Scenes from an Italian restaurant…

I don’t suppose many would know this song by Billy Joel…but there we were at this Italian restaurant…

…at Newmarket in Auckland.

It was a lovely sunny summer afternoon so many opted to sit outside…

…but it was equally packed inside…

You can see Archie, the owner of this place, a full-blooded Italian true and true, in the earlier photograph…and here’s another shot of the man…

…busy supervising and making sure everything was all right.

Here, you can see the the oven where they bake their gourmet wood-fired pizzas…

…which they proudly proclaim to be the best in the world!

We did not order any of those though – instead, everybody had their pastas. I had this one…

…though I am not really very crazy about tomato-based sauces/gravy in pasta but I could not resist the promise of ham and what not mentioned in the menu and they were certainly very generous with it – layers and layers of it…

Yum! Yum! Melissa had their spaghetti bolognese…

– she said she was at a loss as to what to order so she guessed she couldn’t go wrong with that – and she did enjoy her order and that was what mattered most.

I don’t know what this was but I think my missus had this…

…while my friend’s son ordered this one with the carbonara sauce…

I did try a bit and I would say that this was the best of the whole lot. I certainly would order that if ever I had to chance to go back there again.

I think my friend and her hubby shared this…

…or did her hubby have something else, I can’t really remember now?

It certainly was a delightful lunch…and after that, we went back to the house to finish off our packing to get ready for our flight home and also to cook dinner – that will be in the next post, the final one on our New Zealand holiday…

Coming back again…

There I was on the 6th (6½) day of our stay in Auckland, New Zealand – back again at Botany where we had dinner the other night and where I used to loiter around when I was there in 2005.

For one thing, the place had changed a bit – bigger now and more shops and stuff but I remember this place very well…

I went in to look around and this was where I bought the t-shirt and pants set for smallkucing – I wonder if it fits the little kid or not.

I also remember this…

– I used to drop by there on my previous visit to shop for cookies and stuff…

…to eat and also to take home but this time around, there was no necessity for me to that and I guess the reason would be quite obvious.

Here’s another photograph of how disciplined motorists are there and despite the fact that there are so many zebra crossings in the vicinity and so many shoppers crossing the road at any one time, they were all very patient and would stop and wait for them to cross from one side to the other…

I wonder how many zebra crossings there are here in in our country – I know there are  a few at our airports, KLIA or even the one right here in Sibu but unfortunately, I have yet to see any car stopping to let the people walk across first.

If I may digress a bit, I do recall that one time when there was a composition in the SPM English Language paper on road safety and one of the points given was “dangerous – zebra crossing” or something like that and a candidate wrote, “It is dangerous because the zebra will bite the students while they are crossing the road.” Well, we can’t blame him, can we? After all, zebra crossings are non-existent in our country and even if they are, they might as well not have been there. Even with traffic lights alongside those crossings, people get run down like my daughter’s coursemate right in front of the entrance to the teacher training institute in Sungai Petani, Kedah.

Anyway, to get back to where I was, there was a craft market there that morning so I dropped by to check it out…

There were some interesting stuff at the stalls…

…such as these…

…pretty dresses for dolls…

…and these Maori/New Zealand-influenced handicraft…

Soon it was time for lunch, so we made our way here…

…for that. More about this in my next post…so do stick around!