Nz day 24 917am

Ahhh, Christmas Eve!! Heading north to Pahia for some fun in the sun. We'll spend a couple of days on the beach and then head off to do some surfing for a bit. That ought to be interesting.

We spent the night of day 22 in taupo, the home of mt doom (ruapeha and ngaruhoe). We didn't do much there. Walked around and found a hot spring to hang out in a bit. It was very refreshing. We later went grocery shopping for peanut butter, tuna, and bread. Mmmmm, good eatin'. After some time in an internet café, we headed back to the hostel and chilled.

Up at 9, it was back to Auckland. We had to go through rotorua and drop people off and pick people up. We got in at about 2 and spent the day walking around. We found some flyers and were going to check out an bar made from ice and check out their sky tower and a casino. Well, the ice bar, 5 below, costs 30 to enter and included a drink and you couldn't take pictures. We found a coupon for 5 dollars off, but we said screw it. We didn't feel like spending that much for a 5 minute walkthrough and no "cool" photos.

We went to the sky tower and I was a bit keen to do what I thought was another bungy jump. But alas, it wasn't. It was something called a sky jump and it looked kinda goofy and expensive.

We went inside the tower and was disappointed again. The casino looked ok, but the blackjack tables had the continual shuffle looking machines. For the uninitiated, there are a couple different types of card shuffling machines or shufflemasters. There are the ones that shuffle decks of cards after the decks have been used and then there's the one where the dealer takes the cards after every hand and places in the shuffler. I'm not sure how many decks are used with the shuffler or how often it shuffles, but I do know this: the odds shift even greater for the house. I've played these machines in vegas and I hated the experience. I won't go into too much detail about the house vs. the player's edge in blackjack, but I know these machines don't help the player.

We saw a poker tournament going on and no cash games. So we left out of here and started walking around to find a grocery store. After about an hour of no luck and a few walks up some san francisco-like hills, we made our way back to the city. Since there didn't seem like there was much else to do, we found a little mall with a food court and a cinema. We got some food, a laksa for me and a burger for jamie, played some Scrabble with the cards I bought in Franz Josef, and watched Beowulf on the IMAX. Not a bad night...