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New Zealand, Day 1: Auckland, Piha, Mt. Eden

by Cindy Sun 12 Jan 2014 Comments7

You might be looking at this blog entry and wondering, what’s up with this new premade layout, bro? Yeah, I’m not sure myself, other than the fact that I was getting sick of staring at the same layout for 4 years but feeling too lazy to go back to the drawing board and make a new one. There will be a day when I’ll give this blog the facelift it deserves, but that day is likely not today. To make up for it, here! Have a gratuitous photo of New Zealand!

One of the promises of moving to California two years ago was that of constantly being spoiled by gorgeous scenery, from the hills of San Francisco to the beaches of Santa Cruz to the redwoods to wine valleys to the proximity of great beauties like Yosemite and Tahoe. And as much as I miss the urban playground of New York, I do feel that Northern California has lived up to that promise.

[…]

Until now, because New Zealand has officially ruined and appropriately shat on every perception of natural beauty I once had that I can’t even look California in the eye without thinking of how I could have it so much better in the antipodes, like I did when I took a 10-day road trip in NZ with my family this Christmas and New Year’s.

In fact, New Zealand was a family trip two years in the making, and the idea made a bit of sense back then, when everybody in the fam was living in Asia. However, other plans happened and priorities shifted, and the idea of going to New Zealand never quite took off and was thus shelved on the backburner. My New Zealand guidebook, in fact, remains a testament to how long the trip had been in development, based on the amount of dust it had been collecting on my bookshelf. Maybe Amanda remembers the times I’d ping her with I THINK I’M GOING TO NZ THIS CHRISTMAS!!!! … back in 2012.

This holiday season, we vowed to actually put more than hot air under our words and make this trip happen. It would be a road trip, starting off first with the South Island and then driving around the North. And let me say that I — in general — have a dislike for road trips, despite all the romantic notions they tend to conjure up, such as those in On the Road or Crossroads (OKAY, I JOKE). Road trips make me antsy for reasons having to do with claustrophobia, carsickness, boredom, and being stuck with the same people for hours on end. Even when I did the classic California road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway back in ’07, cabin fever and migraines got the better of me (as did my memory card, which got totally reformatted along the way) during those long stretches of time cruising past scenic West Coast views. There have been, like, two road trips in my entire life that didn’t leave me feeling like I was doomed to an existence of recycled air and “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” ad nauseum, and those were an East Coast drive back in ’09 with my college friends and a cross-country safari in Kenya where I saw a lion rip apart an ostrich among other Lion-King-worthy highlights. But before you think all my New Zealand posts are going to be a huge whinefest about how I hate everybody else’s driving except for my own (actually, scratch that, I can’t even stand my own driving, so I guess this means I hate everybody’s driving.), I’m going to put it out there: New Zealand road trips blow all other road trips out of the water.

Simply put, this trip was so worth the two years’ delay and the perfect conclusion to a madcap 2013 that was filled with motion and sights and discovery. The one complaint I do have is that I have to get my jaw realigned, because it kept dropping and unhinging itself countless times as I stared agape at the scenery out my window. Glaciers, valleys, hot springs, mountains, forests, hills, geysers, fjords, lakes, caves — check, check, check. How is it possible for one country to contain so much natural beauty per square mile!!! I still don’t know the answer, but feel free to speculate and plot with me to bring some of that natural beauty to the rest of the world, because no country should ever be this stunning. This is the stuff that Windows desktop backgrounds, Instagram shots, and Facebook cover photos are made of.

So without further ado, I’ll probably spend the next few days (or weeks) talking about New Zealand in hopefully-chronological order, starting with December 23rd (Auckland) and culminating with our final day in Auckland on the 1st of January. Assuming I can curb my tendency to tl;dr, there will be one post per day spent in NZ, because let’s face it — summarizing the entire trip any more wouldn’t be doing it justice.

To start off, my brother and I had an extra day to spare in Auckland while our parents were flying in from Sydney, and Amanda being the awesome lady that she is, picked us up from our hotel to show us around her turf and we were off to Piha for the day!

Piha reminds me of Santa Cruz and Kauai a bit — the former for its hilly winding roads, abundance of surfers, and choppy waves, and the latter for its natural beauty and black sand. Either way, it makes for an absolutely beautiful backdrop for our first day. Coming from a hectic week at work wrapping up all my end-of-quarter stuff, I found a day on the beach to be the day of relaxation I never knew I needed. Most beaches I visit are plagued with people that it becomes less chill and more like a scene from Where’s Waldo?, but this one was just the right amount of quiet needed to unfuck my head from all the flying I had just done and all the stress left behind in California.

One caveat, though: Piha is hot as hell. Usually a beach being hot is about as surprising as water being wet, but New Zealand in the dead of summer plus the presence of black sand basically means that you better lather up on the sunscreen, lest you want to look like you pulled a Sylvia Plath in a wood fire oven. I had my SPF 60 to protect me from any burns, but either way, I think I might have burned off the soles of my feet while running across the black sand. They really weren’t kidding when they said that black absorbs heat the most; I might as well have been running across a cul-de-sac with hot coals on it.

After lazing about on the beach, we went to Mt. Eden, the crater formerly known as a volcano overlooking the whole of Auckland.

Look at that mother.

As fun as it would be to roll downhill in the crater (the thing resembles a giant salad bowl — if salad bowls were all made of grass) or go sledding in it during the winter time, you can only walk around the edge, but it’s worth it for the city views alone.

The day was rounded out by a nice dinner at Circus Circus, which made me chuckle because it shares a name with a Las Vegas hotel that I may or may not have stayed at a few birthdays ago and during a family trip way back when. Whoops. This Circus Circus, on the other hand, is a much classier establishment with good food to boot.

My salmon fillet

My brother’s lamb scotch fillet and the first of many, many lamb dishes we’d be eating on this trip

And with that, we said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel, where we went to bed at an absurdly early hour. I’d say we had slept so early because we were trying to squeeze in as much sleep as we could before we had to fly out to Christchurch and hit the road the next day, but let’s be real, it was all jetlag.

Filed under New Zealand 2013 Travel

Stay crazy, 2013.

by Cindy Sun 29 Dec 2013 Comments9

Yikes.

I just realized that I haven’t blogged at all in 2013, and I can only attribute this failure to a variety of different reasons below:
A. I suck
B. I suck
C. I suck
D. All of the above

And it’s a shame that my suckitude exists, because 2013 was a hell of a good year. Far be it for me to attach hyperbolic meaning to things like these, but as the end of a year approaches, I get into a hyper-reflective mood where I think about all the awesome (see: husky sledding), new (see: dyeing my hair pink), crazy (see: jumping off the world’s biggest swing) things I’ve done in the past 50-some weeks, as well as the lowlights. 2012 felt ridiculously stagnant, and by the end of it, I was getting several months’ worth of cabin fever — which helps explain why I went nuts in 2013. Maybe decades from now, I’ll still look back on this and think, holy hell how did all of this happen in one year, but trying to encapsulate all of this in a nutshell only begins to scratch the surface. I’ll give it a shot though, and make an attempt to give you Cindy’s 2013, the Abridged/Instagrammed Version™, aka what I’ve been up to this past year:

I kicked off the year with a week in the world’s classiest place: New Orleans.

Shortly after, I got accepted to volunteer at Obama’s inauguration, which led to a birthday trip spent in New York and DC.

In February, I went to Japan (Tokyo, Nagano, and Kyoto), and got to see the places that I had only read about in my Japanese Civ textbooks.

In March, I joined Elena for a quick weekend in Montreal, where I stuffed my face stupid with bagels and poutine.

The following April was spent in California — but considering the fact that I participated in Holi, spent the weekend in Santa Cruz, and made a crazy mad dash towards Half Moon Bay, I ain’t complaining.

The latter part of May was spent traipsing around Norway, Sweden, and Denmark — a trip that Melinda and I had bought tickets for 9 months ago — with four of my friends.

In June, I spent a superfun weekend in Austin (TEXAS, y’all — and the place where I almost ended up working!) with a few friends who had been prepping me for Texas months in advance.

I also happened to meet Neil Gaiman and visit San Diego for both the 4th of July and my cousin’s wedding.

Then in August, my family and I went to Hawaii, where I joined them for a few days in Kauai and learned that I don’t suck as much at surfing as I had previously believed.

In September, several of my friends from NY moved out to SF, joining me on the West Coast, and then I switched apartments.

I also found out that month that I got approved for a last-minute business trip to India, which meant that I found myself flying on what remains the longest flight of my life (17 hours!).

Hyderabad was lots of crazy fun, and I figured if I was in the vicinity, I’d visit Bhutan, a country that had long been on my travel bucket list. And visit Bhutan I did.

I barely spent the month of October at home, given that I had just gotten back from India/Bhutan and I had a high school friend’s wedding in Nashville to attend. A total far cry from my previous trip, but with so much good food, who was I to complain.

The day after Halloween festivities at Google (props if you can recognize my costume!), I was on a plane to Dublin, where I’d spend four weeks for a work ambassadorship.

Ireland was super, but there was no way I was going to bypass the ease of travelling within Europe, so I ended up in Munich for a weekend where I checked off another bucket list item: seeing Bayern Munich (my favorite football team and also the main determinant of my blood pressure levels) live.

After my ambassadorship was Thanksgiving week, so I used the holidays to go to Finland and Iceland, thus putting the rest of my Scandinavian adventures from May at full circle.

And finally, to round out the entire damn year, I went to New Zealand with my family on a trip that we had delayed for a few years, and goddamn I love this country. Instagram filters do a piss-poor job at capturing the awesomeness of the NZ landscape, but unfortunately, these photos are all I have as this trip is still in progress. 🙂

The point is, despite the fact that I have a chronic habit of falling by the wayside when it comes to blogging otherwise known as Cannotus b. arsedus, I plan on blogging more, especially in this coming year. I even have a queue of over 30 blog drafts at the ready, waiting for me to post! I’ll ramble on about the new places I’ve been (India! Bhutan! Ireland! All of Scandinavia! New Zealand!), the places revisited (Japan, Austin, DC, Canada, Nashville), and everything that happened in between. And I’m sure 2014 will be hustling along as I’ll tell you guys everything, and if it even holds a candle to the ridiculousness that was 2013, then let’s just say I’ll be blogging for a long, long time. Bring it, 2014.

Filed under Life Travel

New York, I Love You.

by Cindy Wed 24 Oct 2012 Comments11

Remember when I told myself I was going to update more regularly? Remember when I totally failed at that?

Anyway, hi. I’m digging myself out of yet another hole, because the long and short of it is, I miss blogging. Despite the fact that I’m absolutely pants at it. I guess I’ve had a bunch of photos piled up on my hard drive that one day I finally went, enough is enough and finally got around to writing this.

So what have I been up to these days? I’m still in San Francsico, and I hit my one year milestone of becoming a California resident (and a Googler!) in July. I still blatantly refuse to forfeit my New York license, partly out of my love for the state and partly because the amount of patience I have with DMVs is nonexistent. In fact, I went to New York twice — the first time in August to help my brother move into college and the second time just last week, mostly to visit friends, Comic Con, and J.K. Rowling.

Yeah, you heard me. J.K. Rowling.

We’re biffles now. Don’t be jelly.

Backtracking a bit, J.K. Rowling was at Lincoln Center in New York last Tuesday to discuss her new book The Casual Vacancy. Considering I paid $43 for my ticket including all the extraneous convenience charges and I got a free copy of The Casual Vacancy ($35) and she signed autographs for everybody at the event and I got to see her live/in-person with the possibility of projectile fangirling her — the net price for all of this was — what, $8? Real life, what are you even. Get out.

To clear up a few things: yes, J.K. Rowling is a very classy and humble lady, even when she was talking about porn and Fifty Shades of Grey (which may or may not have been my favorite part of the talk). Yes, she is quite nice, even when she spent at least two hours patiently signing autographs for her fans. And yes, I somehow resisted projectile fangirling myself off at her. Somehow, I don’t fancy myself a restraining order.

JKR and Ann Pratchett (of Bel Canto fame)

JKR reading an excerpt of The Casual Vacancy

The interview was more like an insightful back-and-forth dialogue between JKR and Ann Pratchett, as they discussed the book as well as other general topics, such as the editing process of writing a book and children’s literature. (If you’re interested, the full video of the interview is here.) Afterwards, they called up each row to wait to get their book signed, and while I might have waited two hours to get my book signed, the chance to meet JKR in person was so worth it. I feel like I should give myself a congratulatory pat on the back for not being a blubbering mess of emotions like I thought I would be.

The line for autographs. They were really hustling us out there.

I was able to snap this photo right after I had my book signed, as it was my only window of opportunity, but right after the shutter clicked, the security guard waved his hand in front of me and said, “Ma’am, you’re good.” and pointed me to the exit. NO, I GOT A BLURRY PHOTO OF MY FAVORITE AUTHOR WHOM I JUST MET TEN SECONDS AGO DO YOU THINK I’M GOOD.

All capslock aside, though, I’ve made it a new life goal of mine to have a conversation with J.K. Rowling that’s longer than:
ME: I’m a big fan. Thank you.
JKR: Thank you very much!

Hold me to it.

JKR aside, New York was still all kinds of fun, and while I feel like I should be utterly appalled that I’ve already made three visits in the span of five months, I keep staring back at these photos and wishing I was back already. As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder.