Impressions of Auckland
-----------------------

I'm keen as mustard to maintain my current streak of having phlogged
something every single one of the past however-many weekends,
but at the same time I sunk an awful lot of hours yesterday into
migrating the Zaibatsu to a new, hopefully more reliable and also
more competent VPS provider, and I want to spend less time in front
of the computer today.  So instead of my original plan, which was to
finally write a response to freet and anna and their responses to my
"Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" post, I'm going to write
something which involves a bit less careful thinking and technical
accuracy, so I can just smash it out.  Apologies to freet and anna
and also anybody who I told to keep an eye out for this post today.
Check back next weekend!

Earlier this year, something of a family health emergency pushed
my wife and I to travel to Australia again, for the first time in
something like five years.  Since we were already going all that way,
and since we are trying to do less and less long distance flying
going forward, we figured that while we were in the area we should
tack on a short stay in New Zealand afterwards.  Some good friends
of ours whom we've not seen in something like seven years live
in Christchurch these days, and since we didn't know how long it
might be until we were down that way again thought it would be to
catch up with them.  Afterwards we spent a few days in Auckland,
for old time's sake.  Long-time readers with good memory will
recall that my phlog, and indeed my identity as "solderpunk",
was born in the final months of me living in Auckland, scrambling
to prepare for our move to Finland.  We have not been back since,
which was shockingly close to ten years ago now!  Here are some
scattered impressions, probably not likely to be of substantial
interest to anyone other than locals or former locals, and rather
specific to my own interests and former neighbourhood.

First of all, the thing I was most eager to know: SuperTrash,
aka "No EFTPOS", somehow survived the pandemic and is still going
strong at the same location.  Somehow the owner has even managed
to afford a new, rather professional looking sign, and "No EFTPOS"
is no longer emblazoned above the entrance.  The place is as chaotic,
disorganised and hazardous to navigate as ever.  I spotted a somewhat
busted up Yaesu FRG-7 "Frog" comms receiver that I would have loved
to haggle over if it hadn't been for the prospect of lugging the
thing back across the world.  To my surprise, some surreal and
rather hilarious hand-written labels now accompany quite a lot of
what is in the store.  I suspect maybe the owner's eccentricities
have perhaps finally made him low-key locally famous and he is
trying to encourage this.  Anyway, a genuinely pleasant experience
revisiting one of my favourite places.

The army surplus store on K Road is no longer there.  That large and
sprawling underground op-shop whose name I can't remember just off K
Road has turned into an absurdly overpriced and over-enthusiastically
curated second hand clothes store (not competently curated, either,
they had a TAZ 83 Alpenflage shirt on display labelled as being
"German", do you even camouflage, bro?).  The Red Cross op-shop on
the main street of Mt Eden is gone.  I still have a Motorola 6809
CPU and associated support chips that I harvested off some random
large PCM I bought there for a steal.  The owner said it came from
a TV NZ studio, I have no idea what it did, but I should try firing
that CPU up some day.

Mt Eden Paris Bakery still exists and still do the greatest cream
lamingtons in the entire mortal realm.  Astonishingly, Olaf's bakery
and cafe just down the street, which was incredibly popular when
I lived there, is no more.

We climbed Mt Eden/Maungawhau itself while we were there.  It was up
there, nicely removed from the smog of interference the surrounds
all modern houses, that I first got started with shortwave DXing,
collecting a number of QSL cards (still pinned up in front of me
to this day!) from various national broadcasters who, variously, no
longer broadcast at all, no longer broadcast in English, or no longer
issue physical QSL cards.  The top of the mountain now features an
elaborate network of boardwalks, presumably to combat erosion from
so many people walking on it.  Understandable, but it does change
the vibe quite a bit.  The views remain stunning, of course.

Go Go Music Cafe is still there on Dominion Road.  I had forgotten
just how incredible that street is, genuinely unmatched anywhere
I've lived for good quality authentic East Asian food.  The extent
of the East Asian influence on Auckland really is astonishingly,
but culinarily but culturally more broadly.  I saw the largest and
most elaborate arcades I've seen this century outside of Japan on
Queen St, and one of them had a Beat Mania machine in it with a 2026
copyright notice on the demo screen (this was in March!)saw the
largest and most elaborate arcades I've seen this century outside
of Japan on Queen St, and one of them had a Beat Mania machine in it
with a 2026 copyright notice on the demo screen (this was in March!).

On the whole it was a great trip, and a nice way to decompress
after dealing with more difficult issues in Australia (not that the
Australian part of the trip was all bad, I got to hang out with Cat
and TDK!).  We complained incessantly about Auckland when we lived
there, and honestly rightly so.  The housing is expensive and of
universally shockingly low build quality, and despite the fact that,
when talking on the scale of big cities globally, the population of
Auckland is approximately zero, the traffic is also appallingly bad,
and living without a car is about as difficult as it is in Australia.
It's not a great place to live (it was in fact awarded the title
of Most Livable City or something like that while we lived there,
which has made me a life-long sceptic of such awards), but it was
a great place to visit.  There is something about the character of
New Zealand that I missed more than I realised.