Oct 23rd – When you’re here for 35+ days you can expect to see some rain, and this day was no exception. Since we had been watching the weather forecast, we planned that our first rainy day would be spent at the Auckland Museum. What a wonderful place!

We started with a guided tour that lasted a little over an hour but gave us a good overview of all of the different parts of the museum. Throughout the tour we learned a number of facts about New Zealand that we maybe hadn’t thought about before:

• humans have only been here for 700 years
• it was first discovered and settled by Polynesians
• the British didn’t arrive until about 1790 although a Dutch explorer named Abel Tasman came in 1642
• there are only about 4.5 million people here, but 3.5 million live on the north island (the smallest of the two)
• in 2011, there were 31 million sheep!
• Wellington is the capital but Auckland is a much larger and more cosmopolitan city
• they have only a national government and local councils – no provincial/municipal levels of government
• they do not have a senate – having abolished it in the 1950s!

During time on my own, I experienced an earthquake (fake) with a group of school kids and browsed the museum gift shop – a delight in itself.