Auckland vs. Wellington

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.

Wellington vs. Auckland

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.

Wellington JAFA?

jaffasThe 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.

Miserable Jafas?

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 […]