Our Auckland Trip

09/04/2021

My last trip, before Covid-19 struck the Earth like a meteorite and changed everyone's life, was to Auckland, New Zealand, in January 2020. Auckland is the economic capital of New Zealand, and Wellington the actual capital. My mom and I were supposed to spend 6 days in Auckland but we decided to stay four more days since there were so many things to do. We walked along the Harbour admiring  the boats bearing names such as Lauren or Janice or Mary Anne.....The bridge that you can see on the far left of the picture is a Drawbridge with a traffic light. It could be crossed by car, on foot or bike. Near that bridge was an open reading space. You could borrow a book and read it on the spot on a bean bag. We found a lot of bean bags in Auckland and none of them were attached with a lock. If this was in any other city, they would've all been stolen. We went to the cinema almost everyday since we thought, why not? 

 The spotlight of our trip was seeing Serena Williams, the international tennis player. We had just left our hotel when mom saw two kids taking pictures of someone in a restaurant. "Is that Serena Williams?", she asked them. "Yes, it is." I took out mom's phone straight away and to get a closer look I almost climbed over a hedge, when security told me to get down. At least I got the picture. 

A few days later, we went to watch the ASB women’s tennis open. ASB is one of the biggest bank’s in NZ.Coincidentally Serena Williams was playing. As we were close to the front we could see her entering the court and someone from her entourage came to sit next to us. My first ever sports tournament ad I got to see a world champion play😃.(She won the championship.)

Remember the deadly Australian bushfires from January 2020? You could see the effects all the way from New Zealand. One day after we left the cinema we noticed that the the sky was orage, as Orange  as fire.  At first, we thought that it was because we had spent too much time in the cinema so the light was playing tricks on us. No one seemed concerned with the new lighting, except for some other tourists who were also staring at the sky. We looked up on the internet to see what this “orangeness” was about and found that it was due to smoke filtering and blocking sunlight creating this gloomy sky. The smoke had come from the Australian bushfires(05/01). The sky was back to normal by the next day.