minus 5 degrees

Gareth came back from his two-day North Island bus tour today for about a day and a half more in Auckland, so we thought we’d catch the Simpsons movie. Unfortunately, everything here closes way earlier than it should (most stores close at 4 pm, not that you’d know that since they don’t list their hours anywhere!), and the last movie was at 9:15 – we missed it.

We’d both been interested in going to ‘minus 5 degrees,’ a bar where everything is made of ice, kind of like the ice hotels in Scandinavia, so we went there instead. Cameras were strictly verboten – which meant I had to leave mine at the front desk, eek! – so you don’t get to see a picture of us sitting on deerhide-covered ice benches amongst ice sculptures, in our bar-issued fur-trimmed parkas, carefully holding glasses made of ice with two layers of gloves on our hands. We were able to get a picture looking in from the bar next door, but there wasn’t a good place to steady the camera and it needed a pretty long exposure even w/high film speed, so it’s kind of blurry. You get the idea, though.

The idea was pretty cool, although the experience felt a little too commercial/contrived especially with the imposed time limit. Definitely fun to try once – and I still want to see one of the ice hotels sometime.