I arrived in New Zealand on Tuesday afternoon. I was actually really lucky to be able to get into Christchurch because they got ‘heaps of snow’ in their terms that continued falling on Sunday and Monday. Many flights were cancelled coming into Christchurch on Monday and numerous flights could not get out on Tuesday, but thankfully mine was able to land, or that would have screwed up my whole schedule of plans.
I got through customs and security pretty fast, Australia and New Zealand are pretty lax compared to America… I’m not looking forward to going back through customs when I get to America. I then proceeded to try to figure out where I needed to be to find a way to my backpacker. There was this information desk in the airport but nobody was there… what help is that? So I waited outside for about 15 minutes until I found someone that looked like they worked at the airport and she said that it would be best to take a super shuttle but I needed to go over to the domestic area instead of the international area, so I trucked my bags over to the other side of the airport and got on the super shuttle which was $24 instead of the $50 or so that a taxi would have cost me!
There were 7 other ladies on the shuttle and most of them were actually from the area so they all were telling me about different things we passed in the city and how things were before the earthquake. The shuttle driver said that the snow was just “icing on the quake”. It was a shame to hear that Christchurch hardly ever gets snow, but they had a bunch which was just another dagger in the reconstruction process of buildings.
There is pretty much nothing to do in Christchurch because the whole city center is considered a red zone, where it is all closed down that nobody can go into it. (I figured I would still be able to see some of the older buildings and stuff even though they were damaged, but there was no way.
Once I arrived at my backpacker, the Chester Street Backpackers in Christchurch, I was very surprised that it was still standing. A lot of the other buildings on the street were closed up with fences around them meaning that they were going to be torn down. The lady at the backpacker said that since their house was built of wood, it was still standing, because with a quake it just sorta rocks…. Not really sure how I feel about this…. She also said that they get an earthquake pretty much every day! Now that really made me feel reassured! HA!
Well the backpacker was just a little house with like 5 rooms in it. I was in a room with 3 beds and met a nice girl named Roxanne from France. It was actually really cute with a super nice lady working there, but it was freezing! I don’t think it would usually be that bad, but since there was snow outside, that made it worse. They had a stand up heater thing in each of the rooms, so in the gathering room where we watched TV we sat right by the heater.
Roxanne and I decided to venture out in the freezing weather to try to find something for dinner. She had gotten directions, but didn’t speak English very well and did not know how to get there. We ended up walking around for a long time asking people, but were unsuccessful at finding food because everything around us was closed down, so we gave up and went back to the backpacker. Unfortunately I was unprepared with no food, but they had a shelf of free herbs and stuff where I found something like a beef bouillon cube, so I made beef broth and had that for dinner…at least it was warm I guess.
Eventually we made our way to bed where I wore two pairs of pants, 2 shirts and a sweatshirt, and was still freezing, even with a heater in the room. Didn’t get much sleep, but by the morning I was glad I was leaving Christchurch very soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment