Now Voyager: Sunday in Christchurch

After a great sleep in chilly Christchurch where I overnighted in a BnB which I had experienced on my last visit to this once great but now decimated city.

The wedding last night still features strongly in my memory. The wording of the ceremony, beautifully and lovingly created by the excellent celebrant and Bonnie who had emerged from her bed in the hospital to arrive at her own wedding only to return later with her new husband to spend their first night in a suite there. Bonnie, it was revealed during the many speeches, was born prematurely with only one lung and is susceptible to many infections. Now having come down with pleurisy, probably because of the stress of having totally organised her wedding, with geat élan and excellence I must add, she only just managed to make it to the wedding held in this beautiful vineyard on the edge of Christchurch.

More pictures at the bottom....

The garden veggie patch outside my kitchen window at Glenn and Wasana's Air BnB where I spent the night of the wedding.

Large sitting room where I watched an amazing documentary movie on the Maori Channel, called The Red House. I would love to get it again!

My bed....

Coffee Sunday morning at Ballantyne's, the one big department store still in full glory in ravaged downtown Christchurch.

The Style Magazine of CC with the movers and shakers being photographed

With steel sculptor featuring....

My interesting neighbours....

in café at Ballantynes

The two young boys were totally in charge of inviting their elderly and disabled grandparents for hot chocolate and cake. They were only about ten and twelve I would estimate, very bright and engaging as they chatted animatedly with their grand'ma who had obviously suffered a stroke but was valiant in her recovery using her electrified wheechair with great dexterity. The older boy gave his credit/debit card to his younger brother who paid for it all and they both exuded the Kiwi nature of generous spirit and capability. These two gifts seem to be in abundance in this tough and challenging country.

The question is, can I take this challenge?

Today in CC I bought a Kiwi beanie to cover my ears in the very chilly Christchurch air. Walking through the open spaces, buildings waiting to be built, some edifices having already risen, it evoked a feeling of steadfast acceptance, a feeling that nature has dealt a severe blow but the day will come when all will eventually be rebuilt.

But it will take many years for this once gracious, so-English of Victorian cities, to be be reborn. In the meantime the stoic Kiwis soldier on, and mostly don't complain. There is certainly an old-core here, who are Cantabrians for over a hundred years, and their descendants are shown in the society photos of the local Style Magazine. These people indeed do have style, but many are anchored in times gone by. It will be their children who now are emerging into this crazy new world of computers and cyber dating who will create the new Christchurch in twenty years.

I was fascinated to hear how cyberspace had enabled the romance and marriage take place which I happily witnessed last night. The Dating App called Tindr does indeed have a role to play in modern courtship if used intelligently. But it's not for me I'm afraid.

The movie I saw on the excellent Maori TV last night called 'The Red House' was a love story of an aging Kwii environmental activist who was living an idyll on a small island somewhere. He was fighting the ugly investors and developers. It is a story which is all too common today. He was eventually edged out with rising rates which he could not afford. Somehow, (I missed this part), he had met a lovely Chinese widow who had totally fallen for him and he for her, in the most chaste and spiritual of ways. He was supremely fit, like a modern day Tarzan, but was nearing seventy with the body of a twenty year old. He managed to travel to China to help her care for her aging pareents, and he witnessed around them the wholesale destruction of buldings and saw how the Chinese had to live. His home on this island was a paradise to which one can only hope he would eventually return with his new belved life partner. It was such a touching movie it gave me pause for thought.

At CC Airport for a few hours waiting for Jetstar to return to Welly. This is a much larger International airport which Wellington is aspiring to acquire.