Out with stereotypes, in with everyday people

FIRST IMPRESSIONS - COLUMN
Water bills. Traffic jams. Noisy container ships. Stifling heat. Aggravated robberies. Too many Aucklanders in summer. Too many Aucklanders all the time.
Going by every other cliché folk spun me about Tauranga before I arrived, on any given day I could expect to stroll down Devonport Rd and bump into some variation of three people:
Ethel, the conservative octogenarian who lives in a lifestyle village, drives a newish Daihatsu Charade at 30km/h on the motorway, and averages nine letters to the editor a week.
Steve, the ex-Aucklander who, when not pushing up Papamoa's QV rating by building tacky yet bankably titled lifestyle villages, enjoys zooming past Ethel in his Audi, sailing to somewhere exotic in his luxury yacht ... or shopping on his iPad for a gold chain.
Bazza, the laid-back fish 'n' chip shop/bait shop/surf shop owner who wouldn't want to live anywhere he couldn't get away with telling anti-PC jokes and wearing jandals all year. But I'm sure that trio don't exist, because you can count on people having misguided ideas of what everyone and everything, everywhere else, is like.
I got fed all the above hogwash from people in my immediate former home of Masterton.
"Towwel-rongah eh," came the usual response to hearing of my imminent destination.
"Not like here where ya don't have one traffic light, eh ... heaps ah bloody traffic there. But yep, she's noyce up there. Mount's noyce ... plenny ah sheilahs. Pity 'bout the locals though, bloody Aucklanders moving down, buyin' all the cheap houses, puttin' great big bloody price tags on 'em. Bloody Aucklanders, eh."
But some self-styled cultural anthropologists in Hawke's Bay, where I resided before Masterton, said Wairarapa's inhabitants weren't much, either.
"Waaii-rappah eh? She's noyce there. Castlepoint, bloody noyce. Lake Ferry, good surf-castin' there, Cape Palliser, noyce. Wine snobs a bit worse than here though, eh. Bloody Greytown, Mart'n-burrah, full of 'em. Wellingtonians farewelling us as we moved to Napier cast their cultural criticisms from the other end of the stereotype spectrum, saying it was sad that they never saw gay couples holding hands in the wasteland known as "the provinces". Thar' be dragons up there, in other words.
And one fellow native Taranakian provided an all-encompassing character description of Wellingtonians before we lived there: "Wellington people ... a bit different." It turned out that when it came to Wellington, Taranaki, Hawke's Bay, Wairarapa and Tauranga people, it was simply just a case of how Sly and the Family Stone harmoniously put it in 1968: Different strokes, for different folks, and so on, and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby ... .
In Thursday's Bay of Plenty Times, Aucklander Victor Matthew wrote how he'd discovered Tauranga was a "New Zealand that only lives on in memory" after a short stay in hospital here last week. A "special place with special people". I'd like to make mention of other friendly, everyday people. A shout out to Balibir at the Tauranga City Lotto store, Kayne at Starbucks, Nicola at Bookworm, Lynn and Stephen at Civic Video, and everyone else who has made me welcome in my first few weeks here.
Cheers Towwel-rongah, you're bloody noyce ... and so on, and so on, and scooby dooby dooby.
Jamie Morton will be writing a weekly column during Richard Moore's absence from the paper.