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Auckland: Initial Observations

I have officially been a JAFA for precisely 16 days now. It’s starting to feel a bit more like I actually live here, instead of how it has been feeling which is that I am housesitting for someone with all my stuff and my cat, and that I am temping in someone else’s job. It’s quite an odd feeling really, and I feel like I am going to go “home” to Wellington any day now.

Things to note:

• Auckland is very muggy. I live no more than a 15-minute walk to my new job and start at 8:30am each day. For the first two weeks I would walk not entirely too strenuously because at 8:15am it already muggy and hot. I arrive at 8:27am, grab my water bottle and take some swigs of yesterday’s water, take it to the cooler to refill it, and then go to the bathroom to run my wrists under cold water and daub my forehead and upper lip with a paper towel. In 2002 I coined the phrase, “There’s a rivva in my boobies,” and sadly the rivva has returned.
• The coffee is terrible. I have not had a single good cup of coffee in Auckland. Everyone’s beans taste burned and bitter, and lattes arrive thin and watery, to the point I would consider going to Starbucks out of preference. That is deadly sin in Wellington, the land of delicious coffee.
• Everything is very far apart. No longer can I waltz down to the post office at lunch, or quickly grab some new stockings when the ones I’m wearing run, or wander around Farmers looking at cheap make-up and new hair straighteners. I don’t work in the city centre, rather in one of the closest suburbs which although very nice is overrun with stupidly expensive clothing boutiques and many cafés selling crappy coffee. And because Auckland is so large and sprawling, everywhere seems to be a destination shop. A 20-minute drive to Briscoes, a 25-minute drive in another direction to go to Freedom Furniture, and a short drive into town for a lot of other stores that you would want to shop at if it were not a requirement to try for a ridiculous amount of time to get a car park. Perhaps I will be needing a car after all, and my poor little Vespa will need to be sold. That is as yet undetermined.
• The shopping and eating choices are never-ending and fantastic. Being in a city that is 3.5-times the size of Wellington of course the shopping is going to be better. There are so many great little boutiques (that I can’t afford but can wish) and lots of stores Wellington just doesn’t have. There are loads of new restaurants to choose from, and a lot more delicious Asian foods to try which is a wonderful by-product of having a larger Asian population in the warmer north.
• The houses are way prettier. At least in the area I live in. In Wellington, the areas with the beautiful historic Victorian villas have had many demolished to make way for hideous townhouses and apartment blocks. Instead in Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, most of these are being restored to their former beauty. I love going for walks in my neighbourhood just so I can look at the houses and dream that one day I am going to win the lottery that I never enter so I can afford to own a home in a suburb such as thing. However, chances are that it will never happen.

So, I’m getting along alright up here. I miss my family and I miss Wellington (good days only), but I’m sure it won’t be too long before I start replying with “Grey Lynn” instead of “Wellington” when people ask me where I’m from.

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