Auckland, cars and people…

Aucklands roads are pretty crowded every morning, and on other times you spend at least 50% waiting at some stupid traffic lights – even if you walk, unless you give a shit about the lights. The public transport system is, well, as good as non existant… When buses come, then heaps of them at a time… If you don’t wanna rely on them, and say, bike or skate, you’ll have to go on the road, cause there are no such things as bicycle ways. Anyway, the busdrivers don’t like you being on the road and overtake you with the least distance possible, almost hitting you on the curb.
But there are other funny things to watch on the road. Besides all these really expensive cars, like Lamborginis, Porsches, Corvettes and Ferraris, there are heaps of penis-enlargements with spoilers where you can take a nap on (not that I want to generalize it, but mostly driven by Japanese or Chinese youngsters with custom number plates like HI GIRL)…

Well, there are even more funny things to see, as I saw yesterday and today:
On my way to a party, a police car with sirens was nailing a right turn at an intersection, while the officer on the co-driver seat was enjoying his damn big hamburger…
Not enough of that, today at 2, a day that felt like a beautiful summer day, a pretty normal car with a pretty normal guy was passing me with opened windows, having a big smile on his face… Looking at the car, I saw an almost naked butt on the co-driver seat, while the artificial blond hairs belonging to that butt were directly in between the legs of the smiling driver…
The rest of the day I spent climbing outdoors, not getting this funny picture out of my head.

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Final Flat Farewell Party

Oh yeah, there was something… We had to be back on Friday, since our final flat farewell party was that night. Having hiked for 6 hours and driven for further 6 hours, we managed to be back at home at 7. Helping with preparations, taking a shower (which was REALLY necassary), getting 5 Hell pizzas, Jägermeister and RedBull for the flat, we prepared ourselves for the party. Having eaten alot and drunken some Jägerbombs (’bomb’ a shot glass of Jägi into a big glass of RedBull and kill it!), I felt bad and totally exhausted at 11 and had to leave the party… But 2 hours later I was back on track and ready to rock!!! Unfortunately, the party guests were not really rocking, so at 3 we were all on our own. But the good old Ruru Crew knows how to party, so we danced with DJ Tim till 7 in the morning and passed out altogether on a way too small couch.
The next day was destroyed, but we had a bloody good and greasy breakfast at 3 and started to prepare the departure from Ruru.

2007.09.08 Final Flat Partey

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Having Fun with the Jannemann (a.k.a. Bloody Awesome Time)

My good intentions for the springbreaks – move relaxed into the new place and get stuff for my project done – were destroyed on the first Wednesday. I got a message from Jan, my uni friend and kind of continental neighbour who studied last semester in Sydney. He visited his girl in Valparaiso, Chile and did some nice travels on that continent. On his way back home (which is still Sydney), he planned to do a stopover at Auckland – which was the day after I got his message. Not knowing that I had springbreaks, he just wanted to get onto one of these crappy KiwiXperience buses. I couldn’t let him do that, so I picked him (and the beautiful self-im/exported bottle of Appleton Special Jamaica Rum) up from the airport and decided to hit the road with him – to whereever!
On Saturday we were already rolling – destination: Lake Taupo. We packed the car as always with all the toys I have collected over the time and were cruising south. A short stopover and the first night we spent at Kerosine Creek, a hot river (around 37.5°C) which is perfect for letting the day pass out with a cold beer in the hand. The next morning we boiled our hot water for the instant coffee on a hot geothermal well and continued our way to Taupo. There we found another hot stream (around 37.5°C), but this time ending in the 10°C lake Taupo outflow – which makes it a perfect constallation to chill out after a day full of adventures – for example like mountainbiking for 7h in a super beautiful environment with new high tech MTBs (25$/day). There are prepared MTB tracks in the forest from grade 2 to 5. We stayed at grade 3, which included already some little jumps and little climbs – grade 5 was said to have ‘killer drops’ and ‘extremly steep climbs’ – maybe next time…
The following day was covered in ass pain (yea yea, two boys on a roadtrip… I know you’d love to comment it, timmy ), so we didn’t end up doing much. But we continued our way south, to the Mordor region – cause we could see Mt Doom we had a mission where we had to go next… At the bottom of Mordor we got some informations about what we could do there: snowboarding, hiking, mountaineering… ‘But whatever you do’, the shop owner with a long grey beard and long grey hair told us, ‘just make sure you’re having a bloody awesome time!’. That sounded like a good advice, so we decided to walk up to almost 2000m with 30m sight, stormy winds, snowy and icy steep slopes and high climbs, 5 layers of clothes and … skate sneakers… Well, I knew that it was not the best idea, but we made it almost (30m) up to the highest point of the Tongariro Crossing (New Zealands most famous hike through the Mordor region). But I had to give up since there were no more rocks on the slope to get hold with my shoes without any profile. So we turned around, walked all the way back, got some crampons {Steigeisen} and an ice axe (we just used it to pose on photos), got some supplies, a beany, sunglasses (cause the weather was promised to be perfect the next day) and gloves from a local store and did went up there again. We stayed 3 nights in heated huts with a view you would pay elsewhere hundreds of € – here it was just 10$/night. Since we had such a good view the next day, we didn’t just do the Tongariro Crossing, but walked up on Tongariro.
We spent the night in a hut at 1400m and around – 10°C, having an awesome sunset behind a volcanic steam cloud and an amazing clear sunrise, and a view over whole lake Taupo. Walking down for 3h, trying to get a ride back to the place where we rented our gear (which we finally managed after 1h), and walking for another 3h through some swampy track back to our car, we finally ended our first mountaineering experience.
We had an awesome time up there. All visual impressions from this ‘bloody awesome roadtrip’ you can find in the gallery.

2007.08.31 Bloody Awesome Times with Jannemann

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Spring Breaks and Flat Moving

2 weeks spring breaks – but since I spent the first two weeks in the Tongan sun and with enjoying the last days with my girlfriend, I had such a bad consience, that I didn’t allow myself to lay back and have fun – instead I wanted to keep up with my project work to get sth running. Furthermore our landlord told us to leave the our lovely home, without any reasons – tenants {Mieter} don’t seem to have rights here in New Zealand. So we had one month (end of my spring breaks) to get our stuff organized, find a new place to stay (for me just for 2 further month), clean up the mess and have a big farewell party.
One week before the final date I decided on a place to stay – a cosy little flat in the downstairs of a house, my own bathroom, and just one other flatmate – oh well, I forgot about Julius, the bull terrier who just had an operation on his leg and is not allowed to run or jump, and three to four cats (one looks like Garfield and the other two have ice blue eyes, really amazing! the last one comes occasionally, but shall be recruited to become an official flat member) – do you know the mad cat lady from Simpson? that’s my new flatmate .

My new adress is now:
12A Fleet Street
Eden Terrace
Auckland 1021
Phone: +64 9 362 0118
Mobile: +64 21 174 2461

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Uni Stuff

Just in case anyone is interested what I’m doing for university (the actual reason why I’m here…), this semester I took two courses (computational fluid dynamics – to calculate my own developed kite – and industrial automation – to have it manufactured by these nice orange robots) and one project. The project is about rehabilitation robots – my task is to develop a new kind of upper limb (arm) rehabilitation device… Well, that’s all I got as a task description, the rest lies in my hands… Not the easiest part, since every idea you have already had someone before you and you keep on having ideas and find out that it’s not ‘new’. Well, but finally I had vision which noone seemed to have had before – I just call it ‘The Hand of God’ (wow, that sets high expectations and stuff to discuss about with religious people). What it’s going to be I’ll tell you later, cause the worst thing would be that someone reads this blog and thinks, he just publishes a paper about his idea (which is acutally mine).

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Birthday partey

Even though my motto (BeachBeerBBQ) seemed to be at least with respect to the Beachwear a bit too hard for the Aucklanders (even though we had really comfy 15° or so) we had a damn cool spontaneous birthday party. But the BBQ with the German wurstpackage was awesome, especially the smoked bratwurst! With a bit of mustard it tasted as good as the Hamburger Dom bratwursts. Oh well, I almost forgot to mention that we had a regatta that day as well, which was pretty full on: 8 people on the edge (on a 10m boat), but still heeling over intensly. And as a birthday child, I got the best place in front of everyone – being the wave-breaker for the crew. I came home totally soaked and a little cold, but BBQ and beer did the best to make me alive again.
Late at night we ended at a weird party, where after a while some stupid dudes in Nazi-uniforms showed up – at least we could make ‘em remove their Nazi cross on their upper arm. Some of the NewZealanders seem to have a lack of taste in some aspects (or are just too far away to realize what happened there).
Well, whatever, enjoy the Nazi-free pictures if you didn’t already…

2007.08.11 Axels Beach 'n' Birthday Party

2 comments.

Since German is a language noone understands…

I hope nobody has a problem with reading English, but since there are some readers who have no clue about German at all (except the bad words…), I’ll write in English from now on. And hopefully I’ll keep you informed now a bit more often, the last time was just too busy to keep on bloggin.
What happened you’ll see in the next couple of entries.

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