If anyone's in the mood for fried brains, they're welcome to mine. You'll have to remove them from my skull first, though...
I arrived in New Zealand today, which is really tomorrow, having barely slept and not eaten. During my seven hour layover in Auckland, a fairly old Croatian man by the name of Marcus (I may have just made that up -- I'm terrible with names) drove me around to see the sites. Aside from discovering that Auckland is somewhat like San Francisco in layout, I learned that Marcus has two children, aged 31 and 36. His son is happily married, and his daughter was happily married until she became unhappily divorced. Neither of them would go see "The Hobbit" with their father.
After that surreal adventure in between flights, I boarded my last plane to Dunedin. I'd like to pause here for a moment to describe the somewhat hilarious routine I went through over the course of my flights. You see, the airlines wait until you're just about to board the plane to announce that -- just for your section -- they're not allowing carry-on luggage due to space concerns. Not wanting $15,000 of camera equipment to go missing, I began to load up my jacket pockets with every single item from my backpack, stuffing lenses and memory cards into every available crevice like a greedy squirrel storing a few too many acorns in his cheeks for winter.
I should mention that the jacket, borrowed from my father, is designed for just such a purpose...although I doubt the jacket's creator had in mind the sheer weight with which I loaded into its cavernous pockets. In the end, I gained the appearance of a man with a generous amount of blubber around his waist.
Understandably, I think, I was in somewhat of a wretched mood by the time I reached Dunedin. 32 hours of travel tends to fry one's brains. To add insult to injury, I had to regain enough human awareness to navigate the roads, while driving on the left.
My whole mood changed, though, when I encountered this:
P.S. Be sure to check out the New Zealand Galleries. I'll be adding pictures by the date they were taken.