After catching the City Circuit back to the CBD, we spent the remainder of our daylight looking around downtown and souvenir-shopping, mostly along Queen Street. As one would expect in a country so full of sheep, there were woolen goods everywhere. Ingenious New Zealanders had also created a seemingly unending array of products involving kiwifruit, including cookies, breads, jellies, candies, butters and lotions, among other things. As my capacity for shopping did not match that of my wife and daughter, I mostly wandered around nearby and took a few pictures to pass the time.


There was also a smallish Westfield shopping mall, which mostly attracted us by having a large, inexpensive and varied food court. But by the time we finished our shopping along Queen Street, the mall had closed, and we had to seek out dinner somewhere else. Auckland also has other food courts (including one under our hotel), but they all seemed to close fairly early, apparently leaving us to the mercy of the (to us) pricey sit-down restaurants for our last New Zealand dinner. But persistence paid off, as we stumbled across an underground principally Asian food court which was still open. We tried Thai and Chinese food, and found both to be quite good and reasonably priced. Another vendor seemed to be a gastronomic United Nations, serving South American, Italian, Malaysian and Mexican food, as well as British-style fish and chips. This frightened us a little, as we wondered how they could possibly be good at all those things. We probably would've ended up there out of curiosity anyway if we'd had another day in Auckland.


But further gastronomic experimentation was not to be. The additional wonders of Auckland would have to await another trip. We walked back to the hotel and did our packing. Tomorrow we would be crossing the Tasman Sea to the land of kangaroos and wombats, the fabled Land Down Under: Australia.