Up early and in the shower to be scalded.
We made for the cyber cafe to benefit from the 'morning special' whereby we could do 4 hours for NZD 5. Breakfast was bought en route. The cyber cafe was primarily games oriented and the security was too tight for our needs. Improvisation was in order. I only achieved a couple of days journal entries so will have to type quicker this afternoon. I did, however, send an e-mail to my second cousin, Martin, who immediately replied and checked other e-mail and my mobile phone bill and frequent flyer points. Emirates and Singapore Airlines still haven't recorded any of my airmiles from flights dating back to the beginning of November. How slack?!
We dropped the car off with 3 minutes to go. Immediately we were greeted by a girl who visually inspected the car for knocks and scrapes. She seemed satisfied with the condition of the returned vehicle. As the glove compartment was left abandoned with the door wide open Ian felt he needed to offer her 'the glove box locked itself closed and we had to force it open'. 'So, it's broken?' she asked. 'Yes' Ian replied. She didn't seem too bothered.
Lunch was eaten al fresco at 'Yellow Rocket'. Ian was content watching a man dressed as a penguin obviously sweating in his costume entertaining the children in Cathedral Square. The little birds caught my eye. They appeared to be a family. Perhaps the two little birds only recently flew from their nest. The mother was still feeding them, the chicks approaching her with their beaks open expectantly. One chick flew up on to a high ledge of a building next to where we were sitting outside and the mother appeared below him as he called to her. He flew down, received his food, and then they flew off together. It was so endearing to watch. They were very demanding chicks, just like babies, always getting what they want from their mother...
There was another cute moment witnessed while we sat outside. A Japanese woman sat at the next table to us and her daughter, about 4 years old, stood a couple of metres away and remained stood there whilst eating a cornet ice cream. She was dressed so beautifully in pinks, purples and whites with a little sunhat on. It was an ideal photograph but I didn't have my camera with me.
We spent another 2 hours in the cyber cafe after lunch not making very good progress.
When our time was up we returned to the hostel for a rest and chose to play bao while waiting to go back to the cyber cafe at 17:30 for another 2 hours worth of slow progress. A cheap McDonalds for dinner still resulted in a daily spend of NZD 138 somehow... We daydreamed of being soaring birds of prey while gazing at the seagulls flying around outside McDonalds.
Back in the cyber cafe we had some dodgy old machines that had very old versions of Windows on them, so old we couldn't talk to ftp without using DOS command. Somthing new for me to learn quickly then! Both machines crashed and we were moved to another couple which was better until my keyboard failed and everytime I tried to type the letter ' ' it wasn't recognised on the screen so soon enough I got very impatient with not eing a le to type the letter ' ' and I started cursing ' loody llsing piece of ollocks' which left me very looming cross. All I wanted was to type ' ' which I could do just moments earlier. On The chap loitering told me he would reboot it and when it came back to life it recognised there was a hardware failure, namely the keyboard. He moved me again and finally I had the use of a decent machine, pity we were soon to be leaving!
By 01:00 I had packed my bag and finally laid my head down to rest.