4 hour museum visit 🛖

We walked to the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which is in a park called the Domain. On the way we stopped at the “Winter Gardens” and Henry took a picture for a big matching family. The museum is a stately building, with exhibits on the world wars but also a huge collection of Māori artifacts and history. My favorite part was the Hotunui meeting house which was an incredibly intricate carved structure (no pictures allowed as it’s a sacred space).

We took a break to each our sandwiches on the beautiful hill outside. The weather is gorgeous and I could imagine why people have been enamored with New Zealand Aotearoa for centuries. We went back in and did an exhibition on the communities of Auckland, then the world wars, plus a few other wars NZ was involved in.

By then we were starting to ache so we walked back to the Airbnb and had a rest and a beer. For dinner we went to an Indonesian restaurant called Java that was very pink inside. We had a delicious variety of food and a pink soda of coco pandan syrup, soda water, and condensed milk (Soda Gembira). The area of the restaurant seems to be the hipster/gay district— we saw some markets happening and a drag queen grinch. In the evening we started the first Lord of the Rings, to be watched before we get to Hobbiton.Read more