NZ Day 5 of 89 So yesterday it was sunny & 25deg so I felt like being a bit more adventurous. So I took a bus to the Wynard Quarter(Waterfront Quay) in the afternoon. Cost $0.50 for a 3 Km trip. Great value, especially for a cripple. They have converted a lot of he old wharfside buildings into water front cafes and restaurants with a pedestrian walkway all the way down. There is a Pedestrian Draw Bridge that opens up to let yachts come & go from the Marina into the inner harbour. There is lots of seating along the way to stop and rest or just people watch. I walked from the Wynyard Quarter where the bus dropped me to the Main downtown waterfront at the bottom of Queen St. West & the Britomart(Transportation hub -t rains & buses) for a total walking distance of 1.2km which is huge for me especially without my knee braces and only my cane. Something about all that sunshine & beautiful scenery makes it painless. So I parked my ass on a bench at the ferry terminal to people watch and listen to music when a few minutes later a gentleman my age sits down. He looked Italian and I was afraid to speak to him at first because he may not know English and I definitely cant speak Italian. But for some reason I was compelled to remove my earbuds and comment on the weather. To my surprise he spoke perfect English. He was from the UK but his parents were of Italian decent. We had an amazing conversation about traveling, the disparity in wealth to the changes in how people bury themselves in technology and dont communicate verbally today. He is actually 75 and easily looked 10 years younger. He is a retired Psychologist and has been traveling for the past 6 years since retirement and has a lot of the same life philosophy as I do. Strive for a stress free life, eat well, love well, and be happy as much as possible because happiness is a state of mind not a condition of our surroundings. I really enjoyed our conversation and it will definitely encourage me to reach out even more to people in my travels. Sometime after he left I noticed four young ladies with two pizza boxes looking all around and I could sense they were struggling to find somewhere to sit and eat where the four of them could be together so I called out to them and offered my bench which they were very grateful for. I continued my walk up to the Britomart where the underground train station and the above ground buses converge. Im sure it will be a bustling hive of activity Monday morning after a long holiday break. Im not sorry that I will be too busy sleeping in to take in the show. The Old Post Office building is now the train station but they have kept the exterior of this historic building. This building has special memories for me because it was here 31 years ago at the Main Post Office that Debb & I had to scramble to in order to have money wired to us during the beginning of our 3 month trip to New Zealand. Just up the street we were in a shop buying a new camera because we had lost our Konica 35mm SLR on the beach in Australia days before. The salesperson said that out Visa card would be expiring in a few days. Debb & I looked at our card in horro after looking at the card to verify her observation. With all of the detailed planning we had done for this 3 month trip neither of us had noticed that our Visa card would expire during our trip. We had made arrangements with our bank to pay our Visa bill in full each month while we were away and we had brought very little cash with us. So how were we going to pay for anything with our cash all in Canada and our bills here in New Zealand. Now at that time there wasnt the convenience of the internet or cellphones so everything had to be done by telephone and cablegram wire. So we scrambled over to the main post office building which was the communications hub at that time. We had to place a long distance phone call to our bank where our bank person had to check the status of our new Visa cards which had already been mailed to our home address. They had to cancel those cards and we had to have a wire transfer done for the thousands of dollars that we would need for the trip. Then we had to purchase Travelers Cheques and then the tedious task of signing everyone of those cheques. This all took a couple of days to complete. So we went from total panic to laughing in two days. We were so grateful to the salesperson that had noticed the problem. If we had left Auckland before noticing; we would have had to back track and possibly without any money to do so. Thats why this building has such significance for me. :-). The funny thing is I remember there being many more stairs going up to the building. This might have been a psychological illusion as it represents over coming a greater obstacle or maybe they have raise the street elevation over the years. Either way this old building and the technology inside of it at the time saved our trip. I also want to remember all the amazing people at both ends of that transaction (CIBC & Kiwi Post Office staff) that pulled out all the stops to help this young Canadian couple on their Kiwi adventure. Cheers Everyone.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:45:34 +0000
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