Because I felt bored, I decided to run around Auckland a bit and take some photos of places that I've always wanted to go to. So Kagami and Tsukasa packed up and came with me.

First order of business is Auckland's Sky Tower. This tower rises pretty high above Auckland and makes its skyline look like it's got a needle sticking out of it. So I figured we could look at the city from the top there too.

The Sky Tower's base wasn't really massive at all. It really was just a needle sticking out into the air. Of course, the pillars weren't small enough to hug either.

Talk about idiosyncracies. The entrance to the sky tower is located underground. So it actually meant that I had to go down before I went up.

Kagami looks excited. Yoshi Ikuzo!

The first thing I saw when the lift got up was the hueg arrow pointing north. Well, I think its pointing north. Maybe its just the N for New Zealand?

At the main observation deck they had these glass panels you could stand on.

They even reassured us that it was as strong as the concrete I was standing on. After seeing how thick the glass was and how thick the concrete needed to be, it almost seemed as if glass was stronger than concrete, thickness for thickness.

Tsukasa says she'd rather not stand on the glass.

Kagami goes to get the tickets for the upper deck.

While Tsukasa runs off and tries to use the screen that displays the panorama through the use of a scrolling image and a joystick.

Bungieeeeee

It was awesome at the upper platform. We could see the entire city and all the huge buildings just look like little boxes from up here.

But Tsukasa turned out to be so afraid of heights she dared not even look.

Despite Kagami's persuasion.

Kagami explores the city with binoculars. But she apparently saw something, blushed and pushed the binoculars away and said that she was done.

View of the city away from the sea.

Lots and lots of little private sailboats. Now I know why they call this city the city of sails.

After the sky tower, we felt hungry, so we decided to look for a good place to eat

Being a highly multicultural city, (read: Lots of Asians) Auckland is filled with shops that serve a variety of interesting food (read: Japanese food).

We decided to pay a visit to a small ramen store tragicomedy told us about. It was located in an alley between the train station and an office building.

It was pretty cool and stuff since you could sit at the bar and eat as they cook other people's ramen in front of you just like how it is in anime (weaboo mode ON!)

I didn't know there was going to be so much ramen when it came with a plate of curry, so it made me really full.

After eating up and feeling very bloated, we walked off to the train station and found a film crew making a feature length movie.

The movie seems to be set in the future where immigration policies are tightened and people have a bad view on immigrants.

The movie is called Ice, and from what I heard from one of the guys on duty helping out with the filming, it sounded like something worth watching.

They were filming a portion of the film where there was trouble in the airport. They even put up big posters and metal detectors to make it look like a real airport.

Big light is big.

After a day's worth of touring the city and its buildings, we went for a little dinner filled with steak. Rump meat ftw.

written by astrobunny \\ 2009, altophobia, auckland, concrete, curry, film, glass, ice, kagami, movie, ramen, sky, steak, tower, tsukasa, win