I guess if it is to be travel writing, I should write about my
travails. I sit here in view of a big banner of the right half of a
tiger's face, except for its nose where a cabinet door has been
installed through the banner. The banner reads
hamilt on
Rhinos->Chimps->Cheetahs->Giraffes->Zebras->Tigers->Kokako->Tuatara
;A trophic chain? That tiger killed a zookeeper a few years ago btw.
[another cabinet door]ig
attracti on
in other parts of the transit centre, I think I can see
appreciati on and du?rerececti on
I'm not sure what's going on with what I imagine was directi
on. Alright I think the woman who brought me a hotdog (ona stick in
NZ) whom I was chatting to is discretely observing me looking way too
intently at these banners. That sign was Pure Recreati on but hard to
see because it is quite oblique to where I am looking from.
While I was asking the lovely old Indian woman what she thought I
should order half an hour ago, the man who sold me my bus ticket a
month ago appeared in the wings furtively hissing asking her where the
person who was meant to be working was. No one would ever have known
that this woman was not meant to make me bus-station-coffee and a
deepfried hotdog. But I know, and now you know too.
These intercity semi-private bus companies still accept cash, which is
palatable to me. The privatised local bus system in the Waikato only
accept NZ govt RealMe account issued transit cards, then it needs
javascript app online BeeBucks credit card purchases, so I stopped
using buses a few years ago. NZ govt RealMe binds other
semi-government accounts to an IRD (= IRS) account.
While having three hours to kill, how did I get onto this topic? After
buying my ticket with cash, the kiosk person a month ago was
absolutely desperate to get my email address, weirdly fervent about
it. He asked how that email was hosted (how one can host emails is an
interesting question I guess).
That doesn't really warrant remark but I then got many, many copies of
a bus ticket purchase confirmation email. Attached to these is a pdf
receipt, and the pdfs elicit multiple warnings opened by mupdf. I'm
not aware of anything to be gained sending 10s of copies of the same
email to an mx somewhere. Maybe it could trigger a rejection
notification from some servers or something? I'm not an email wizard.
I wanted to look at the bad data in these pdfs, though honestly I
don't know how pdfs work. I just opened one up in nvi (aside; my
travel laptop, for compatibility purposes is the linux laptop I keep
for the sole purpose of connecting to proprietary javascript
applications my siblings use to communicate), including recently the
mastodon web application.
But, the nvi default seems to be to not display non-text characters
rather than give hex values or something, and vis(1) doesn't seem to
have been builtin here. The default should be hexadecimal
actually. Maybe those "stream" pdf elements were actually just a bunch
of spaces.
Bizarre. I was just approached by a wandering chocolate salesman. I
thought it might be for a charity, but on inspection the
four-dollars-fifty of candy's package has the face of the person who
sold it to me on it and is a secret-family-recipe business venture.
13 ; hundred hours.
My journey into the down-underworld began with boarding Charon's
vessel, having paid my two bits.
If I posted it, you may have felt I was overflowing with negativity
about Hamilton sitting next to a hollowed-out derelict of a vending
machine in sight of the moldering remains of Shearer's Music, a sex
shop, a government-funded Barber training business and a
government-funded Urban Hair and Spa training business. I think that
the biggest non-academic state-funded training pure business, The
Wintec, summarises my feelings with their gaudy banner ads around the
city proclaiming that within five years after graduating up to half of
the graduates will either have purchased further training or
experienced employment. (The bus station building was between me and
being able to see the Wintec's campus in the city centre).
Intercity bus travel from the midlands mercifully could not have had
starker contrast. The bus before Charon's arriving was a little-town
circuit. People filed out into the big city and settled, with each
person having about one square metre of personal space and most people
densely lit up cigarettes (to my own and other nonsmoker's chagrin). I
talked pleasantly with the bus driver after checking the protocol for
my 20-minute-later aeroport bus. He asked where I was from due to my
mysteriously foreign accent, and he himself sounded very like Stug. I
told him as much and he said he was originally from- I think he said
"Pull" and seeing my bewildernment said a few things about northern
England. Some of the other bus-waiters chimed in about how they were
visiting Auckland, and some of them were also going to the aeroport
departures, and I couldn't miss it anyways. There was more community
in that smokey 20 minute wait than I think I have ever experienced in
Hamilton otherwise, since I worked in more rural IT settings and was
part of these bus scenes before anyway.
Charon arrived, and began calling for certain names with booked large
baggage, and then issuing general bus leadership. International or
cityfolk mused about what exactly was being said in her NZ country
dialect as she called out names. I tried showing her my ticket which
she waved away with a request for Your Name, Dearie. I chatted a bit
with a Canadian backpacker (who politely identified my own accent as
faint).
Lots of seasonal fruit-pickers and small-towners.
The Canadian guy, who turned out to be an infamous festival scene
firespinner with a Spartan helmet (on fire) theme said something about
the internet, and I tried to give him some cursory directions to
aNONradio. I need to carry around some of snowie's promotional
materials. He's more about spinning fire to music than making music,
but can also tell festival and party stories, as well as talk about
the wild places he has travelled. It would be cool for him to do a
show.
During Charon's bus announcements, she reminded everyone to /please/
not press the emergency stop button conveniently situated next to
every single person unless they really wanted the bus to come to a
rapid emergency halt, and a discussion of road works and possible
backroad alternative routes she might take if traffic seemed to
thicken. She told us that the bus technically had seatbelts and it was
the NZ law's opinion that seatbelts should be used when available
(no-one used them).
I think the sort of people who take these buses take them a lot, which
includes itinerant workers and backpackers fulfilling at least
persistent character roles. And you then spend at least two to three
hours of the day together on each journey, so everyone kind of joins
together and shares some cause.
After chatting a bit with firespinner Justin, Charon conducted some
live inductive reasoning over the bus coms about the backroads versus
the main route and chose us to venture the main route even though
roadworks were scheduled today based on how traffic felt, a good call-
the roadworks weren't out today (maybe there was a risk of rain after
the weekend's thunderstorms). On arrival, she asked people who wanted
to stretch their legs who were continuing to check in with her out and
in so she didn't accidentally lose anyone. Evidently the
arrival-direction pick-up point can't be missed if you go to the
aeroport arrivals' McDonalds.
Of course, now I am six hours early (three hours early for checkin).
There is barely any seating pre-checkin so I am situated on a bench
outside beneath suspiciously leaky clouds.
; ---- 18 most relaxing security experience ever. Well, until I got
here. There are these vertical stair pits with fake rocks in them, and
some of the stairs are bleacher seats? But your thighs would have to
be twice as long as mine to use this as a seat. Some people are
perched on ledges, others are sprawled diagonally on the
bleachers. Departure status: Relax. A cluster of west-coast (US)
accents near me are keen for anything salty. They don't know a bad
time for nachos. They've even [sudden self-censorship]. My plane
itself isn't for two and a half hours. According to the security
guard, Melbourne is just like Auckland. I think that Melbourne is the
NZer city of Australia. It occurs to me my show happened five hours
ago (maybe) but I don't have any mode of checking in. I recorded it
two days ago, a medley of depingus, ffog and ldbeth (and me, I don't
remember if one of my tracks even made it in). Hopefully lots of
people heard my show and want gopher directories full of synth music
added to the shuffle. I guess we need a way of usefully inspecting
that #'defvar.
; ---- 19 My three hour wait was sped up by two Japanese English
students who had graduated from their studies and were on their
triumphal return to Okinawa. I channeled my very sketchy knowledge of
Japan from reading nm03 the gopherhole in Tokyo and our various other
Japanese speakers and travellers. Naturally I enjoined them to
investigate
https://aNONradio.net which seems to be the unofficial
theme of my Melbournian adventure. I don't really remember or know
anything about freeflow (?) or all the Japanese music in the shuffle,
but if we cross paths again they have been enjoined to tell me details
about it. One of them wanted to move somewhere cold in America
somewhere, and on consideration I recommended Vancouver and skiing at
Whistler-Blackcombe with some context. Okinawa is tropical
(evidently.).
