Auckland: Day 2

Our second day in Auckland was a lot better than the first, although I think that had more to do with the fact that we had had 11 hours sleep than anything else. 11 hours sleep! I felt amazing. I mean I was still full of a cold and so I felt like crap but I was full of a cold and feeling like crap without feeling like I was going to drop down asleep at any moment. 

We were up and out of the hostel fairly early, so that Meryn could be on time for her 10:30am appointment with the bank. We had to book appointments to activate our accounts but Tom and I hadn’t booked ours before we came to Auckland. We went to the desk in the branch and asked when their next available appointment was and were nooooot happy to find out they didn’t have any free slots before the 17th of October. 12 days in Auckland was so much more time than any of us were willing to spend there. She gave us a customer services number to ring to see if any other branches had free spaces a bit sooner, but her lack of hope sort of stopped any on our side.

Instead of worrying about it though, we decided it was time for a coffee. We left Meryn to her account activation and went off in search of a Starbucks (we had yet to discover how widespread soy milk is here). We needed something familiar to cheer us up. We were sort of bummed out at how things seemed to be turning out. 

Once Meryn had joined us, we thought we would head over to the Post Office to apply for IRD numbers. In the true spirit of this trip, we discovered when we got there that the system had changed on the 1st of October and now everything was done online. Since the wifi in the hostel cost $4 for 24 hours of not being able to connect, not one of us was feeling hopeful about being able to get that done. 

Things were started to look pretty terrible. Tom was stressing because we didn’t know where we were staying after Tuesday night, nothing was getting done, and the general dislike of Auckland was really weighing down on everyone. 

It didn't help that Tom was slowly coming down with my cold!

By about 3pm, Tom half forced me and Meryn to go with him to get a phone. We had done a little bit of shopping before we went back to the hostel for lunch, and had picked up some information on phones and contracts etc. so we had almost made up our minds on what phones we were going to get. We just wanted to pop into Vodafone and see what they had to offer before heading back to Spark and choosing a phone there. 

We never actually made it to Spark because we ended up liking the Vodafone offer more (it worked out cheaper!). Buying our phones turned out to be incredibly quick and easy. I was (cruelly!) persuaded not to buy the $28 phone that came with keyboard and snake, and instead opted for the same crappy smartphone as the other two. 

I’m writing this exactly one week after I bought that phone and I’ll just say that buying the phone may have been quick and easy but using it is a whole different ball game. Me and Tom are useless. Meryn is having to teach us how to do basic things because we are apparently incapable of using anything other than an iPhone. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. 

I think everyone’s moods picked up after we had sorted out our phones. It was one thing ticked off the list and it meant that even if nothing else got done, the day hadn’t been a complete waste. 

We decided to try and find the library after that, hoping that where there were books, there would be wifi. It was a good shot on our part. Free wifi and space to plug my laptop in. It looked like we would be ticking more things off our list before the day was over! 

We still had to choose where to actually go when we needed to check out in two days time, but while we didn’t choose where, we managed to choose how. We bought ourselves 30 hour passes for the InterCity bus system. We just had to book journeys and pay using our hours instead of paying for each bus journey. That took the pressure off a bit and so we decided to focus on our bank appointments.

We decided there would be no point in leaving Auckland if we could book an appointment within the next few days BUT that there was no point in staying if we couldn’t get one sooner. So the decision was to ring and get a bank appointment, and THEN book our next few days of accommodation. 

Tom rang the customer services number and we were struck with our first bit of luck since we arrived in Heathrow. The man Tom spoke to managed to find us both appointments for the following day at 12:30. Score! We could leave Auckland! Where we would be leaving to felt like too much a decision on top of the day we had so we decided to just focus on getting back to the hostel in time for the free snack. Priorities. 

We put our dinner in the oven before we went down for the snack which gave us enough time to invite our new roommate down with us. He was a 29 year old IT guy from Argentina who was in Auckland looking for a well-paying job. We ate chilli nachos with him and talked about all the places we’ve been, wanted to visit, and why he decided to quit his job and come here. This is definitely one of the best things about being here - meeting all of these different people! 

We ate our dinner (jacket potatoes and beans, so so yummy!) in the little living area of our “apartment”. It was a crappy hostel but we met some really great people (shout out to Finn and Emily) and it was fun to sit and talk to them all while we were eating. 

I was still trying to fight off my cold though, so I called it a day around 11ish. I went to bed in a much better mood than the night before. I think Auckland was starting to grow on me!