for the eyes

A post in photos...

Before catching a plane to Melbourne we spent a few days in Auckland. Tahi loved going to the zoo. I'm not usually a big fan of these places and can' stop staring at the animal and saying I'm sorry in my head. In saying that, the Auckland zoo is very proactive and making sure its visitors are made aware of issues threatening most animals in the wild, namely loss of habitat. They are putting a big emphasis on palm oil and encouraging customers to use their buying power to express their discontent. Palm oil is the cause of deforestation in some asian countries and has meant that orang-utans are seriously threatened in the wild. They didn't mention anything about the new zealand dairy industry using palm kernels as a feed supplement though...

I loved getting a big city fix and if anything I wish we'd had an extra week to check a few exhibitions and do some more op shopping.

Our friends live in a very cool art deco house in Carnegie. The public transport system is amazing, we got to their house from the airport no problem at all and the kids did really well, considering they'd been up since 3.30am that morning, spent 4 hours in the plane, then 20mn in a bus and another good half hour in the train then in another bus.

Southern cross train station, bright and early.

We all slept in the same bed although I sometimes found it hard to squeeze in.

 ON our first night, once the kids were all in bed we set to making sausages.

 WE spent a day at the beach, the kids loved it of course!

 We even found time to get a bit crafty. We set out to make a sunhat out of a japanese craft book Stephanie had. It turned out to be a bit of a mission but the results were very satisfying. To anyone who has a japanese craft book and can't read japanese: the patterns don't include the seam allowance! The first sunhat we made turned out to be too small but ended up fitting stephanie's 2 year old like a glove.

 We were lucky to see two of Theo Jansen's crazy moving sculptures. They're even more amazing in real life!