Auckland December 16th-18th

The flights actually all arrived and left on time, but it was still a looong journey!  On the plus side, I finally got to watch Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (brilliant, and as soon as I see it on sale for £3, I’m buying it.  I don’t care if it’s an animation, Rob’ll like it); Guardians of the Galaxy, for the second time, and just as good as the first time; Mr & Mrs Smith, which was okay, and by the end of a 36 hour journey, who cares anyway, The Other Woman, which was so dreadful, I gave up on it – Cameron Diaz must have been desperate for the money and a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory.  That made me laugh a lot!

It was a China Southern flight, so the inflight food was…interesting…but the service was really good, and the planes and airport are all pretty new – Guangzhou, in this case.  But you can’t get a decent cup of tea there!

We got to the hotel at about 8 am, on some unspecified day in December (could have been January, for all I knew.  It felt like all I’d done for the whole of my life was travel) and found to our delight that we could go straight to our rooms.  So we booked in for  (an enormous) breakfast, unpacked slightly and fell asleep.  The plan was to sleep until about 1-ish and then get up and go out – the actuality was sleeping until about 5-ish, then getting up slowly and going out in search of food.  Which we found at Degree, in the harbour area: Duo of Lamb, which was big enough for the two of us, plus interesting vegetables and a shared pudding with the most amazing blood-orange sorbet.  It had me thinking, I must try out some new recipes; a resolution that normally holds until I go into the kitchen and realise that trying out new recipes mean cooking something unfamiliar, and I’m not that mad on doing that.

It was raining!  “Where’s my sunshine?” Rob kept demanding – so we went to the museum and saw the World of Wearable Art exhibition, which was amazing – dresses made out of cable ties, wood, recycled tyres, metal -  and, sometimes, conventional things like wool.  That took up the day nicely – as did failing to buy a cagoule for Rob (he didn’t want one that cost £100.  The guy in the shop seemed to think that it was a bit of an insult to suggest that they would sell anything cheap).  This time we ate Italian, down in the harbour area again, at Portofino.  Nice food, but the service was nothing like as amazing as it had been the night before.