11-18-10

We headed into Christchurch today via the city bus. We drove to the Palms a mall 10 min from our motor camp and 20 min from down town to park our van and catch the #60 bus.  Along the way we saw some cracks in the older brick buildings and some bent phone poles and bus stop shelters.  It was interesting to see the damage, whole building were flagged off or demo'd but it was something that unless we would have known about the earthquake probably would have missed how much damage there really was.  Once in the heart of the city we saw more damage, some buildings were fenced off, and whole street blocks were closed while they were repairing sewer pipes and waiting for owners to decide if they wanted to fix the buildings or demolish them.  The damage was a lot less than I expected to see, a lot of the problems are underground with the water and sewer pipes from what we heard.  

  We walked to Cathedral Square and browsed through the craft booths that set up and watched kiwi's eat their lunch in square, getting hungry we found a little park with an empty bench and ate our pb&j's. The city was pretty around the square, but I was not as impressed as I thought I would be, aside from Cathedral square and the art museum the city did not seem to have any kind of unique vibe, just felt like another big city. Wellington remains our favorite city in NZ because it is very unique, but Nelson is the area we would live in if we had to.

I had been thinking about it for a long time and finally on the way home I had decided to get my hair chopped off, I had always wanted to have a pixie cut but never had the courage to go through with it. I decided that now was the time, if it looked awful I would be camping for the next two months and it would have time to grow out.  We took the bus back to the Palms and found a hair salon, the gal that cut my hair was named Alica, and she did a great job. Paul really liked it, but it is a big change so when he looks at me he is shocked just as i am when I look in the mirror. Im not sure yet how I feel about it, I like it but I'm not sure if I will keep this style or not yet. 

We were getting really excited to have our friends arrive tomorrow we wanted to get to bed early but some Germans kept talking to us in the kitchen until 10pm. Luckly the kitchen is locked at 10pm so the manager came in to shut things down and we made our exit to bed.