Visiting Auckland over the Christmas holidays was quite enjoyable, to our surprise. Being the “ulu sampah” country folk living in Wanganui that we are - the hustle and bustle, crowds and traffic fumes of NZ’s biggest city are something we try to avoid. Fortunately for us, the evening of Christmas was very quiet - most places were closed and indeed, we were worried that we would not find a place to eat.
Fortunately for us, opposite our hotel (City Life Heritage Hotel) was a very busy Chinese coffee shop. Its customers are mostly chinese locals and backpackers, but the more savvy local Kiwis come there too. As you can see, it has chinese roast meats as well as a very decent menu of stir fries, noodles, porridge and every order of rice comes with a generous potion of delicious soup made from bones and meat scraps. The portions are huge, so an order of roast pork rice or in my case, beef stir fried with bitter gourd and fermented black soy beans was large enough for 2 of us to share.
We ate our fill and took a “digestive walk” down to the waterfront - see the first picture and watched the sun go down over sailing boats and the Auckland Sky Tower. A particularly good watering hole (which also has excellent food and service, is Soul, down by the wharf.
New Zealand (like Singapore and probably many other places) is notorious for having sales. Pre Christmas sales, Before school holiday sales... Queen’s birthday sales. So it was no surprise that many stores were open on Boxing day and offered very good discounts on all sorts of goods. We bought some quick dry trekking clothes from The North Face shop and a couple of CDs from Marbecks.
After an energetic morning of shopping we stopped by for dim sum lunch at a local Chinese restaurant. The food was very good, pretty genuine (judging by the number of chinese patrons) and the egg tarts light and fluffy.
Since we were on holiday.. after a dim sum lunch, we decided that the best thing to do was to have an afternoon nap, which we did.
This rest gave us plenty of energy for a long walk to church and Spanish Tapas at a delightful restaurant called Limon by the water front for dinner.
There was real Spanish guitar music and a waitress that spoke Spanish (OK, she was from Argentina) and melt in your mouth Jamon Serrrano. Ole!
