Thursday, July 23, 2009

One of Those Cities No One Cares About

In Adelaide, we watched an Australian game show called “Talking About My Generation.” This show pitted contestants from three different generations (Boomer, X, and Y) against each other. I am good with trivia, so I thought I might do well with the Generation X questions. But the very first one required knowledge of a 1980s vegemite jingle, and I realized that my knowledge bank is virtually useless down under.

One question involved knowing which Australian city was the first to see a certain product on grocery store shelves. The generation Y man guessed it was Perth. (Actually, he said, “Parth;” he was Irish.) This was wrong. The correct answer was Adelaide, the very place where we happened to be at that moment. “Ah,” he sneered, “I knew it was one of those cities no one cares about.”

This seemed harsh, especially in regards to Adelaide, a lovely city with nice parks, a gentle climate, and a surprisingly broad array of available foodstuffs. It is, as I have noted, a city so nice we went there twice.

And if our snarky Irish friend thought Adelaide was provincial, then it’s a good thing he wasn’t with us for the remainder of the trip, because our itinerary was about to get even less ready for prime time.

2 comments:

Mary R. said...

This show has it all wrong by ignoring Generation Jones (born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and Generation X). I won't watch the show because of this lack of credibilty...GenJones is too established by now for a show to still being used the old school outdated Boom/X/Y model.

Nicole said...

"Generation Jones..." I don't know that term. Is it an Australian reference? We don't have a word in the United States for a generation between Boomer and X, but we ought to.