Yesterday I went sightseeing around Auckland again, and this time in the Parnell suburb. Since this was my first time doing anything big outside of the central city, I decided to simply walk my way down and around to find interesting things to photograph.

Parnell seemed to be mostly a shopping district. There was a Westfield mall but it wasn't a very big one, and most of the shops were outside of it.

One store of note was the Esprit store, which was pretty damn big, and had a huge presence.

There's no way you can miss this store.

It turned out the really long rows of shophouses were just dominated by boutiques of designer wear and other branded stuff.

There was also this huge clothes shop

And an Apple store. But we really weren't interested in any of that sort of stuff and decided to look for some parks with really nice scenic spots to take pictures of.

We came to a little corner where there were these nice little brick buildings that had shops that sold furniture.

The store behind Tsukasa is a Ralph Lauren Furniture store. I didn't know Ralph Lauren made furniture too...

After a bit of walking my eyes were caught by a road that was lined with flowery trees. So I decided to follow it down.

It turned out there was a little garden at the end of it with some pretty flowers.

So we decided to admire those for a while.

After a while, I noticed that further up the road was a big building. I didn't know what it was at first but since the day was still young, I decided I wasn't in any rush to find out.

There were little monuments littering the place.

Which made great photo opportunities.

It turned out the huge building was a museum. The Auckland War Memorial Museum. It really isn't exclusively a war museum though. It was a museum of all sorts of other things too.

There was a little orchid exhibition inside too.

There were all sorts of things ranging from orchid arrangements

To little things that let you smell the different fragrances made from orchids.

There were also bowls with orchid paintings on them.

Besides the orchid show, the museum had other permanent exhibits on art too. Here's the contemporary art section.

So we decided to take our time and brows the different galleries.

There were the natural history exhibits...

Which had these hueg dinosaurs

And birds...

Then there was the war museum upstairs, which was admittedly the most interesting.

There were all sorts of models of military hardware used since ancient times.

There was even this exhibit of a restored Mitsubishi Zero fighter.

In the middle of the building was a memorial to all the soldiers that perished in the two world wars.

It even had the flags of the countries involved in the war, and the flags that had the union jack on them.

And niches that had solemn declarations that promise never to start unreasonable wars again.

After about 3 hours of staring at historical artifacts, the museum started to close around us. Little did we know, it started raining outside. So we had a little run ahead of us.

Since we spent the entire day walking around, everyone was hungry so we decided to order a nice big serving of meat and rice in a nice chinese food shop in the city.

Then Kagami and Tsukasa went back to have a little casual costume fun.

...and uh, played with Tragic's electronics, whose wires have a mind of their own.

Soon it was time to pack up for the first flight the next morning back to Christchurch.

written by astrobunny \\ apple, art, artillery, auckland, bbq, broccoli, char siew, chinese, coral, dinosaur, district, duck, esprit, exhibition, flower, food, gallery, japan, kagami, lauren, memorial, mitsubishi, monument, mouse raep, museum, orchids, parnell, ralph, rice, roast, shopping, tsukasa, war, world war, zero