Tauranga Art Gallery & Street Art Crawl – Day 319

So today we are embracing street art at the Tauranga Art Gallery.

This morning we are waking up at the awesome Pacific Coast Lodge backpacker hostel it’s a really coll place located in the suburb of Mt Maunganui in Tauranga it’s basically the best suburb of the town so check it out if you are in the area. Plus, if you’re looking for a job they also do job placements which is really awesome if you want to be relieved from the entire stress of finding a job in New Zealand.

Moving on, today we are heading toward the Tauranga Art Gallery. Just over the bridge from Mt Maunganui is the city centre of Tauranga itself and right in the middle is the Tauranga Art Gallery on the corner of Wharf and Willows Street you can’t miss the building it’s big yellow one.

The Tauranga Art Gallery is a pretty awesome concept where there is tonne of temporary exhibitions in fact most of the exhibitions in this gallery last less than a month so when you’re gonna get there you’re likely to see something completely different. The exhibition that we’re checking out today is about Banksy which is a really famous English artist creating a lot of modern art.

The famous street artist creates a lot of different pieces of art which are super thought provoking they actually make us look at our own society on a really different angle it’s all about subliminal messages about consumerism and war it’s really cool and Laura and I do spend quite a lot of time looking at all those pieces of art.

There is a tonne of different artists that exhibit in this art gallery as well and Laura and I take the time to check it all even if there is some few things that area a little bit weird like this virtual reality stuff where to be fair, we are the art exhibition right here. We look really silly.

It’s really impressive the amount of work they put into the Tauranga Art Gallery, especially considering they’re all temporary exhibitions, they’re not here for that long, but there is so much packed into such a small space and the favourite piece of art is this piece right here where when it’s all separated it just looks like nonsensical shapes but when you’re stood in the right spot where it’s marked on the floor you see this awesome image of this beautiful face.

There’s an upstairs and a downstairs to the Tauranga Art Gallery with a lot of little side rooms as well so there’s so much to check out but we’ve heard there’s a lot of street art in Tauranga so we pick up a map showing where all the pieces are around the city and we hit the streets.

Alright so we’re walking through Tauranga in search of street art we’ll find some. Will we?

Yeah, New Zealand is a mess.

Using the map that we got from the Tauranga Art Gallery, we are making our way all around the city trying to find the best street art that the streets of Tauranga has to offer and honestly, some of them are super impressive they are super colourful cartoon ones which attracts Laura and I cos we’re kids.

There’s a smurf. Papa smurf.

So there’s a service lane with street art…

Or maybe it’s a dodgy back alley.

Or maybe we’re gonna get robbed.

No. Ok, we’ll keep on searching. Where are we?

Maybe it’s a bit further down Grey Street.

Oh yeah.

I’m being serious right here, some of the street art is actually really really hard to find.

What about here, Laura?

Definitely not.

Nope.

Great public bathroom. Where the hell art those street art. I think that’s street art.

Look there’s a butterfly, there’s the sun.

It’s called vandalism.

Laura I just found some street art.

That’s not street art, Robin, come on.

it’s street art.

Hopefully the next piece of street art will be as good as this one.

Every back alley in tauranga cos the map says they’re somewhere there is a bit of street art. Oh yeah.

Oh my God we’ve found it.

No it wasn’t it’s a hairy builder.

Moving on from today we are now making our way in the evening toward Escape Masters which is one of those awesome escape rooms that you can find in most cities nowadays. It’s so much fun.

He’s creepy.

Laura, we’re trying to escape right here.

I’m so good at this, I’ve always been amazing at unicycle.

That’s why we’re not escaping right here. We’re still locked.

I’m sure this opens.

As you can see, the concept of an escape room is to solve lots of puzzles back to back.

So we’ve got the sword we’ve got the nationality just got to get the combination.

Woohoo!

What’s a four letter word? Tells you trapeze.

So we were locked for a wee while we came out actually at night.

It was day when we entered the escape room…

We were not that good.

That was a long but epic day in Tauranga.

So although I can’t really give you much detail of the escape room because we don’t want to spoil it for anyone else all we can tell you is that we shamefully only managed to escape after 48 minutes how frustrating and we were on easy level as well.