Stray-ight boys.

so its been a bit, feel free to harass me if i don't update often enough for you. (it means people are reading this which i like)

a few days after the gay-fest that was Family, i made a new friend at the hostel, Rich from Yorkshire (England for those of you who don't know). first we chatted over breakfast then bonded over Mario based video games (i was playing Super Mario World and he was wearing a Mario Kart shirt). he invited me to join him at the bar down in the basement of the hostel which i had not visited (and kind of thought i wouldn't visit) it was for some reason Skirt night, which meant that if you wore a skirt you got a free beer. a box of skirts was provided and they looked like the dregs of a goodwill store but were quite amusing. it also meant that there were about 20 guys in the bar wearing skirts, most over jeans but a few had clearly taken the event seriously and were quite gussied up. many of the skirted boys were also playing in a pool competition which was fun to watch.
i met up with my Brit friend who offered me one of the three beers he had been handed upon presenting his skirt at the bar. the night started slowly and sort of turned out to be quite the "sausage fest." there was a nice older couple from Boston that me and Rich talked to for a while (and who provided me with my second free beer). they were just back in Auckland for the night after returning from south east Asia and were flying back to the states the next day.
the music slowly turned up and the pool tournament ended (the owner of the bar won, which is kind of amusingly unseemly, and i saw him cheat at least once but i don't think anyone cared much) me and Rich started talking to two other Brit boys, who's names i can't for the life of me remember.
it's been a very long time since I've hung out with boys as straight as this and it was for the most part amusing. there was one moment where they did drop into the "i don't mind gay people as long as they don't hit on me" thing (which was in response to two guys who showed up dressed as cats) and there were some things that i'm sure Blyth or the WOA crew would not have approved of but generally they were quite nice. i didn't out myself and i'm not sure if they picked up on it but i didn't really feel the need to at the moment. it turned out that it was one of the other Brit boys birthdays at midnight so we sang for him and "took the piss out of him" (which i still find an odd expression but whatevs).
there was another British guy we ended up talking to who was quite odd, and according to Rich from a quite dodgy part of the country. he was very excited that i was from New York and had his picture taken with me. he had also gotten his picture taken with the cat boys. this guy turned out to be quite the close talker and told this long rambling story about a skateboard he had borrowed from his brother-in-law that he was very excited about. the two other Brit boys packed it in because they were going to Waitomo caves the next day. the close talker invited me and Rich out to another bar but me and him dodged him and headed back up to the hostel, i was going to take a free tour of the city from one of the adventure bus companies (called Stray) and Rich had decided to join me.
~~~
so the next morning at 10:20 we hopped on a nice orange buss and started to explore the city.
the first stop was the Sky Tower, the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere, and Rich won the chance to jump off of it (NZ loves their adventure sports, especially jumping off of very tall things) they suited him up and loaded him into and elevator and we went to the base of the tower to watch him come down. it was quite the amusing thing to watch.
after the Sky Tower we drove around the water front and took a bunch of pictures, then headed to a park and a monument to the country's first Labour PM which was quite an ornate toumb but offered quite nice views of the bay and one of the volcanic islands you can get to by ferry.
next stop was a dead volcano called Mt. Eden, which has a huge crator in it (i had seen pictures and was surprised at how deep it actually was). the crator is also apparently cursed because a tribe's chief got stabbed in the back there so you can't (and i wouldn't have anyway) go down in to it. there were great views of the city from there and a nice bronze place that points to major cities all over the world and tells you how far away you are.
our tour guide gave us a brief sales pitch about the kinds of trecks the company offers and what they are all about (most of which i had already heard) and then we headed down to a local pub for lunch. we were supposed to go out onto the Harbor bridge to watch someone bungee off of it but they are aparently resurfacing the roads at the moment so we couldn't, instead we drove a lap over it and i got a bunch of pictures for mom. we took a wide lap around some of the smaller neighborhoods of town, including K' Road wich is the "red-light-district" in addition to the gay part of town, where i may have semi outed myself to Rich (assuming he hadn't noticed the I <3 Kiwi Boys button i had on my back pack). our last sight was the steepest street in Auckland and teh second steepest in NZ, which at first i thought was going to be lame having come from SF and it's hilly bastard roads but i was actually quite impressed. the steepest st in NZ (and i think maybe the world) is down on the south island and is on my list of things to check out. i need to go back and get some better pics of this street some time today or tomorrow for all my SF peeps.

still no job yet, i need to do more hunting tomorrow, today i moved into my new place (which i suspect might suck more then the hostel but we'll see). but at least i have an address, message me if you want it and i haven't already sent it to you.

-Peter-