Cockling

Sorting through the photos from the last few months I came across some oldies but goodies. This happened a while ago, mid May-ish if i recall correctly…

So we were tipped off by some people that you can go "cockling" if you go a bit out of town on the habour. Our friends Kit and Natalie, who represent the fine state of Illinois, invited us along with 3 other Americans and another Aussie along for a Cockling adventure. All told one of the eight of us had been cockling before, a long time ago and not in Dunedin. But her dad was a fisherman, so we figured that was experience enough and rolled with it.

It turns out getting the Cockles (yes, plenty of very predictable jokes were made regarding Cockles) is the easy part, you just go at low tide and start digging and they are everywhere.

Kit, Burt and Caroline

Kate in the sand

Natalie

The time consuming bit about cockling is the preparation. Rinse, Rinse, Rinse, Rinse, scrub and rinse some more, then boil them forever.

Burt scrubbing away

The final product is this…..

Not much left for the end product. But it was cool to do, even though I can't eat them.

NYC!

With great daring Astro braved the drive into New York City and lived to tell the tale.
We stayed with Becca, who hadn't done laundry in a month or 2 so we decided to use team power to lug all the laundry downstairs, walk it to the laundromat and have a drink next door while it washed. In the picture below you can see Becca on the phone with Alexa who is foolishly offering to do Becca's laundry if we will instead meet her at another bar (one with free pizza!) So we did, we had a couple beers with the laundry cart in the bar and Alexa took it all home and washed it. Impressive friendship.


We only had one full day in NY so decided to explore somewhere new. We had the obligatory delicious bagel for breakfast before hopping on the subway to Queens, remember, the place where Eddie Murphy found his bride in Coming to America?

The MoMa (Musuem of Modern Art) has an outpost there that had loads of cool stuff, including these structures in the courtyard:


and a swimming pool to be viewed from above or below. I want to turn my bedroom into this:


Across the street is a building where people can apply to graffiti.



We rounded out our visit with Molly and Darren, raw food, Philipino food, ice cream, and baked goods. Most of our tourism seems to revolve around food.