I considered taking the train – the new Sylvia Park station opens today – but it actually looks like going from Mt Eden station Sylvia Park could require three trains, which is, like, totally ridiculous.

So instead I took the 512 bus. It starts off fairly ordinarily – Symonds, Khyber, Broadway, Great South, Main Highway, Ellerlie-Panmure Highway, but then once it hits Mt Wellington, it goes on this dizzying circuit of various suburban streets, including one called Ferndale, which is the fictitious setting of Shortland Street, which makes me think that the bus isn’t actually grinding around the suburban hills, but rather I’ve accidentally jumped across a vortex in the space-time continuum and am in a parallel universe/limbo where I must circle the mean streets of Ferndale South in a bus until finally I get to jump back in to the relative civilisation of Mt Wellington Highway.

Now, when I first visited Sylvia Park a few weeks ago, it was a quiet Friday. The mall felt like a 1960s English Corbusian-inspired housing estate that had been turned into a New Zealand mall, and I was quite excited by it all.

But when I got to Sylvia Park today, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake. It was the school holidays, so the mall was packed with babies&children&teenagers.

Enough Sylvia Park school holidays mayhem! I jumped on the first bus that came along with “DOWNTOWN” on its destination board. What I didn’t realise was that it went to downtown via Panmure, when meant entering a whole other space-time continuum and going on more crazy-ass circuits, past butcher shops that offer discount rates on sausages for sports clubs and hangis.

But as it happened, I’d just signed up with Twitter, so I amused myself by sending progress reports to the interwebs:

3:25pm On a bus. Endlessly circling the streets of south central Panmure. Oh, make the relentless suburban landscape end!

3:38pm Taniwha Street in Glen Innes. I paid over five dollar for this bus ride. I expect magic.

3:44pm The sun has come out and the bus is turning into Kohimarama, which is not in my cellphone’s dictionary.

4:02pm Why can’t this bus do what the 274 does and drive along main roads instead of detouring along all these suburban side streets?

4:13pm Downtown, sweet downtown. Only an hour to get here from Mount Wellington.

Life would be so much easier if I were a shut-in/hermit (hermette?) type.