POV: You’re a tourist flying into Melbourne airport at 3AM, after a combined 36-hour travel time from Europe. First things first, you’re instructed to fill out a paper declaration form which cannot be filled out online; the flight attendants didn’t have any pen to lend you, so you’ll just have to fill it out in the airport! When you land, you head to the arrivals hall, and find a line of about 40 people waiting for a pen from the single bench with two pens, attached with a cord (what will happen when they run out of ink?) After waiting 25 minutes to fill out the form, you continue your journey to another hallway; a literal bottleneck, with 8 machines that everybody must use to scan their passports, click three buttons to answer questions (which are also on the paper form you’ve just filled out), and take some printed out paper. Since this hallway is a literal bottleneck, an airport employee instructs people to continue past the line to get to the further 4 machines; in a manner which can only be described as extremely condescending, while grovelling to himself under his breath about “stupid foreigners” not understanding. Finally, after another 30 minutes, you finally press the three buttons and get your piece of paper. You continue down the bottleneck into a new room, and head towards the passport control (luckily, you somehow have an Australian passport, so you use the automated passport-checking machine, and don’t have any story of the human passport control experience). As you heard towards the passport control, you notice 8 more of those machines you’ve just waited 30 minutes to use – with not a single person using them, despite them clearly working. Oh well, I suppose next time? After passing through the passport-checking machine, you finally have to give the paper that was printed and the form you wrote with the pen to a security officer – not before being forced to stand in line with 10 other people, legs apart not moving, while a sniffer dog runs up and down the line, checking you for whatever.
POV: You’ve finally entered Melbourne, Australia! You try to connect to the free WiFi at the airport to work out how to get into the big city from the airport, but it doesn’t work. You finally find the help desk, and they explain that there’s no train to the city; your only options are a bus, or a taxi; but with a taxi, you’ll be paying around $100 and you’ll have to wait another 30 minutes due to a queue. You end up taking the bus; it’s not too bad, just annoying because you have a large suitcase and the gentleman taking payment – who doesn’t speak English – refuses to help you lift your suitcase onto the bus while you have an injured leg. The bus has free WiFi! But it doesn’t work.
POV: You finally arrive to the city of Melbourne. As soon as you step off the bus (it’s now 6AM), you see a clearly homeless and very mentally-ill man fly-kicking the air, as if he is battling an invisible opponent. As he continues his practice of taekwondo with his invisible opponent, you notice five or six other people with gaunt faces riding on bicycles in circles, yelling at each-other, and throwing glass bottles onto the ground around them. “Alright, I just need to find my hotel”, you think to yourself. As you find the tram (thanks to one of the non-drugged-up people on the street.. at 6AM who offered to search how to get to your hotel with their phone, since there is no WiFi), you ask the driver how to buy a ticket. He tells you to exit the tram; you have to buy something called a My Key, then put money onto it, then you can use the tram; you cannot just purchase a single ticket. “OK, if the driver won’t let me on the tram, I’ll go and buy one of these ‘My Key’ things”, you think. The driver, before yelling again for you to get off the tram, tells you that there is nowhere to purchase a ‘My Key’ at the tram stop – you have to find a store which sells them. You also can’t put money onto the card at the tram stop or in the tram, you have to find a store which can do it, or a dedicated machine – the vast majority of which are only available at some train stations. Oh, great. “Maybe I should have taken that taxi after all”, you think to yourself, before realizing that if you had taken the taxi, you’d be even further away from somewhere that you could buy this ‘My Key’, being stranded (forced to order another taxi to the nearest location where you can buy one).
This is a dramatization of the combination of two times that I have entered Melbourne. I no longer fill out that paper form on arrival, as I worked out that I can claim ignorance at the gate that you have to give the paper, and they will provide me with a “new” paper (and a pen!)