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Saturday 9th June Journal entry brought to you by Tami Sophie woke me up at 9.33am this morning by saying "Tam. It's 9.33." At first I was a bit confused as to why I should care about this, but then when I looked over to Amos and Oli's bed and saw they were both still fast asleep, it dawned on me that the two of them had well and truly missed their 7.25am bus. After well and truly ripping it out of them that they'd done this, and having told Oli what he did the evening before (too drunk to remember ANY of it! So funny!) Sophie and I headed out to the museum. It was pretty cool actually, it's the first time in AGES that we've done something just the two of us, since Taupo in fact. It was a wicked museum, but it took us AGES to look round it all. The bottom floor alone took us a good couple of hours. Half of it was dedicated to Tonga, Fiji, Samoa and the links between the three and New Zealand, and had lots of artefacts from various tribes. The other half was all Maori information. Then we went up a floor and saw lots more stuff, a huge display on volcanoes and earthquakes, and some other things....which I actually can't remember now.....some shark stuff......and a weird and wonderful section with cockroaches and stuffed polar bears and crazy things like that. It was a generally well laid out museum, but a little too much information presented at once, not spaced out and easy to take in like Te Papa. The top floor was all about war and I got a bit freaked out in there, I don't like war in general anyway, and there was a list of loads of people who had died, and as well as a T.Russell there were loads of other names that had initials that could have been people I know, and it just brings it home how many people die in these things and I get really freaked out. So I left Sophie to that and went to look at some 1920s photographs, which were pretty cool. The main featuer of the musem, the main reason that we had decided to go to it on our second time in Auckland as opposed to our first, was because they were featuring a huge exhibition on Ancient Egypt. We had to pay for this (which I was not impressed about as the museum is meant to be Free or Donation Optional (which MEANS free to backpackers)) but it turned out to be really good, very very interesting. It took us through the lengthly funeral process of Keku, an Egyptian girl who actually existed, her mummy was in the display with her coffin and relics found in her tomb. It was actually really fascinating. Plus there was a section where you could work out your name in heiroglyphics, so I worked a couple of names out and then we moved on. When we got back to the hostel, we did some washing, and then went down to the waterfront to meet up with Hana Cooper who was at Kingsley School with Sophie, and who I've met at various times over the past 4 years, like on World Challenge and so on, and her boyfriend Hesy. And also, rather randomly, Alice Harrison, who went to Kingsley years ago, who I was at College with for a year in 2004 - 2005, and moved to Auckland two years ago! How random is that?!! We went to the Minus 5 Bar which is an ice bar where everything from the bar to the chairs is made of ice. We were told before we went in that we were allowed to lick anything we wanted. This of course, was the cue for Sophie and I to lick EVERYTHING we could get our tongues on. Germs and bacteria can't survive at that temperature so we were okay. We got a free cocktail in our entry price (or a mocktail in my case), and they were really delicious. We got kitted out in MASSIVE coats, and to my delight, we were given Ug boots to wear as well! Woot! After our alloted 30 minutes we headed to a bar of more normal temperature, which was pretty cool as well, there were about 50 lights hanging from the ceiling and each one had a different lampshade. I will upload a photo at some point. At about 1am, Alice dropped us back at our hostel and we went to bed. Had a wicked night, was so crazy to catch up with them both!
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