One of the most striking things about Auckland is the ubiquity of te reo Māori, the language of Māori people. While you see reference to it everywhere and hear it on public transit announcements, Auckland is also full of Pacific Islanders who came seeking a better life in New Zealand. While these immigrants don’t speak Māori there are linguistic similarities across Polynesian languages. Apparently Samoan is actually the second most spoke language in NZ.
When the Pacific Islanders arrived they faced barriers integrating that would be familiar to ethnic minorities in Canada. One thing they do share in common with Māori and New Zealanders of European ancestry is a passion for rugby. The neighbourhood where our hotel is located is certainly working class, and is dominated by families who trace their ancestry to the Pacific Islands. Every night on our walk back to the hotel from the bus stop we’ve seen what appeared in the morning to be a vacant field absolutely jammed with local kids and community coaches working on rugby skills. There are pylons and balls everywhere but not a post or field marking to be seen.
B is for blog! And for breakfast. And for Bestie, the restaurant where we had breakfast! We took the bus-train-bus to the Karangahape Road area (known to everyone, thankfully, as K Road). This is a hipster neighbourhood similar to Queen’s Street West before the chain stores moved in. It still has a gritty feel about it while the proliferation of trendy coffee shops and restaurants speaks to an area in transition.
After checking out the cool laneway areas in behind the Britomart station we wandered up to Albert Hill where we found the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. It’s a most impressive building and admission to the main floor gallery spaces was free. We spent a good hour checking out the “Romancing the Collection” exhibit, which essentially decolonized representations of place and people quite effectively.
We also stumbled upon a still life exhibit. While the feature attraction was the Picasso, the star of this exhibit was the alarmed “not so still” pitcher. You can see which one I included below.
Then it was back to the waterfront to admire more boats. What had been a cloudy day turned into a lovely afternoon. Thoughts of boats and boardwalks soon turned to thoughts of patios and beer.
For some reason we felt a little peckish. We went to check out the impressive Harbour Eats Food Court in the Commercial Bay development across from the train station. I know most of you are making a quick connection to the mall food courts of North America. This isn’t that. It is much more similar the the food halls you might find in Europe but with a definite South Asian “flavour”. There must have been 20 or more different spots and the food looked just amazing everywhere. You order and wait with a pager in a common eating area while your food is being prepared. The lunch crowd that was there when we were scouting it out earlier in the day were primarily business folks. At this point in the day it was a mix of tourists, families, couples and people picking up some food after work to take home. We enjoyed the Vietnamese Street Food- Pho for Robin and Bánh mì pork sandwich for me. Delicious.
So that’s pretty much it for Auckland until we are back in March. Tomorrow we make another attempt at going to Brisbane where we hope to have dinner with Sarah and Ian Friday night. Wish us luck!
Fair warning.
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