First Full-Day in Auckland

 Nov 18, 2023



I’m at a library in Auckland. It’s a pretty big library. It’s nice. I arrived yesterday. I got to the airport in Melbourne like six hours early on the 16th. My flight was at midnight. 


I didn’t have any issues going through the check-in. I sat next to a family on the way there. The guy chatted with me. He was from South Africa, then lived in New Zealand for a while, and now lives with his family in Melbourne. They were going to Auckland to visit family. He said they’d left NZ because it was too expensive. 


He was a nice guy. He offered to buy me a beer on the flight. I said 'no thanks'.
 

    It was really weird at one point. He was talking about Covid. He asked if I believed it. I thought he was suggesting that he didn’t believe it himself. I didn't even know what he meant by 'believe'.  I just said I was open minded to hearing what everyone had to say. It turned out that he DID believe it, whatever that means, and that like 20 or 30 of his friends who didn’t believe in it had died. 


    It was one of those really interesting moments for me. Like when I was at the Fox. 


    I keep noticing that when people lean really far one way, you can’t tell them apart from people who lean really far the exact opposite way. Their energy and body language and anger is identical. You only know where they stand once they say what side they’re on.


    I always find it interesting to think that if you I didn’t speak their language, it would be impossible to know. Both extremes are identical in how they manifest in people. It’s moments like that that remind me of how trying to live in the middle is really important for me. That’s where I want to be. 


    He was also doing this really ironic thing that I notice people doing. He was talking about how he feels like Canadians and Americans have this really simple minded idea about the rest of the world. He said he thinks that people in America and Canada probably think that everyone in South Africa rides on camels and lives in huts. 


    The irony is that he’s doing to America and Canada exactly what he’s accusing them of doing to him. He has a belief of what hundreds of millions of people think. 


    I mean, just right there, the idea that hundreds of millions of people are basically copies of one another- that there’s no nuance and differing opinions. 


    He has no problem believing his belief. That’s what he’s mad about, though. He’s mad about what he believes other people believe about him. It’s just so ironic. Again, it’s so clear that he has so much in common with the things that he hates. 


    It’s so easy to see in other people. It really makes me think about how I’m doing it in my life. I guess I just have to follow the logic. It implies that the things that bother and annoy me the most are the characteristics and traits that I have in myself. 


    So anyways, we landed in Auckland at about 5 am NZ time. Auckland is 2 hours ahead of Melbourne. I just sat in the airport for like 8 hours. I couldn’t check into my hostel until 2 pm. I got a SIM card at the airport. 


    Last night I went to an AA meeting here. There were only 5 of us. It was my first time really talking with people from here. Everyone at the hostel is from somewhere else. 
I’m gonna go to another meeting tonight. There’s not much else to do. It’s raining for the next couple days. I can’t open a bank account until Monday, so there’s no chance of working for now. 


    Carter mailed the credit card. I don’t know why I told him to have it arrive in less than a week. I could have had it arrive whenever, and then gone to pick it up after the Vipassana retreat. It cost like $170.