Week 2: Learning to Balance

Hello everyone! I've decided for this week's blog, I'd share how I've been learning to balance exploration with rest, while still sharing my experiences. Obviously, there's so much I want to do while I'm here, but I can't burn myself out either. Whether I rest or do something active depends on how much energy I've spent earlier in the day.

Despite being tired most mornings, I've found that I have a bit of energy once the school day is done. In my free evenings, I have made a habit of walking around my area, whether around the mall, the neighborhood, the nearby suburb, or a park nearby.

This week, I had the chance to walk around two different malls, one closer to my homestay and one in Albany, a bit further up the north shore. Unlike America, malls are not dying in New Zealand. In fact, they were quite lively and busy at both malls I went to. The only businesses I recognized were McDonald's, KFC, and Kmart (yes, Kmart is alive and well in New Zealand). However, most stores are comparable to the ones in American malls, including shoe stores, clothing stores, toy stores, gift shops, and video game stores. Specific comparisons I can make include Farmers (a department store like Target), Warehouse (imagine Walmart but red instead of blue), and EB Games (essentially Kiwi GameStop). The malls I visited also had bookstores, something we don't see in American malls much anymore. Something else I noticed is that Christmas merchandise was at stores in October when most stores in the U.S. tend to wait until after Halloween has come and gone. According to my homestay hosts, stores began putting out Christmas merchandise in September.

The main entrance to Westfield Albany Mall was blocked off by this Christmas Tree set-up (on October 24th, so early!)

This week, I decided instead of venturing all the way out to one of the suburbs nearby, I'd walk a bit closer to home, going down the hill and then back or to the nearest reserve (I should also mention that there are heaps of reserves interspersed throughout the suburbs, but most are not very expansive and you could walk through it all in a few minutes). Taylor Swift's re-release of 1989 came out after school on Friday, so I gave it a listen while walking around Stancich Reserve. Though it will be cold and miserable when I'm back in the States, I'm hoping to keep this habit of walking around once I return.

Something else I've done to balance everything is to give myself time to wind down each day, even on the weekends when I am out exploring the city and country for longer periods of time. I usually do this by spending some alone time in my room with something familiar, either rewatching episodes of Community or playing on my Switch. Typically, this is something I do in the hour before I go to bed or after I've walked around a bit.

While my exploration this week wasn't quite as eventful as my first week, I feel like I should discuss what I have done. This past Saturday, I went to Auckland Zoo on my own. It's actually quite a big step for me, a person who likes to do activities in groups, as back home the biggest public activity you'd see me do on my own is going to a movie theater, where I am sitting in a dark room, completely engrossed by the film and less likely to be perceived by other moviegoers. You wouldn't catch me dead going by myself where people typically go in groups in broad daylight, yet I chose to go to the zoo knowing I'd be without a group. It really wasn't as bad as some might think, I liked walking around at my own pace and seeing all the different animals. I also got to see a kiwi, but since kiwis are nocturnal birds, the building they were kept in was quite dark, too dark for photos. I did get other photos at the zoo, however.

I look forward to sharing more with you all! Life in Auckland is pretty solid.