It hasn’t all been easy, however. Many places seem to suffer from a lack of sensible signage. For example, our first stop was the tourist information centre. They have a counter with people behind it, but you can’t just bowl up to the counter, nor can you start a queue – you have to push a button (next to which had a small label saying ‘Free WiFi’) to get a ticket with a number on it, and wait for that number to be displayed on a screen. Obviously, we managed to figure the system out eventually.
Then, at the city hall, there was one sign indicating where to buy tickets, which led to another sign pointing to where the tours left from. It turned out the ticket office was in the same place, but again that wasn’t obvious from the signage.
We found other things that we thought were rather inefficient. This surprised me, for the country that invented Ikea! For example, certain pedestrian crossings only go green in sections across the road, and the timing does not seem to be linked very well with the traffic lights. So you have people waiting to cross the road, and traffic waiting to turn, while other pedestrians and traffic travelling in the same direction can go, and then both get a green light. I probably haven’t described this very well, but maybe that just indicates what a mess it was.
At the city hall, instead of limiting the number of tickets sold for a particular time, they split the group into two – each with a guide, who then proceeded to try to talk over the other one as both groups moved through the same rooms at about the same time.
For dinner we had burgers and salad from a Swedish fast-food place: the guy who took the order was the one who went and made the salad.
I bought an iron-on patch to go on my collection blanket: it had been stuck onto the cardboard support using a hot-glue gun.
Finally the most inefficient thing of all has been the hostel. First of all, neither of our credit cards worked yesterday when we checked in. Secondly, they offer breakfast in the mornings, but when we went down today we found about a dozen people had taken over half of the kitchen making packed lunches for a small army. Then we found that all the dishes had been put away wet, and there was nothing provided to dry them on. (So we left and bought breakfast somewhere else.) Then when we arrived back in the evening, with it starting to rain outside, we opened the door to find about 30 people all standing in the very tiny foyer area. Maybe all this goes with the territory of a hostel, and I’m getting old. Or maybe people should think about other people just a little bit more? Can’t believe we’re paying NZD140 a night to put up with this!
No comments:
Post a Comment