Musings of an Idiot

Travel Weekend

The weekend trip to Tauranga and Mount Manganui was heaps of fun. We (Julia, Barbara & Me) went in Barbara's car and it was a fun road trip. It was overcast for most of the weekend but thankfully it did not rain till today i.e Monday.

Friday evening workshop extended till almost 10.00 PM and it was great fun. The characters are shaping up nicely and I am almost killing myself with nervous anticipation of things to come.


I was too tired to heat up any food after coming back home at 10.30, so Benji and me went to this Asian restaurant called 'Momo Tea' (close to our house), which stays open till 3.00 in the morning. It was an experience and a half - I asked Benji to look around and see how everyone was so fashionably dressed even at 11.00 at night while we were casually dressed. Benji laughed and said that is probably not the reason we would stick out - as it turned out everyone there was Asian except for the two of us. The food wasn't bad at all - will probably go back there when midnight hunger pangs strike.

On Saturday - the road trip started early. I drove to Barbara's place and dropped off my car there and we then picked up Julia en route. Our first stopover of sorts was at Owharoa Falls and then we had another stop over at Waihi where they were having the monthly arts and craft market. [P.S - All photos are enlargeable if you click on them]


We were famished by the time we got to Tauranga. We had lunch at a Turkish place called Zeytin and the ambiance felt really authentic and to top it off the food was finger licking good, it impressed on us so much so that we had our lunch there the next day as well. Once done, we roamed about the CBD for a while before checking into the backpackers.


The backpackers we stayed at, Pacific Lodge in Mount Manganui was a cool place. The guy who runs the place, Murray, was really funny and eased us into our room. It was a good place to meet people from different parts of the world- all nomads or people in transition. We dropped our stuff off in our room after that everything is a blur in terms of the number of times we were in Mount Manganui and Tauranga. We avoided climbing Mt. Manganui straight away because it was overcast and it looked like it would bucket down with rain any minute. The weather cleared up early in the evening which gave us the opportunity to hike up the mount.

Just before we left Tauranga on Sunday evening, I bumped into one of my mates from South Seas - Bren Frank at the cinemas. It was good catching up with him again after a long time. He is currently working in the lighting department on '30 Days of Night' which is shooting in Auckland.


We took a detour through Hamilton and had a brief stop over for a stroll plus dinner before returning to Auckland. All in all it was a fun trip which came at the right point in time.

Today morning I went over to David M' place to check out a couple more locations in the Waitakeres and went for a walk even though it was raining (it has been raining the whole day). It was good but then I had a realization and we cancelled the hike to 3 other places. Now this week will be busy with organizing stuff and scheduling for 'Five' along with the usual workshops.


I have put up a couple of items on trademe for sale - a comic book and 1GB of laptop RAM, so if you are interested or if you know of someone who is looking for that stuff then bid on it.

I'll sign off for now.
Till later,
Amit

[P.S - I have started taking swimming lessons since I thought it would be a good idea to know how to swim considering that NZ is essentially 2 big islands.]

oooh. And one more thing - you can watch the first 4 minutes of BORAT here. Be warned that you could find a fair few things offensive within those 4 minutes.

Labels: Acting, Five, Movies, Pre-production, Swimming, Travel

posted by Amit @ 8:10 PM