It feels familiar here.

I woke up early yesterday to go on a run. My goal was this place:

another war memorial

I ran through several really beautiful parks. The war memorial above overlooks the city. It is filled with trees and reminds me of volunteer park but much bigger and with many more statues of fallen war heroes.

You can't really see that in the lower left side of this picture is a cannon. The pole is supposed to be the sail of a ship. I've seen other reminders that people sailed from far away and were very pioneering in order to create the society they have here. Polynesian (who became the Maori) people sailed here 600 years before the Europeans arrived and were also quite pioneering in order to survive. The memorials to that effort are here too. They just look different. Auckland's needle is also in the background.

It's funny that I can travel across the planet and find many, many similarities between this city and my own.

how do they have black Friday? They do not have Thanksgiving.

Christmas decorations 5 weeks early. 

Like Honolulu, New Zealand is host to MANY tourists. I haven't met an American yet. Clearly, the Chinese tourists are making an impact.