Barely Scratching the Surface: Mt. Eden and the Auckland War Memorial Museum

Today I was lucky enough to spend the day with Rosie, Terry and Mimi's 23 yr old daughter. Rosie is a nurse and had today off which was great timing for me. We started the day by going to Mt. Eden, a dormant volcano in near the CBD (central business district) of Auckland. From Mt. Eden you can see the entire city and suburban area as well as both coasts of New Zealand. Here's a picture of the crater of Mt. Eden:

You can see the city in the back left corner of the photo.

We took a few photos of ourselves while we were up there:

Rosie, my first friend in Auckland, and I.

The city over the rim of the Mt. Eden crater.

Auckland Harbor Bridge.

The Auckland metropolitan area is home to roughly 53 volcanos. There are small hills - volcanic craters - all around the city creating a metropolitan area with few straight roads as the streets need to wind in and around the ancient landscape. Here's some photos of a few of the craters we could see from Mt. Eden:

After we spent a bit of time at Mt. Eden we headed to the Auckland War Memorial Museum. We started our time there with the Maori Cultural Experience, a 30 minutes performance by 7 Maori people that goes through presentations of traditional dances, pasttimes, weapons, and concludes with the haka - a traditional war dance performed before battle. Sometimes a tribe's haka is so impressive/intimidating that the other side would concede after seeing the other tribe's haka. I can tell you this much, if I saw an opposing tribe do the haka, I would concede the battle immediately. Here's a video of the haka we saw today. The New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, performs the haka before every rugby game to the competitors. I wouldn't mess with the All Blacks if I was you. (Here's a video of one of the All Black's hakas from a game.) After the performance I was able to take a few photos with one of the performers, Tana (pronounced Tay-na), a guy who Rosie actually graduated high school with.

After the performance we wandered around the museum for the rest of the day. As we were walking around the Maori exhibit, Rosie was able to answer almost all the questions I had. Here in NZ they work very hard to preserve the native culture and teach all the children in school about the Maori people, their culture, and their language. It's really too bad we don't do it to the same extent in the states. Besides the Maori exhibit we went though the WWII exhibit which was drastically different than a WWII exhibit you'd see in the states. They had an entire small area on a battle at Crete, which I didn't even realize was a big deal in WWII. They also put less emphasis on the plight of the Jewish people in the war than a typically American museum would include. They did have one really cool wall in the exhibit, however, where they asked any POWs that happened to come through the museum to write their name and which POW camps they were in during the war. It may have been the most moving thing I saw all day - to think I was standing there looking at wall that 30+ POWs of WWII had looked at before me. It's just crazy to think at one time they were being held behind enemy lines by the Germans all those years ago and then at some point decided to visit the Auckland Museum. Here's a photo of that wall:

We also walked through the natural history part of the museum where they had a replica (wrong word maybe...) or a Moa - a now extinct bird which was larger than an ostrich. Here's a few photos of my next to it. Look at the size of ti's feet!

As we were leaving the museum we stopped in briefly at a children's area in the museum where they had lots of animals. In the locust exhibits most of the locusts were mating. It was really weird. None of the children in the exhibit seemed to interested but many of the adults were. Here's a few photos: