Drove to downtown Christchurch for a few hours before catching our flight to Auckland. It is really hard to write about Christchurch after seeing the destruction from the earthquake. I felt a huge sadness and sense of loss even though I did not know anyone. Everywhere you look there are construction cranes, maintaining walls and braces for some of the buildings that were left. You see so many empty pieces of land turned into parking lots temporarily. Unbelievably, only 185 people were killed. There is a picture we took of all these white chairs sitting outside together to depict the loss of the victims. Very eerie but a nice tribute.
It has been 4 years since the earthquake. The city is cleaned up from the mess, but it is going to take a long time to build it. We walked around in the sunshine and found it hard to imagine.
There is a chair and ottoman outside That I took a picture of. It is made from shards of teacups. The story is that the person who lived there had an antique collection of china teacups that belonged to her grandmother. Her grandmother had been poor all her life and had always wanted beautiful teacups to have her tea in. When she was old, she was able to buy some. But she loved them so much she was afraid to drink out of them so put them in a china cabinet to admire them. When the grandmother died the granddaughter inherited the teacups. At her grand mother's funeral she used them for tea.
The earthquake broke them all. There is a Japanese community in Japan who sent over a whole bunch of teacup shards and together with the found little ones from the demolished granddughter's house, a mosaic was made and turned into a chair and ottoman and put on display where the house was.
Larry here
Seventy percent of the buildings in the central business district have been or will be torn down. Immediately after the quake the so called red zone including non damaged businesses was closed to the public for eight months just to make the area safe. When it started to reopen they had built shopping areas cafés etc out of shipping containers and they move them from place to place as work progresses.
Beth was talking to some local women, about the quake, one of their friends was talking to her husband on the cel phone when the quake happened and the building collapsed on her. She didn't make it. Another story was about a woman about to be married, they had to amputate both her legs at the site.
On the lamp posts are pictures and bios and flowers in memory of people who had died at that site. We went to the so called cardboard cathedral. They've built a temporary church, A frame style out steel beams and the beams are covered with the cardboard tubes that are used in pouring cement, hence the cardboard cathedral.
As Beth mentioned we're in Auckland now, leaving in the am for home. We averted a near catastrophe, when I got to security they wanted to see the Ipad, I normally carry it in my backpack, not there, roar back to the car rental counter, cars gone to be cleaned, call over, they find it and bring it back, phew. The gal said don't worry we would have shipped it to you. The weather has returned to glorious, we're not sure we want to leave but our VISA cards expire at the end of the month so I guess we have no choice. I'm surprised the cards haven't melted from overuse.
