Day 54 – Christchurch.

I was sharing a room with 2 other people and the first one had to get up and leave for the airport by 5am, then the next had to catch the Kiwi bus at 7am so when my alarm went off at 9am it didn’t feel like I had been asleep that long. I needed to check out and find out whether they had a room for me for tonight, the woman said the Kiwi list had just come through and there was so she added me to it but I was told I needed to come back later to check back in.

I left my luggage with them but took my carry on with me, as I didn’t really want to carry my laptop around all day I thought the best idea would be to head over to the Re:Start mall, grab some breakfast, update my blog and use the free Wi-Fi in the area, so that is what I did.

Around midday I walked over the road to a museum called Quake City. As you may have guessed it is all about earthquakes but mostly the one that happened in 2011, it was $10 to enter but it was worth every penny… or cent I suppose.

My facts yesterday about the earthquake were slightly wrong. The earthquakes began in September 2010 but only caused damage to Darfield, which is 40km west of Christchurch. After earthquakes aftershocks can happen, a lot of the time you can’t even feel them or they happen in the middle of the night and you don’t realise. The February quake did start at 4am but it wasn’t really that big, the M6.3 happened at 12:51pm, so lunchtime on the 22^nd February 2011, which is when most people were affected. It caused exceptionally violent shaking and the ground motions recorded within the city are among the strongest ever to be recorded in the world.

The museum has pieces from buildings and other things that were damaged in the quake, it talks about the history of quakes in New Zealand and there was a feature length film being shown containing interviews from local people. The film was really interesting and quite emotional to watch at times. A number of people either had loved ones or were trapped in the CTV building themselves. It really made me think about how I’d react in a situation like that and it’s easy to say you’d stay calm but unless anything like that happens, you don’t know. I have seen enough safety information since being here to know what to do now though. One interviewee was a policeman who was trapped in the police station with just one other officer but 6 people in prison. 1 woman was waiting to be transferred to prison, 1 was a 16 year old boy who they were teaching a lesson by locking up for a few hours and the other 4 were waiting to go to court to be sentenced or something. He wasn’t quite sure what to do but knew they needed to get out. He found some handcuffs and put them all together and walked out. Everyone from the court nearby were waiting in the evacuation point outside, so he found a judge and asked him to make some decisions there and then. He had a scrap bit of paper and made bail conditions on it for one guy, let the young boy go and took the others to the state prison using some random car.

I didn’t get out of the museum until about 2pm, I thought the Kiwi bus would have arrived by now so I text Charli to find out where they were. I needed to check in to my new room so I made my way back to the YMCA.

On arrival the woman said they were full and I wasn’t on the list, obviously I made this clear to her that I had been told I had a room etc and within 5 minutes they had sorted me out a bed. I wasn’t exactly asking for much was I!

I met the girls outside the museum and we wondered into town. As they had only just arrived I became tour guide for the afternoon and showed them the places they wanted to see.

We went out that evening and checked out the Pallet Pavilion. This is another ‘Gap Filler’ project where they have taken an empty bit of land and made something out of it. This structure is mostly just wooden shelving crates built up to create a community space. It had a caravan as the shop/bar and we played Snakes and Ladders, somehow I managed to win…clearly have skill as this game is not to do with luck! After here they wanted to check out Smash Palace which is the bus bar I went to last night, this time we actually sat in the bus and it was pretty cool!