We got out of quarantine on September 24 and spent that whole day -- blustery with rain showers -- buying a car. At the end of the day, I went grocery shopping, and for the first time, it became real to me that we had left late summer in the northern hemisphere and had entered into spring in the southern hemisphere. Here's the moment when spring became real to me:
"Fresh, in season" asparagus, a spring food. You need to see what it was like to enter the grocery store:
There was a short line of people waiting to sign in for contact tracing. The next day, Dave got the app for his phone to be able to capture the image to the right of the table and send it to the New Zealand contact tracing folks. In the supermarket, about 10% of the people had on masks. I wore mine because of just coming out of quarantine. (New Zealand had a case about 10 days ago where someone who had tested negative twice during quarantine got sick with covid after they got out! Scary!)
In another store, shoppers who didn't have the phone app were asked to put their name and phone number on a slip of paper and drop it into a box.
For Dave, one of the highlights of Auckland was most of a day spent in the Auckland Art Gallery. He was absorbed in a photography exhibition of everyday scenes taken from unusual angles. Here's one that he loved. Can you tell what these two objects are? (answer at the end of this post)
When I drove into central Auckland to pick Dave up at the museum, I passed our quarantine hotel. Here's what it looks like from the outside. Quite poignant to see it from a very different angle.
Here's a picture of me, looking happy about being out of quarantine:
Seeing friends in Auckland was the biggest highlight of our five days there. For those of you reading this in the United States, imagine our joy at hugging friends and sitting in a living room talking to them without a mask -- the first time hugs from friends and living room conversations with friends for 6 and a half months. Surreal. Strange. Then comfortable and normal.
I fell in love afresh with the trees and other vegetation in Auckland. Way back in my early adult life, I had a Norfolk Island pine as a house plant. In Auckland, they grow big and tall, which delighted me the first time I visited here, and continues to give me deep pleasure. The early missionaries loved Norfolk pines because the new growth at the top looks like a cross. My brother, who worked in the lumber industry, said that Norfolk pine lumber is so interesting to look at because the pine knots all occur in one place over and over on the trunk because the branches attach in layers, rather than being scattered up and down like other pines.
Dave did a pencil and pen sketch of a tree he loved. He'll paint it later, but I thought you might enjoy seeing the black and white version -- the initial stages of one of Dave's watercolor sketches.
I drove past so many things I wanted to photograph but couldn't: a yard with five orange trees groaning with fruit, wisteria blooming, a rhododendron that was blooming but looked very unhappy in Auckland's subtropical climate. I'll end this post with some photos of spring flowers and gardens, so you can see the vegetation that I enjoyed so much.
In the center of that last photo is a cabbage tree, native to New Zealand, which looks like a yucca plant with a trunk. They also grow around Dunedin, much further south, but there they tend to grow as individual trees. This was quite a different look -- a cabbage tree nestled in with other trees.
Answer to mystery question: The odd geometric photos Dave saw in the museum are cruise ships from above.
If you want to see more landscape photos of Auckland, here are some previous blog posts I wrote about Auckland from when we lived in New Zealand:
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