Week 4 of my internship here in Auckland was productive. I did my normal morning tasks of reconciling accounts and journal entries and preparing invoices to be processed, but in the afternoons, I worked on going through the criminal watchlist and making the draft for the unclaimed money policy and I was able to finish both! My bosses were happy with my work and tomorrow I will be given a new task to work on. So far everyone on the team has been very friendly and helpful when teaching me new things. Even while performing the same tasks, I receive increasingly complex versions of them each week, such as new types of invoices and journal entries. On Thursday this week after work, a few of us went out and watched some live music at a restaurant along the bar. The band was taking requests and playing them on the spot, and they played them really well. The singer was also really good, maybe one of the best singers that I have heard live. Then, on Saturday we visited the Auckland Museum and learned so much about the colonization of this land and how the Mauri people used to live before then. We learned about techniques they would use when sailing, how kids were taught navigation skills while growing up, and even about some of the animals that used to be on the island. What I really thought was cool was how each face in the carving resembled an exceptional warrior from their tribe and the people of the tribe knew the name of each of the carvings of the faces as they were taught about them growing up. Here are some pictures I got from the museum.
After the museum, I found an amateur fighting event at a local kickboxing/MMA gym to go to for the evening. I love watching martial arts and I lucked out because they even hosted a couple of wrestling matches, and I used to wrestle in high school. The gym had a very welcoming energy to it and I made friends with some of the locals and even explained the rules to wrestling to a guy who only knew kickboxing and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I arrived early and had a good conversation with one of the fighters and got to watch him win later in the night! It was a fun experience getting to be a part of a local fight night experience.
On Sunday I even went to watch the Lopez vs. Volkanovski UFC event at a Pub here in the CBD and I went to the right place because the energy was high. Everybody was there to watch the fight and the crowd was very enthusiastic. I even had a conversation with a guy from Liverpool which was cool because Paddy Pimblet, a fighter from Liverpool, fought the co-main event. Overall, it was a very eventful week with a lot of learning and action-packed events. I can’t wait to see what the next week will be full of.