As the saying goes: "If the woman in front of me didn't have her ears pierced I'd never have seen the water".
This was the crowded part of the beach at Mission Bay in the heart of Auckland City at the height of summer.
One day, as I was by the beach, supposedly doing some study for an exam, I took a note of how many people I saw every 30minutes along a 100m stretch of beautiful white sand at Mission Bay, on a week day in high summer. The numbers went something like 2, 1, 2, 0, 1(walking through) 3...