Thank The Lord The Pope Has Gone!
Excuse me while I have a rant…..
Why did they call it World Youth DAY when it actually went for a WEEK? False and misleading advertising.
Why didn’t I see at least one pilgrim with any dress sense? A smile and a spring in your step can only get you so far…
Why was the city of what, 3.5 million people, severely displace and inconvenienced for 150,000 catholics who injected nothing more than a happy vibe into our city? A quick check on the websites of wotif & lastminute last Friday showed that you could get a bed at just about every hotel in Sydney over the weekend. Surely you wouldn’t expect this result from an event that pretty much shut down the city and major parts of the eastern suburbs for 8 days?
Mid week I was happy to see the pilgrims (see post below, I was positively euphoric). By the end of the week, having schlepped into the city several times I was starting to tire of the inconvenience. Then on Sunday, two things happened that had me irate. First of all, I wanted to go to Centennial Park with the family. A regular weekend destination for us. They’d shut the whole thing up and all of the surrounding streets. Really annoying. Then in the afternoon, I was on my way to Acer arena to see Disney On Ice (6/10 & $14 for fairy floss that was probably bagged 6 months ago? You’ve got to be kidding) and the trip took about half an hour more than it should have because of the road closures. Not a big deal, except when you have a 16 month old in the car and then it becomes not just a big deal but your worst nightmare.
To top it all off, I had to go into the city this morning AGAIN, thinking the roads would be returned to normal but no, so so wrong on that front. The pope was still here, clogging up the city. So today I was positively fuming. And I got to thinking about a project that I was working on for Motorola a couple of years ago. I wanted to put the Black Eyed Peas (click, that’s why their picture is posted here!) on the back of a truck - inspiration for this was taken from U2 doing the same thing throughout the streets of NY - see pic here:
so anyway, Motorola loved the idea. I met with the powers that be at the RTA. They wouldn’t have a bar of it. Reasons being, we couldn’t inconvenience anyone (we would have had to stop some lights for short intervals to let them pass through - Domain to Bondi along Oxford St). There were also safety concerns about them being without seat belts (would love to know if the pope wore one in his popemobile) however we did commission a risk assessment specialist who addressed and provided plans to alleviate these concerns in a very lengthy and costly report. The whole thing would have concluded with a free concert for the public at Bondi. The RTA still wouldn’t allow it. They said at the end of the day, it was a marketing exercise (hello, what in the hell was WYD?!) and wouldn’t really have benefited anyone. I begged to differ that many thousands of BEP’s fans would have been thrilled to bits to have seen this - most people in fact would be tickled pink to see one of the hottest bands in the world, in their city presented like this. It would have been a very minor inconvenience for which the city would have been beamed around the world (Sydney rocking it - great PR anyone?). Surely if it could be done in NYC, then it should have been a lay down misere for Sydney?
No wonder our beautiful city has slipped down the list of most liveable cities in the world. Melbourne has surpassed us. And do you know what someone (VVIP) told me when the RTA knocked the idea on the head - take it to *Melbourne, they will love it!
* I would have, but it wasn’t logistically possible for the band. It ended up being a different creative execution - 400 celebs, media and VIP’s got to see them perform at the overseas passenger terminal in Sydney. They drove right into the middle of the party, in a hummer and got out singing “let’s get it started” - it was hot hot hot. Party of the year.
