Yay! More guest post-age! Fresh-faced Wellingtonista Stephen Clover came to town in the service of rock’n'roll and while here, headed way out east to see legendary Sylvia Park Mall for himself. This is his story…

In Family Guy Season 4 Episode 1: North by North Quahog (2005), Peter Griffin walks into the “Beyond” section at the Bed, Bath and Beyond store and finds himself in some kind of space/time-warp vortex — where, happily, this turns out to be where the coffee mugs are displayed.

At Sylvia Park Mall, you don’t get anything even remotely as much fun:

No bizarre floaty vortex-place for you, matey. No coffee mugs, even. (Probably.) Nope, at Sylvia Park Mall you got you your Bed and your Bath, and your and er.. Table. Woot.

See, not even a pretty hanging print of a spiral staircase that looks like an ammonite or perhaps as if it’s being used to illustrate the golden ratio can rescue this. Look at how fed-up and disgusted the guy who looks like my Embedded Microcontrollers lecturer from 1992 is. He can’t even bring himself to finish his latté. He’s had enough, and rightly so.

I chose this tale of average-ness to illustrate the resoundingly disappointing experience that was my visit to the Sylvia Park Mall. In Auckland for a few days, I dragged my gracious host out there all bright-eyed, bushy tailed and keyed-up for a shopping expedition of awesomeness. This is when it all started going wrong.

For ever, I’ve held onto this (in retrospect, ridiculous and naïve) ideal that at Malls, you get Deals. That is, Malls should be places where shops sell things at lower cost than their usual High-Street equivalents. That Malls are where you find stores that you indeed don’t even find on the High Streets, whence you get even better Deals. Bargains. That’s what Malls should be all about. In fact, all Malls should be DressMart Malls, where you actually do (mostly) get stuff more cheaply. Basically, Malls should reward you for the crappiness of their user-experience by saving you money.

Turns out, malls are just cluster-bombs of chain stores, selling everything at exactly the same prices as any other branch of the franchise. Buh. Colour me disenfranchised.

Basically, I was wanting the Most Amazing Shopping Experience Known to Mankind. I was failed. Oh well, at least we got to play at Britomart and ride on the trains.

Other things of note:

• It’s not Nearly As Big As You Would Think.
• Wagamama — weird but good.
• The Warehouse — sells liquor? Has a ‘clearance’/’special’ bin? 700ml Pernod for $32? Need I go on?
• Actually the Warehouse now apparently sells fresh fruit and veges. Honestly, this is getting out of hand.
• Asian Supermarket at the entrance: yes, you win. Red Bull-alike taurine drink that smells a little bit like cow piss and is called “Bacchus” on special for $1.99? Thank you. I’ll take several.
• Cute staff raise shopping-for-men’s-Elle-MacPherson-underwear-at-the-Bendon-outlet experience ^4. At least.
• It was really weird running into a guy from my cricket team back home almost as soon as we arrived, literally only hours since we’d been boozing together 700 km away. We were both all “duuude! what are YOU doing here? LOLz!!1!!one”