Finzel’s Reach

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

Early morning coffee with Toby, in the hip wharf district. The Mokoko coffee shop, nestled between an organic grocery and a sourdough pizza parlour, serves me Jasmine tea in a cast iron pot, brewed at just the right temperature.

A productive day working with Toby’s team is punctuated by a falafel lunch from a busy food stall in a nearby mall. There’s plenty to talk about and lots still to do tomorrow.

Then I crash the Agile In The City conference social at MSHED. There are plenty of familiar faces, as well as new ones. A posse of us head into town to The Botanist restaurant. The butternut squash and beetroot tart is excellent when it eventually arrives - the meal was delayed when the chef allegedly burnt the last two fish cakes and had to send the waiter back to ask Toby and Tamara to choose again.

The conference organisers, unexpectedly, pick up the tab. I Uber into the dark, my driver, Nahil, a computer science student.