The flight to Auckland was a manageable 3 hours and we touched down around lunch time. We picked up the rental car, a sporty little Mazda 3 and braved traffic to our house in the inner suburbs of Auckland. The owner was chatty but very nice so we settled in and took a walk to the grocery store. It was nice to be able to cook meals for ourselves finally. The grocery shopping experience is pretty similar to the US. Brands are different and there are some different products available, but aside from some things being more expensive and there being fewer varieties of the same product it doesn’t feel too different.
We arrived on Tuesday and needed to start heading towards Wellington on Saturday. There were four things we had to accomplish during our short time in Auckland: 1) pick up our bank cards (we had opened the account and transferred money to it while we were still in the States), 2) get our phones working, 3) buy a car, and 4) see some sights.
Wednesday was forecast to be rainy so we took our raincoats an umbrellas on the bus downtown where we stopped in at our new bank. All we had to do was show our drivers licenses and set PINs and we were all set with our new debit cards. Easy as.
Next we headed to the mobile phone store down the block. Before we left I had contacted our cell company and paid off the balance on our phones. This made them ours and let us unlock them, which allows them to be used on any carrier’s network. Unfortunately, three days after that I also managed to drop my phone and crack the screen! Unlocking my phone was easy, you just press a button on an app, but Kelly’s Apple was more complicated so we didn’t get a chance to do the unlock process before we left. Unfortunately, when we got to the shop and put in a new sim card we found that it wouldn’t work, and after chatting online with our US carrier we found that it needed a code to unlock that they had never sent and it would take 24 hours to process. We stopped in to the shop around lunch the next day to find that they had still not sent the code and that now they were telling us it would take up to 48 hours to process! We set up the account with the NZ mobile company so that at least I would have a working phone and so that Kelly’s would work as soon as we got the code. After a couple more agonizing interactions with the US company Kelly’s phone finally sprang to life on Friday.
Kiwi Bound 