Heading back to Auckland

This morning, I woke up and my cell phone was dead >_<
I forgot to bring the adapter (I had my charger, but obviously, that's useless without the piece that changes the American plug to a New Zealand one...)

I realized, though, that my camera also has a built-in clock - perfect!

I got to pack up the rest of my stuff in the dark. Then I left one of my German books at the hostel book exchange. Maybe someone else will enjoy it. I checked out (that took like two seconds - these hostel people are really efficient!) and made my way to my favorite bakery.

After breakfast, I took all my bags to the convention centre. I left my trolley and bagpack with the coat check people.

This morning's talks were really interesting! One of the girls from my lab talked about her FIV project. FIV stands for Feline Deficiency Virus (yes, cats can get aids, too).

I met up with Keysa and Chris during the coffee break; then I went to listen to more talks. This session had a lot of talks about "Molecular Anthropology." I had no clue what that even is, but I got to listen to a few interesting talks.
One girl, for example, explained how she analyzes the feathers in old Maori cloaks. She tries to find out where the feathers came from and tries to learn more about the travels of the Maori.
Another woman, my friend's mentor, explained how she analyzes ancient chicken, rat, and pig DNA to track the movements of the Lapita people through Oceania.
I did catch one talk that was a little more "computer science" oriented. The guy was talking about theories in phylogenetic diversity and he talked about some of the computational challenges he came upon. He looked at a lot of graph problems (different phylogenetic trees), including some NP-hard problems.

I skipped the last two talks in the second session and got an early lunch (no lines :P). My plane was scheduled to leave at 2:15, and I still needed to find the bus stop and get to the airport.

Finding the bus stop wasn't too hard, I just hadn't realized that it was so far away :P I got on the bus and it took us about 30 minutes to get to the Airport.

Again, the airport staff was really relaxed. I checked in and had an hour of free time to kill. Good thing they have all these candy and souvenir shops just for that purpose! There was also a book store (but books are really expensive here - little paperbacks cost 30 NZD!).

This time, I had booked a non-stop flight to Auckland. Everything went really easy, until we approached Auckland.
Of course it was raining in Auckland, and the last 20 minutes or so of the flight were pretty bumpy!

I grabbed my luggage and headed for the bus stop. It took me 1.5 hrs to get home because the bus driver drove through downtown Auckland (don't do it, I can't recommend it!).