town hall

I really don't like Town Hall.

Not the actual structure -- it's pretty photogenic if you can find an appropriate angle -- but the train station.  I'm also not big on Central, but somehow I think I actually prefer it to Town Hall.  Central you expect to be big and sprawling and troublesome and confusing; Town Hall ought to be small enough that it's not.

It's not that I'm a one-station sort of girl -- I've written a lot about Wynyard, but love Circular Quay for the view.  And Museum is just homey to me, and I don't really mind St. James (okay, I'm clearly a city circle kind of girl).

But Town Hall now.  Town Hall is just distressing.

There's no part of it that isn't distressing.  The areas to wait for the trains are often crowded and boisterous and dirty and leave you feeling like you could get pushed into oncoming traffic if you're not careful.  And it's deep.  Not as in intellectually, as in lots of stairs.  Lots and lots if you're walking up from the bottom level.  Not as many as Piccadilly Circus, but enough to convince you you ought to exercise more.  Tomorrow.

When you get up to the top, it's impossible to figure out where you want to go.  I can picture it quite clearly above ground, but the supposedly helpful labels are quintessentially unhelpful.  I think I'd be better off without them and just going off of landmarks unlikely to move, like Woolworths.

Even when you've been going in and out of it for years, you still find yourself coming out of areas you could have sworn led somewhere else the last time you went through them.  The underground nonsense is all very confusing.

Then when you do finally emerge, you're smack dab in the heart of one of my least favorite parts of the entire city -- the George Street cinema strip of dinge.

Dinge evidently is not a real word, blogger sees fit to tell me, but I think you get it.  If not, just think of something unwashed and sleazy and asking for money and you'll be close enough.

Coming into Town Hall isn't much better, except that it means you're escaping the dinge.  The main problem is the placing of everything.  It's so long and rectangular.  You can only enter the ticketed area in a few select spots and, here's the ludicrous thing, the monitors telling you where the train you need is are all placed off to the side away from the entrance.

Thus, in reality what happens is you rush in knowing you ought to catch a certain train quickly and dive through the ticket barriers, only to discover that you haven't got a clue which platform you need to go to.

Here you've got a couple options.  If you think you've got time and a MyMulti ticket, you can exit and check the monitors and come back in.  But that's a pain.  So's asking the blue-shirted man who works there.  First off he probably won't understand what you're asking, and second off even if he can he's unlikely to know the answer or be able to help.  Oh, he'll think he can and he'll adamantly attempt to push you in some direction, but the chances that it's the right direction are slim to none.

Which leaves you standing at the top of the stairs taking a wild guess as to which platform to try first.  There are only six, I think, but that's still a lot of stairs if you guess wrong five times first.

What I've found works best is getting a general idea in your head of which platforms are most likely to be the right ones (a couple times of trial and error tends to ingrain this pretty well), which for me happen to be 3 or 6.  Generally either one is okay.  Generally I forget to look at the monitors and so progress to platform 3 (some stairs, but not all the way).  If platform 3's monitor indicates a wait long enough to make me throw up my hands and utter any audible exclamation, my rule of thumb is to try platform 6.  I get to walk down more stairs then and check its monitor.

From there I might still be up a creek, but at least I know which creek I'm up.  I know how long I have to wait if I stay on 6 or if I go to 3.  I have to go back up stairs for 3 if I choose that one, though.

Never mind.  By this point getting out of the train station on whichever train comes first and fastest sounds like the best option by far.

Just so long as it takes me to Wynyard, and not Central.