Saturday, December 15, 2007

Goodbye Auckland

Well, Emma's on the other side of the room smelling her armpits, so I figure I'll just write a bit. We decided to go with ultralight synthetic shirts which have the delightful side effect of storing body odor and letting it really ferment to its full potential. So far Emma's ahead on this front, with her blue shirt in the lead, but my only cotton shirt of the trip might be making a comeback in the final stretch before we hit up the laundromat in Dunedin.

Today we finally decided on a way to track day-to-day finances. Up until now we had been tracking credit card activity for shared items on a Google Docs spreadsheet, having a row that calculates how much one person owes the other person. But now that cash is involved we're using the little Moleskin notebook and have three pages going: one page each that tracks withdrawls from checking accounts and any use of a credit card, and then one page that tracks how we use cash. It has four columns: date, D(ebit), C(redit), and Description. Yeah, I know: quite anal. But if all those Mediterranean traders arrived at this method, we might as well use it too. We were already getting confused at who had withdrawn what and how much we had spent where. Right now we're a bit over-budget, but NZ should be the most expensive: we'll keep you posted.

I think we'll both be happy to get out of the cities. I've almost been run over a few times after not looking the right way when crossing the street. Caught Emma looking the wrong way a few times too. It's so unnatural that I have to consciously twist my entire body to the right before stepping into the street. Must look like a tourist right off the boat.

But then again, on several occasions people supposedly have mistaken us for locals. Today the weather was pretty great, so we walked to one of the beaches just outside of town. Somebody came up to us saying she was taking a survey of Auckland residents for something or other. With the camera, the day pack, the goofy hiking pants? Come on! After chuckling about that, we had a great time for the next few hours, sitting on the sand watching all the action in the bay. I really wanted to get out in one of those fast little sail boats; a few high performance 3-person ones were going so fast they were almost catching air. I tried a bit of swimming to prepare myself for surfing in the months ahead, but just confirmed what I already know: I'm a sinker. We'll see if that improves.

Off to Dunedin.

2 comments:

Chelsea said...

my worst fears have been confirmed...the no deodorant was a bad idea. also, that "blue shirt of emma's?" most definitely mine. i think i might just cut my losses and go buy another.

glad to see you are keeping the blog up to date though. emma start writing! we want to hear more about the country!

Peter Spiro said...

So this is what a blog is like when both people are left-brained.

Are you categorizing the types of expenses? Beer, travel, food, sudoku, crossword puzzles.

What country are you in?