For several years now, every year on Chinese Lunar New Year, Oakland has hosted a Chinese Lantern Festival. Although I would call these glowing sculptures 🙂 for they are very large for flashlights. Several hundred glowing figurines were collected in Oakland's Domein Park (more than 800 according to official records). Some were funny, some were more or less gaunt 🙂 Besides the lanterns, the trees lit up with different colors looked cool.
I don't know how to translate water garden, something like a garden with a pond... A place with the Maori name Ngatea has a very famous garden. It is known not only for the fact that there is a lot of vegetation, but also for the unbridled sense of humor of its owners, which spills out in unexpected installations and compositions. It rained very luckily while fording and produced lots of colors with droplets.
A few years ago there was a news about opening a koto-cafe in Japan, then they opened a lot of places and suddenly I found one in Auckland. As it turned out, you had to book cat socializing in advance, but I got lucky and had a free spot from 3 to 4. To keep the cats from freaking out, they don't let more than 16 people in an hour. For $15, you'll be treated to delicious coffee and cats. It's better to keep your coffee to yourself, because there are junkies there who will finish everything you left unattended.
We have here on the eve of 2016 weather forecast decided to break all records and on January 1, 2016 promised 3 MONTHLY norms of precipitation. Happily rainy «happiness» moved from midnight to 6 a.m. and although I didn't go into town for the fireworks, I shot some of it from the veranda of the house I live in on North Shore. From the photos, you can estimate the roughness at 200mm from a distance of 10km at a shutter speed of 1 second.
Being a programmer by profession and an optimizer by nature, my inner calculator thought and decided that going to bed for 2-3 hours before a flight is not cool and then paying for a cab is not cool either. So an alternative option was devised: take the last bus into town and hang around for two or three hours. The idea was realized, with a few photos emerging in the process.
Collected a lot of photos from various treks around the city. The weather is great, despite the climactic winter, you have to slather on the sunscreen so you don't get an overdose of UV. There were no particularly heavy rains, as a rule the rain ends in 20-30 minutes... but then it starts again for 20-30 minutes 🙂 Anyway, it's fun here.
We're in the middle of a biological event! The Corpse Flower has bloomed in Auckland 🙂 Not that it does this rarely, but the last time it bloomed was in 2013. On the outside, this «flower» over three meters tall. I didn't get to the fragrant blooming period, so I can't tell you anything about the smell, but people who went to smell it say it doesn't stink much. Also in the post threw flower photos made in June-July this year (we have such a winter in the southern hemisphere). Since I don't know what all of them are called, the captions will just be numbers.
Back in early April during the big Easter vacation, I traveled to Gisbon to deliver a long-promised gift from Russia. As entertainment on the second day we went to the hot springs of Morere, where besides the springs there are several trails in the wildest New Zealand forest, of varying degrees of difficulty, with a climb of about 280 meters.
A test post to check out the blog extension. It's all on my phone, but I did my best, and there are some cool shots in there. 🙂 At the same time I tested MapMyWalk - a program that writes a track when you walk, but most importantly it shows the tracks of other walkers, and you can choose someone else's route and follow it. Very handy in unfamiliar terrain.
I went to the zoo to see the wonderful Kiwi bird and everyone else who would be there. In the end, I saw everyone, but not the Kiwi. In the enclosure where they live, an artificial night is created, and you can't see anything at all! The entrance ticket to the zoo costs $29, and for $85, you can become a special zoo lover and visit places inaccessible to ordinary people, like petting lemurs or feeding kangaroos. I would like to specifically mention the navigation in the zoo, which is just obscenely confusing. There are no signs on the territory at all, and I made three circles around the baboons before finding the passage to the Kiwi. At the entrance, everyone is given a map, but the map is schematic and does not reflect the actual distances and locations of the sections. Nothing is clear! But the map does have a schedule of when different animals are fed on which days, and you can watch shows all day.
