Travel – Christchurch NZ
Heading out for a quick holiday visit to NZ to see our daughter perform in SWING – Circo-Arts latest circus production – so far we’ve made it to Sydney airport where we can skim some free wifi at the Bar Coluzzi coffee shop in the International lounge.
Airports
Airports are strange liminal spaces where people are held briefly in stasis – not ready to board yet, but filled with anticipation or exhaustion depending on whether you are starting out or returning to distant shores. the coffee shop empties periodically as another crowd gets ready for check-in prior to all the security checkpoints.
Alarmed but not alert
It is a space where people screen out the world, their lives on hold temporarily, to the extent that the fire alarm achieved zero response. From anyone. Correction – one person downed their coffee a little faster, lest it be taken from them. Other than that, there were no instruction, no information and no sense of alarm. The alarm might as well have been a garbled announcement for the late departure of a plane bound for Timbuctu rather than the steady insistent beep-beep-beep. Perhaps they were waiting for the non-existent announcement. Perhaps they were waiting for a follow-up woop-woop rising tone to indicate evacuation. But eventually the sound simply stopped. Perhaps an alarm test. We may never know.
Food
The two coffees, croissant, soup and potato wedges came to just over $34 – it filled the gaps, and the coffee was good – as was the food, but maybe next time I’ll make some sandwiches and just go for coffee. We were both hungry up to that point, despite having had a decent breakfast. No-one warns you about how you feel hungry after three hours of sitting still in a bus with your knees around your ears because your carry-on won’t fit in the narrow tray above – good for hats but not much else. The fiddle fitted though.
Shopping mall as museum of contemporary culture
With only two and a half hours before boarding there’s not much to do except find a hot-spot and get online, or maybe do some last-minute shopping. But we are on the wrong side of international for most of the shops – besides, we’ve actually got everything we’ll need in our bags. We don’t smoke, the technology is reasonably up to date and we’re just not big drinkers, so it’s really just a museum of contemporary culture, rather than a shopping experience.
And to cap it all they are refurbishing the airport so even the museum bit is more wooden hoarding than retail eye-candy.
But the coffee is good – perhaps it’s time for another.
Cheers
Jerry
