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May 20, 2006

The Babylon

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Ow my Gawd! This is Auckland.

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This is the view to the centre of the town. We were horrified. Seems that everyone is driving a car in this place. There're huge motorways going straight to the city centre and once you're in the centre, then all of a sudden you realize that there's really nothing there.. There's no centre in Auckland. At least nothing nice there. There's a scary mix of buildings of various styles, sizes and purposes and motorways.

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As there are no easy walking and strolling around in the neighbourhood. There's streets, houses and cafes, if you're lucky, then there're are huge supermarkets and you have to drive everywhere.

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Our few walks in the prime areas of Auckland were also quite disappointing.. It seems that there was no any kind of urban planning here. It looks like Auckland just exploded and people kept their countryside mentality, weary to give up "good old" lifestyles (such as having 5 cars per 4 person family). There's only 3 train lines in the 1.3 million city and some busses. Currently there's a huge debate in the media, whether Auckland needs an electric train and a huge portion of the NZ budget this year goes to building more roads. In Auckland. Scary.

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I've been meaning to write about NZ ah bengs for quite a while, but I got a picture of one just now. An amazing proportion of population here are ah bengs and an amazing amount of old cr*ppy cars are modified with spoilers, massive exhaust pipes. You hear their cars 5 blocks down the road and when you finally see them, you just want to burst to laugh.. Talking about psychological compensation.. ha ha...

We've been quite disheartened by the first look at Auckland. I heard that traffic situation is quite bad, I didn't expect it to be that horrible. Basically there's nothing to do in this city if you don't have a car. A lot of people that we talked to said that we should have another look, as there are great things about this city too. And true enough, there are nice leafy neighbourhoods around here too.. So we'll see how it goes...

Posted by gkligyte at May 20, 2006 10:34 AM
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