A different long weekend away provides another opportunity to reexamine the age-old battle. After our first chapter, Secret Agent Robyn came down from Auckland to check out our city. This is her report…
Getting there: The airport bus runs past my place every 20 minutes. I waited for 30 minutes, but there was no sign of the bus. I started to panic and called a taxi. $50 later I was at the airport, but too late for check-in. Oh no! But fate smiled upon me — due to ‘weather’ in Wellington, the plane was late, so they could check me in after all. In Wellington, the taxi to my hotel was cheap, but slow in a way that proves the bypass was a dumb idea. Wellington wins this one for delaying my flight.
A long weekend away provides the perfect opportunity to re-examine the age-old battle. In our first chapter, our agent goes to Auckland. In our next chapter, an enemy agent will come here…
Airport access: Getting to Wellington Airport, from Thorndon via a quick stop in Hataitai to pick up my suitcase took less than half an hour, and the only cost was some grovelling to my mother. Getting to the CBD of Auckland via a shuttle took an hour and cost $26 – that’s 15 minutes longer than the actual flight, and only $13 less than the ticket. Wellington 1, Auckland 0.
Airports: Wellington airport has only one terminal, which is blissfully fast food chain-free and it’s a sexy big space. You can get Fuel coffee, and Wishbone food (which caters to a wide range of dietary requirements) but it’s loud and bustly, and the stools they have at counters are shiny metal and you slip off them. Meanwhile, Auckland Airport may have Burger King and MacDonalds, but they also have a juice bar with those posh award-winning recoverable design style chairs. A tie.
The Generation XY crowd are having a competition to find an equivalent for the phrase used to describe a certain type of Aucklander: the JAFA.
It took about 35 or so comments before someone finally conjured up something for the JAFA’s age-old ally in movie-theatre tooth-decaying crime: SNIFTA (Suited Nominal Intellectual Funding Terrible Arts Snivelling Nerds In Flash Terrace Apartments).
But my personal favourite is…
AGENDA
Another Government Employee Not Doing Anything.
Which naturally leads to the ‘Hidden Agenda’ which are the New Govt Employees that are artificially holding the unemployment rate down.
Brilliant. Add your own suggestions to the Gen XY comments thread over here.
Today’s Dominion Post carries an insufferably smug article headlined “The lonely misery of living in Auckland“. Like all good journalism these days, this story is based almost entirely upon Google: in this case, the news that a Google Trends search for the word “misery” shows that Aucklanders search Google for this word more often than […]