this food was purchased in our first few days here. We had intended to cook it over a fire as we camped one night, but apparently the whole damn country prohibits campfires. Also, we only hauled out the tent once in the whole trip, and that was the third day, before we even bought all this food. I realized, just then, our true genius though: we'd bought five cans of food, but we had no can openers, and only two of them (the macaroni) had pull tabs. Yeah. Brilliant.
It is now just past two in the morning. We plan to wake up in about five hours for our final day in New Zealand. I'mma take a poop and go to bed.
I'm ready to go home now.
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