New Zealand: Auckland

New Zealand is simply amazing. to call it green would be using a well-known cliché, but it fits. When the plane descended for the landing, at 7 am and with perfect sunshine, the landscape below looked like a romantizised model, with nice hills and patches of forest.

The city of Auckland itself has many trees and parks and so even near the ugliest skyscrapers you can find something to offset this ugliness.



You can find people from all parts of the world here, besides the native kiwis there are asians from China, Corea and Japan as well as tourists from Europe and the Americas. I couldn´t spend an hour without seeing some Germans here.

I really love the funny advertising ideas some places come up with:

It´s very interesting to see the foreign plants and animals. The birds around here sound so much different than at home that I sometimes just sit in a park and listen to them.

I can´t pass by a museum without visiting it and the Auckland museum is really worth it. They have a big section about the Maori culture with many objects on display. I don´t dare to guess how long it may have taken to carve a whole house like this:

There´s nearly no high place around here that you can´t jump down from, be it the harbour bridge or the Skytower. I just wonder who are the insane here, the kiwis who invented the business or the tourists who actually do the jumping.