The JaYmes Escape

Auckland was suddenly hit by a wave of British/Irish-ness and an air of intense anticipation as the Lions rugby team arrived yesterday for their six week tour. From garish red Lions clothing everywhere to a bagpipe player on Queen Street, it seems that there’ll be no escaping the fever as some of the world’s greatest players clash in this most rugby-obsessed of nations.

So, will I be seeing any of the matches myself? Unlikely; tickets are rarer than hens’ teeth, especially for the three test matches agains the All Blacks, selling on local auction website TradeMe for hundreds of NZ dollars. Still, I would love the opportunity if it came along.

The latest pictures of Auckland are now in the gallery, along with great photos of my trip on The Overlander to Wellington and my visit to Eastbourne.

‘No one can show you New Zealand like we can’ is the slogan of rail company TranzScenic, and having now completed their trio of scenic train journeys I can’t dispute their claim. Nowhere does a twelve hour journey speed by like the Overlander train from Auckland to Wellington, especially when it’s made all the more interesting by landing a ride in the cab with the driver for a short section. Exceptional, and worth every penny, some stunning photographs are on the way.

I’ve now visited the city of Wellington no less than four seperate times for various reasons; this past weekend was short and sharp, to catch up with some recruitment agents and some relatives of the Crouch family in picturesque suburb Eastbourne, a ferry ride across the harbour from the city. On the job front I’m still temping here in Auckland, after returning by bus on Sunday I was straight into a software testing assignment on Monday morning.

Just in the middle of a quick dash to Wellington for another interview, but I have to confess that I’m starting to wonder why I’m hanging around here and here when I could be here instead.

I can’t say that I like everything, or even most things, about George Galloway but his no-nonsense rebuttals in Washington make a refreshing change from the corrupt hypocritical back-scratching that anglo-american politics has been reduced to in the last few years. Finally someone has raised the real issues, and it’s not hard to see why the political establishment is sinking to such depths in it’s attempts to discredit and silence him.

Galloway’s own politics are not to everyone’s taste, but his effort to expose the corruption and bare-faced lies of two of the world’s most powerful democracies has made front pages around the globe and deserves the support of anyone who believes that world leaders should have some responsibility for their actions, particularly when those actions kill 100,000 people.

OK, so whilst I’m hanging out in Auckland waiting for the jobs market to catch up with me I’ve decided that it’s time to share some of the inevitable frustrations with New Zealand and general Southern-Hemispheric culture. Stupid words for things and irritations, all with tongue firmly in cheek because I love the place really.

First of all, the single greatest annoyance has to be the word ‘capsicum’. How can they denigrate a perfectly decent vegetable by giving it such a ridiculous name? It’s a pepper dammit, and even the Americans agree with us on that, which must be a first. Number two is the car park. In English a car park is a vast area where lots of cars can park. Not so here. For here a car park is simply one space for one car, or in English, a parking space. This creates some faintly amusing ads like ‘flat to rent, includes free carpark’ but is otherwise just plain wrong.

Next it’s EFTPOS. This absolutely horrendous acronym stands for ‘Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale’, which is an incredibly pretensious way of saying that you can buy something with a card that transfers money straight out of your bank account. To me that’s simply a debit card and yes, we have PIN numbers on them too. One can only assume the marketing department had a flu epidemic, or perhaps just a collective seizure, when they named it. Can you imagine the brainstorming session that produced that? “Oh yes, I know, we’ll call it EFTPOS, that’s short and snappy”, “WOW why didn’t I think of that” and so on. They really earned their dollars that day.

Finally, for this installment (there’s plenty more), it’s music in supermarkets. Not the mildly offensive KwikSave or Texas Homecare muzak, or even the teeth-grinding Asda jingles, but a constant stream of loud, insipid, eighties ‘classic hits’, the worst aspect of which is that half the customers in the store walk around humming them as they pick up tins of spaghetti and examine their Peppers, sorry, Capsicums. It’s like being an extra in a zombie movie, I’m half expecting one of them to turn around mid song and break out into an evil cackle with vampire teeth.