Allergic to old Japan & a wet welcome from New Zealand

Well hellooooo there!
Yes I have left Nihon (Japan) and two flights (one of 8 hours and another from Brisbane of 3 hours) later I'm in New Zealand. And what a shock the weather is here - it was a typically British welcome with rain even some lightening last night. It is positively freezing compared to Japan! Well it is spring here so I suppose it's to be expected. A welcome change but I hope it warms up a bit while I'm here. Still, at least I won't have to wash my clothes as often. ;)
I'm surprisingly alert considering I was up for 39 hours over the past 2 days. So what was my overall verdict of Japan? I loved it. Would love to still be there to be honest. The people were so polite and despite the hot weather in the south, it was still enjoyable. On the tour I joined we visited Nikko (a mountain village a little north of Tokyo), Takayama (a mountain village in the middle of Japan), Hiroshima (plus the adjoining island of Miyajima) and back to Kyoto. I saw Kubuki theatre in Tokyo which told the story of a samurai who tried to storm Himeji Castle - the guy who played the samurai was so funny, he flicked his head every time he won a victory - and the fight scene was truly amazing. The shrine to Shogun Tokugawa Iesu at Nikko was stunning - a massive complex of garden, shrine and temples. The old town of Takayama with the preserved folk village of Hida No Sato and the old wooden houses in the village's main streets, plus the cute Saru Bobo (a good luck mascot which literally means 'little monkey') mascot was really quaint. The city of Hiroshima was not as depressing as I imagined and it was a surprising shopping mecca which boasted rings in jewellery shops that fit me (hoorah as I have tiny fingers!). I even managed to get a nice skirt for a bargain 1,000 yen (just under 5 pounds). And I even saw an entirely new side to Kyoto that I missed with Rick when I went back there at the end of the tour. We must have been in the sleepy end of town as the other side of the main train station was HUGE and bustling too! We seemed to miss loads of shops and shrines which thankfully I got to see upon my return.
The only drawbacks were that I seemed to develop an allergy to genuine tatami mats (the mats they put on the floors of the old ryokan traditional inns. I got severe hayfever symptoms and couldn't figure out what was causing it until my roommate said the room smelled of hay - then it twigged. Yet again my wonderful body has to throw some kind of spanner in the works. ;) Plus I also seem to have bad reactions to mosquito bites - I won't go into the gory details, suffice to say that yukky yellow bubbles on my legs and red swollen elbows are not a great look - bring back the dripping with sweat look, I can handle that one!!! ;)
That said, it is very possible to do Japan on a budget. I managed to stay within my budget every day and still had 43,000 yen left over (which was the extra I got out before I left). I changed most of it to New Zealand dollars before I left Japan as I was told would prob get a better rate there. I got $480 so not bad. It's really cheap here in New Zealand too - you can get a sandwich and drink in Starbucks for less than 3 pounds. They don't have the Shaken Lemon Green Tea like they did in Japan (which was rather addictive in the hot weather) but they do seem to have new types of 'signature' hot chocolates which are a lot better than the weak chocolate-flavoured water they usually serve. I never thought I'd be a connoisseur of Starbucks - still, it's better than McDonald's!!
Himeji Castle near Kyoto was very impressive from the outside. Sadly there wasn't really anything inside (apart from a few artefacts and some very steep wooden stairs). Niko Castle in Kyoto was more impressive inside - it had the nightingale floor (which squeaks like birds singing when you walk on it (a defence mechanism so guards could tell if anyone was coming) and some truly beautiful golden paintings across the walls.
I was also told upon our return to the Fushimi Inari shrine near Kyoto (the place with all the red tori gates) that all the shots of the seemingly beautiful calligraphy I took on the reverse of the gates are actually the names of the companies who sponsored the erection of the gates - d'oh!! Looks nice tho so I won't tell anyone if you don't...
So here I am in Auckland. Apart from the rainy start and the slightly naff hostel I'm in (leaving tomorrow as found a much nicer one in the town centre today that I booked into), it seems like a nice city. A burgeoning city which has lots of nice new apartment buildings on the waterfront and a small shopping area. There are maybe a few too many Starbucks stores - I spotted 4 on the main street alone - but the people seem friendly. I was talking to a Japanese lady in a jade store today and she was saying that despite how polite the Japanese are you never seem to get under the skin and see what they are really like. She said it's very hard for them, particularly for career women to meet men because if they are successful it's hard for them to find men who are equally successful because they are expected to give up their jobs upon marraige and are used to a certain way of life. Interesting.
An interesting thing I saw here today is that pigeons and birds seem to fly into coffee shops and no-one cares. I ate my lunch next to a pigeon eating some cake today - wonder where it got its money from...
Ciao for now. X