Four day Auckland

I had delightful four days and nights in Auckland. My prediction about the French farmers' market was correct - and I wasn't even the one to suggest a visit!

There seemed to be a lot of purple vegetables at the market - purple carrots, purple cauliflower. And the pineapple mini in the car park looked like it could have fallen out of that tree.

Like so many of my holidays, I did a lot of eating during this one. On Sunday, while two of Soph's flatmates laid carpet they bought for a song off TradeMe, I made cheese scones which I've never made before (I just used the Edmonds cookbook recipe) and they were excellent. There was only smoky cheese in the house so I used that and it was really good. Then Soph made amazing BLATs and one of her flatmates made banana bread which had yoghurt in it (which gave it a slight tang and which I want to try using in banana muffins). THEN we had a roast dinner with some other friends bringing fresh orange and marscapone tart for dessert. In between all this food we played scrabble (I was very jealous of the old Scrabble set with wooden letters), drank tea and read The New Yorker.

I had Campari for the first time on Sunday night which is quite bitter but mixed with orange juice it tastes like grapefruit juice. I stole this photo from Sophie.

The day before we went to see Dark Shadows and played Balderdash late into the night. Quite the restful weekend after spending Friday night at the Grey Lynn RSA.

Monday night was Florence and the Machine at Vector Arena. The stage had five stained-glass panels at the back which seemed to change colour a little depending on the light. Their shape was kind of art deco and they were pretty simple but very lovely. Florence was great, such an amazing voice and seemed really likeable which is always nice. She came out wearing this great black cape and then had a beautiful floaty black dress on underneath. And of course, excellent red hair.

She played some of my favourite songs and I had a little cry during one of the songs from her first album. I don't understand some people at gigs though, WHY PAY MONEY TO STAND AND TALK THROUGH A SHOW? JUST SIT AT HOME AND LISTEN TO THE ALBUM AND TALK AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE. Also, a girl standing next to me went crazy when Florence started singing 'Dog Days' but then spent the rest of the song trying to call her friend and hold her phone up for her friend to hear the song, but the phone would drop the call and she'd try again and yell, 'Can you hear? Can you hear?!' into  it. So many people spent ages taking photos and videoing songs, it seemed like they weren't paying any attention to what was actually happening live. I mean, I took a couple of photos, obviously, right at the start and then put my camera away for the rest of the show. But some people were holding their cameras up for almost the entire show. It seemed weird.

Tuesday morning I had a coddled egg with my brunch which I don't think I'd ever had before and it was was yum - kind of cheesy and baked in a wee dish. In the afternoon I went back to Auckland Art Gallery to look around properly, seeing as last time we mostly just looked at a particular exhibition. It's been expanded and refurbished so well, so many great views out into the park as well as beautiful old parts of the gallery that have been restored.

I was pretty taken with an exhibition called 'Speed and Flight'. It was very small and featured 1930s line cut prints from the gallery's collection.

It was pretty hard going back to work today after such a nice weekend.