Day 2 - 11.2.26

Day 2 started with a big sleep in! We got up at around 10/10.30 am, according to my watch I got 13hrs sleep. I’m hoping for a few more sleep in’s over the next few days. Once we get to the tearfund part of the trip there won’t be much time for that! Also I think that with everything that’s been going on over the past year or so we’ve accumulated some sleep debt.

We decided to have brunch at the same place as yesterday because it worked well, and was a great price (less than $30 NZ for the two of us). We ordered the same things, mozeralla sticks, pizza and two drinks. This time I decided to try the strawberry shake - it was really tasty.

Today we did a more targeted approach and visited shops that we wanted to go to, rather than wander the mall and see what we came across. We also used the mall map on their website which was very helpful!

We purchased a few things, including stationery etc for the kids and the centres that we are gonna visit. We’ll need to spend a bit of time sorting things into piles to work out if we’ve got good coverage for each centre, and enough for the kids, plenty of time for that later.

We headed back to the hotel to relax for the rest of the day, cos we’d overdone it a bit the day before. We watched some TV, did some life admin stuff (there’s a bit of that to do at the moment), and decided that we’d order in room service for dinner.

We’ve never had room service before, so that was kinda exiting. It was a little challenging to get thru to the kitchen, but then once we did get thru it was approx 40 mins till the food arrived. We had left over drinks from our 7-11 run so we didn’t need to order any of those.

We decided that we’d have breakfast in the morning at the buffet downstairs, so set an alarm for 7.30 to allow us enough time to shower and get down stairs. We went to bed at around 9.30, so still a pretty decent sleep in compared to normal.

Unfortunately I didn’t really take any photos today, other than this one below out of our window.

Observations

• Today was less rainy than yesterday, it seemed warmer over all
• We saw two youngish kids lying down on the concrete on a busy street corner, this was challenging, I wondered about their life/circumstances that lead them here
• Today I noticed more dogs around, both stray and ones in the mall too (yes you are allowed to take your dogs into the mall here)
• When returning to the hotel we saw some tourist police - I wondered why there were specific police for tourists
• The number of staff in shops here is very high, depending on where you go, sometimes there is one per aisle.
• The powerlines still get me, wow they are so out of control!

And will leave you with a thought - it feels like a lot of things come down to where you were born, or what your family circumstance is/was that you were born into. So much is out of our control, from even before we are born. How can you go about life and not believe in a higher power, not believe that someone/something is governing your life, someone/something is looking out for you, no matter your circumstances.

We take faith in God, that he guides those who put their trust in him.