St. Paddy's Day in the City of Sails

The end of my second week of "orientation" ended with two Auckland events on the weekend. First was the celebration of St. Patrick's Day with a parade down Queen Street. There were shamrocks, kilts,and bagpipes as you might expect.

I was a bit surprised when the parade ended with the holy man himself, blessing the crowd, chasing out snakes, and acting the host much like his fellow-beatified legend St. Nick does  in December.

That same day, the racing yachts in port with the Volvo Ocean Race (mentioned last posting) had an in-harbor sprint for a few points prior to resuming on the next leg from New Zealand to Brazil around Cape Horn.

Earlier in the week we even got to board the Kiwi entry in the race, sponsored by Camper, a Spanish shoe company.

These boats are really lean, mean, racing machines. The galley cook can only boil water so the meals are all dehydrated food,

and the head is likewise quite basic.

We took a ferry across the water to a small neighborhood in North Auckland, Devonport, to get a better view of the goings-on.
  Devonport is a a charming seaside community that feels a world apart from the CBD even though it is only 15 minutes away. When the ships came about and headed down-wind and hoisted their spinnakers it was quite an impressive sight.

After a full day, we retired before the drunken excesses of the one-day-a-year Irish, but not before seeing the Sky Tower bathed in green light, a fitting tribute.

Sunday we moved into our long-term apartment, and Monday work started for real. More on those topics later.